The Post Of The Beast

This is the 666th post of this year!

 Have some Maiden!

 

Older Is Newer

There's no iTunes for Ubuntu.

There was iTunes on my Win7 and OSX 10.6.8 installs on the dead Mac Pro.

This has led to a discovery of just how much music was in the DRM locked m4p format.

Amazon is happy to sell me the music again in mp3 format without any DRM attached.

SIGH.  I sometimes miss Napster.

Going to be a bit of a slog finding and replacing the locked music.

But I get the bitter amusement that this is not the first time I've had to repurchase a large chunk of my music.

I've gone from vinyl to cassette to CD to mp3 to m4p and now back to mp3!

Yay! Fun! Yay! 

A Feature I Miss

The first five years of this blog was LiveJournal.

One thing they had was a place to note what music I was listening to at the time I posted.

While I could just put a note on any post I make here, it's not the same.

But at the moment I'm listening to "The Sickness" album by Disturbed.

Loss Leader

I have now purchased Dire Straight's "Brothers In Arms" album three times.

SIGH

First on cassette, then on CD then on mp3.

I have, however, had mp3 prior to buying it from Amazon today.

But my CD rip wasn't a good copy.

C'est la vie.

Hey I Have That Album

Ever buy an album because you like a song and then forget to listen to the rest of the album?

Me too.

Reading about some bigot anti-Semites reminded me that I have a whole pile of Disturbed albums that I need to listen to on the off chance that enjoying them would cause the bigots physical pain.

Probably won't, but why risk it?

PS: Signing your name on a 155mm shell might make you cunt, but it doesn't automatically make you wrong.

PPS: Cunt doesn't mean the same thing in the UK as the US, so the accusation might not land most places.

The Doctor Is Out

After 55 years, Dr Demento is retiring.

I have many fond memories his show.

His opening song was based on this:

I Did It For Johnny!

I know who Johnny is!

Well, it's a strong theory.

Johnny is who the greasers from The Outsiders are fighting for against the soc's in the big rumble.

Stay Gold. 

Depends On The Album

I've seen a meme that says that if you air-drum to a Def Leppard song with both arms you're an asshole.

I would say that any song that predates the Hysteria album is OK to use both arms, but from Hysteria on you have to limit yourself to one arm.

The Metallicas

 

h/t FuzzyGeff.

Motörhead - Load The Guns ☠️ (AI)

 

Can an AI mimic Lemmy?

Yes. AI can do Lemmy.

The Fees Add Up

Watching "Becoming Led Zeppelin" and they flash some concert tickets on the screen.

In 1969 it cost $5 to a mainline band like Led Zeppelin.

That's $43.57 in today's money.

What's Ticketmaster want for Metallica tickets?

Surprisingly, $55 for the upper tiers.  $250 for the next level down.

That $5 ticket is a $250 ticket today.  The venue is still there!

Crank It Up

Put on the headphones.

Crank up the volume.

Best transition is at 0:47.

Juxtaposition

Three thousand quatloos to the person, in the comments, who can tell me how "Hold My Hand" by Lady Gaga and "Everything" by Alanis Morissette are related.

Google will not help you.

Not Rock

The Eagles are the first place I noticed.  They aren't a rock band.  They are a country band that gets played on rock stations.

It was years later when I finally figured out the con that Pink Floyd had played on so many rock stations.

"Composite Rock" is actually jazz.

Oh how we raged!

With our headphones on.

With "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" blasting.

FUCK!

We like jazz.

The "Benefits" Of Hearing Loss

A nice thing about losing a significant amount if hearing is losing the need to have a stereo past a certain point of fidelity and needing music past a certain bit rate.

Why pay for it if I can't hear it?

Since my hearing loss is focused on certain frequencies, I also don't need to waste money on subwoofers because I can hear bass quite well, thank you.

That sometimes makes me dial in the equalizer so that it sounds wrong to other people as I tune my experience to match my memories of a song before I murdered my ears.

I've also noticed that I am more sick of saying "What?" than people are of repeating themselves so I can understand (and they are VERY sick of it).  For many situations I just smile and nod until they quit talking than to bother to get them to say it so I can understand it.

Oddly, I can often pick out their voice better in a jumbled background than if it were merely quiet.

Not For Years

I feel like I should mention that I have not bought anything from iTunes for years.

Their store stops working when OS support ends.

So, when they stopped supporting my version of OSX, I stopped buying from them.

What I had used them for was to replace all the music I had on cassettes and CD's from the early '80's.

Napster facilitated my change from discrete physical media to using digital.

The music industry really should have realized that Napster was, effectively, a loss-leader that led many of us to be buying after trying.  It was handy for finding the correct version of the song I was wanting to buy.

They should also have noticed that a lot of the music people were "stealing" wasn't available for purchase because it was "out of print."  People wanted to buy it, but the music industry was refusing to sell it.  That did nobody any good.

Amazon has been just as convenient as iTunes for getting music, it's DRM free, and it works on all my devices.

Casette CD iTunes MP3

I'm getting a bit sick of rebuying my music.

For the most part, I had the problem solved with iTunes, but...

There's a few songs, here and there, that are in a format that can't be read by a device here and there.

Mutter mutter, grumble grumble.

The case in point is the stereo in The Beast cannot read m4a files, despite those files being DRM free from iTunes.

That means having to get new copies in mp3 that it can read so I can listen to them without fiddling with the phone and bluetooth.

The phone plays m4a files, but doesn't show the song on the screen.  If you can't see the song on the screen, you can't take a clever "Hulk In Tree!" pic.

Why no Hulk song?  Why Iron Man get song?

We take a series of "Hulk in the tree" pics every year, kinda like a fun, digital, advent calendar.

Where would you like to see Hulk?

100 Year Old Cars

Sound on!

Also, not a bad rendition of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."

Iowa You're In Iowa

"On a long lonesome highway, East of Omaha," is in Iowa.

Probably Iowa Route 92.

Though, Bob Seger said it was in Dubuque, that's on US20.

Cover And Merge

Someone named Sable did a metalized version of "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga.

Someone else blended them together.

I rather like the result.