What are you listening to right now?

~Beautiful~ MOBY

"Look at us we're beautiful-
All the people push and pull-
but, they'll never get inside-
we got to much to hide!

Look at us we're beautiful!"

I just go a new 'puter and I had stacks of tracks for tons of compilations that I burned for the car CD player, all arranged in folders and subfolders on my old puter. By a miracle of home networking I could just point mplayer at the home directory on the old puter and it got the idea and just loops through every track regardless of where it is.

It tells me I've got 25 hrs 45 mins and 18 secs of music at the moment.

And it's smart enough to poll the directories to see if any tracks have been added.

I am compilation man. One day I'm going to figure out how to drive a jukebox through my Access db catalogue (down to track level, with compilation applicability marked!)

Now if I can just get a dunny in here....

I'm listening to the fuggees with an awsome remake of
"killing me softly" That Lauren Hill has an incredible voice.

Rain on the window.
A bit of road noise from 14 floors below me.

Is it an apartment? Are there any woods nearby?

I'm listening to my cat growling at the birds chirping up in the tree

I saw Tom Robinson live in ... Edinburgh? Long time ago - late eighties or something. Liked it a lot. Those lyrics sound sooo 1986 - but then there's the E reference - in any case, sounds like a track you wanna grimly sing along with - or I would, anyway.


LOL! Mad compilation man with a weakness for stat detail. Gotta love ya.

I'm a compilation guy myself - I loves making these instinctive, associative playlists. Got a kind of eclectic taste (oh you noticed eh? , so it can easily just kinda thread from big band swing to blaxploitation to funky hip-hop to dancehall through roots reggea to rocksteady and then back to jazz ... and sometimes it just kinda skips and jumps through those genres without anything that much structure. I like it, it works for me and thank God A. totally went with it too (my ex before drove me crazy with the one dozen CDs she had, kept on playing the Peppers, Kravitz and Hendrix - now I like Hendrix, but ...)

Sometimes I forget its just me tho and we get visitors and one time, this nitpickety snobby kinda would-be queen of a boyfriend of one of A.'s friends sighed affectedly about who on earth would string such stuff together ... I apologetically mumbled something about the jukebox having a random setting and I still regret not sitting the young man down and forcing him to listen to the Universal Cosmic Groove three hours straight ... damn right!

My MJ says I got <goes to check> 126 hours, 15 minutes and 11 seconds of music on my HD ... friend of mine gave me an extra HD he had left over, yahoo! I'd been carping around my files cutting this erasing that and burning away such and so cause it was perennially full. But now that I finally got around to transferring and refoldering all the files to that new disk I can suddenly get round to d/ling new stuff and I went on a binge this week, got myself some 100 new tracks some good stuff!

Mind you, I'm astounded by the other users on Soulseek and what they share .. I'm a teeny weeny little guy in comparison all these people often have six, ten, fifteen thousand files in their shared folder, dozens of complete collections rowed up in separate folders ... <humbled>

I just downloaded Soulshare and I'm totally at a loss.LOL

Love the photograph, panz

Soulshare = Soulseek? If so, I might help ya out, perhaps, if you have any questions? Not that I remember much about installing it ... But I did put up a whole thread on Soulseek once. One piece of vital information from it was: "DON'T download anything from http://www.slsk.org. They've let the domain lapse and some German bought it up - if you click download, you'll download some dialer, not the P2P software. (You can tell it's a dud cause the forum, faq etc don't work either). The one you need is at http://www.slsknet.org."

Thanks nimh. Well, so far there's mixed reviews.
As far as ease of use...it gets a 3 compared to Winmx's 9.
How do you know how many people are in line in front of you?
The ease of folder listing is cool but half the time a browse ends with"error"

I like the rooms. I got in one from Argentina and instantly met a guy who was helpful in my search.

( Edited for irresponsible content)

Right-click on track you're downloading and select "Get place in line".


You mean if you browse a user's files? I get an error sometimes, but definitely less than half. And I got most of my files through browsing rather than doing my own search: see a guy who is downloading my favourite files or who has something I'd long sought for, browse his files, find lots of other goodies. Plus, you can add him to your list of users, so you can easily go back to his files a later time.


Cool. I hardly ever use the rooms myself. What I do use a lot is the wishlist, I think thats quite cool. If you're looking for something and you cant find it, put it on your wishlist and the programme will alert you when a user comes online who has it. Saved me a lot of hassle compared to Kazaa, where you just had to try and try again.

On the other hand, what doesnt work well for me (but it might for you) is the "Things I Like" button. You enter stuff you really like, it gives you tracks that other users have who like the same stuff. (My taste is too eclectic for it to work).

Amen to that.

On a different note. I'm wrestling with the message in this cartoon.

Heh. Hey, I'm from Holland, the country where smoking pot is allowed, buying pot is allowed, selling pot is allowed, but growing it is not. Where the coffeeshop owner is engaging in a legal enterprise when he's selling pot, but doing something illegal when he's purchasing the stuff from the growers. Or something ambiguous like that. How else is he supposed to get the stuff he's legally allowed to sell? Sshh ... dont talk about it. We've made tolerating stuff that's formally illegal, but considered allowed because of how its been habitually tolerated a defining art form of our identity, we even made a word for it: "gedogen".

In the meantime, nothing changes for me. Eclectic taste like that is unaffordable if you'd have to buy all the complete CDs - except for stuff thats on sale, perhaps (which, I can testify, makes for a rather quixotic collection). So instead, when I was in high school, I went to the music library, took the records home, taped them - or friends did and we swapped. When I started studying, the CD-rent places sprung up and I became a member of first CD Heaven, then Verlaine. Rented CDs, taped them (still got some 500 tapes in the cupboard). Later started burning 'em instead. Now, the CD rent places have gone broke, cause everyone is d/l'ing instead. Nothing much changes except for the form.

One thing's for sure: the CDs that I do end up buying are often things I'd never even have heard of if it wasnt for the above opportunities to browse, seek and experiment.

That's a good point...there's a lot to this ethics dilemma...I'm trying to sort it out.

There's a kind of poetic justice about it even, come to think of it! Because now, when I do buy a CD, its cause I know I wont be able to find it online, not in full - the really obscure stuff, like those Complete Recordings of Yabby You's last month - so its likely the labels/musicians who need it most who get whatever it is I do spend. Heh.

(NB: above intended solely as amusing digression of quirky logic, not seriously as some lame excuse ...)

What I'm gonna do when I'm in Budapest, sans cable/DSL (I presume), I dunno ...

Heh. Yeah Craven put the fear of hell in me too.

Sting - Book of my life

A tribute to Marvin Gaye. WCLK. Atlanta, GA. There are probably alot of tributes this weekend. Today is his birthday and yesterday was the anniversary of his death.