Fleet Foxes - "Montezuma"
This is probably the first album by Fleet Foxes that couldn't have been made in the 60s. I don't mean that in any backhanded way, at all. They just make good, timeless music. No crazy instruments or synths. There's no gimmick here. A bunch of guys with their guitars, singing harmonies, and making good folk music.
There are, for lack of a better term, peppier songs on Helplessness Blues (including the song of the same name). But, I mean, seriously, this is why Fleet Foxes are awesome, right? The song is so simple and beautiful, and as it hits the last minute, it has a little breakdown, and then we basically go a cappella for 30 seconds (not quite, but close), and then we coast out.
2011 was a weird year in music for me. There were a bunch of albums I loved, but going back through the music, I couldn't find songs that jumped out at me as being amazing. Most of these songs fit that description: the best track of a very good bunch, but with none jumping out at me as being the song.
The Decemberists - "This Is Why We Fight" The King is Dead is such a great album of rootsy, country, folk rock. It's maybe a 45 degree change from their normal literate rock. Still literate, but much more focused on the music than the wordplay. This track, and "June Hymn" are a couple of the best. The only reason it probably didn't make my list this year is because it came out early in the year and I've heard these songs so many times that they've lost a bit of impact. Six months from now, I'll probably wonder what I was thinking not putting it on the list.
Mates of State - "Maracas"
Another strong album, one that split the difference between Mates of State's older stuff and their last album. This song is such a cool song, with the crazy synths opening the song, the hook that almost feels like it's played at the wrong speed, and the last third of the song the sort of turns into a more traditional Mates song. Great song, and was phenomenal live.
Surfer Blood - "I'm Not Ready"
I don't even know Surfer Blood that well, but the first time I heard this come on the radio I said "this has to be Surfer Blood." And it was. These guys are probably the new hope for power pop/surf pop. It's a more modern sound than your traditional pop; you can hear bits and pieces of The Shins bleeding through (which is crazy, since The Shins are all of ten years old or so).
Telekinesis - "Car Crash"
Here's your more traditional power pop. Straight up, fun ass power pop. A song you'll be humming all day, bopping along to it. Then, during one listen you'll pay attention to the lyrics and wonder how such a happy song can be so depressing.
We Were Promised Jetpacks - "Human Error"
Another song that fits in the "this was the best song off of a really good album" category. Nothing on WWPJ's new album reaches the heights of their last album, but it's another batch of strong songs. And, it's another album that let's the band be one of the best live acts around, as every song is anthemic.
This is the fifth anniversary of me doing this list. So, I should be rocking this thing out, right?
Well, I've gotten a very late start on this year's top 10, so I'm going to probably blow through a bunch of tracks until I get caught up. This year, to save on the headache (and maybe make 25 cents), I'm going to use Amazon's little MP3 player. You won't get the full track, but you'll get a good chunk of it.
And, if you want to buy a song, you can just click the link and buy it from Amazon, and it'll show up in your iTunes.
The rules, as always, are simple:
The song had to have been released on an album in 2011
One song per artist
That's about it.
If you wanna get a taste of previous lists, here's the start of the list from 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.
Actually, I'll do a quick recap here because, quite frankly, I'm sort of interested to see what the last four lists have looked like. If you care about my pithy comments, go back and read through them.
2007
Arcade Fire - Keep the Car Running
Klaxons - Golden Skans
Spoon - The Underdog
Tokyo Police Club - Your English is Good (I cheated here)
Band of Horses - Is There a Ghost?
Dear Leader - Everything Looks Better in the Dark
The New Pornographers - All the Old Showstoppers
Hallelujah the Hills - Wave Backwards to Massachusetts
The Shins - Australia
Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place
2008
Tokyo Police Club - Your English is Good
Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
Weezer - The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)
Nada Surf - I Like What You Say
Delta Spirit - Trashcan
Violens - Violent Sensation Descends
The Decemberists - Valerie Plame
Ra Ra Riot - Ghosts Under Rocks
Girls Guns and Glory - 667
Lyrics Born - I Like It, I Love It
2009
Phoenix - Lisztomania
Camera Obscura - French Navy
Metric - Gold Guns Girls
Fanfarlo - I'm a Pilot
Passion Pit - Moth's Wings
Neko Case - This Tornado Loves You
The Decemberists - The Rake's Song
Dear Leader - Barbarians
The Thermals - Now We Can See
The Everyday Visuals - Florence Foster Jenkins
2010
Arcade Fire - Ready to Start / Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
The Lonely Forest - Turn Off This Song and Go Outside
After moving to iTunes Match (and not to get too navel gazey, but that post brought more traffic to my blog than I think I've gotten … ever), I've been trying to figure out ways to avoid having to ever plug my iPhone into my computer. There are two things that I still do via syncing with iTunes: getting photos off the phone and podcasts.
The getting photos off the phone part is sort of helped by Photo Stream, but not really. But that's also not what this is about.
The podcast bit can be managed really nicely through Instacast. Export your podcast subscriptions from iTunes, import 'em into Instacast, and it'll become your podcast player. It's very handy.
The only thing it doesn't do particularly well is let you know when to start it up and download new podcasts. (Actually, there's a cool feature in Instacast HD for the iPad that does just that, but I don't listen to podcasts on my iPad all that much.)
Screwing around one night, I was trying to come up with a solution, and I remembered that I had Boxcar installed, which gets me push notifications for Twitterrific (since it doesn't have them natively). I logged into Boxcar, noticed they had a "Push me a notification when there's a new entry in this feed" option, and thought "Hey, I'll plug in the podcast feeds and get push notifications whenever there's a new podcast!"
Amazing, right?
Except, it didn't work. I don't think Boxcar supports podcasts as a feed type or something, as it just seemed to ignore any new items that showed up.
But I was not discouraged.
There's another cool "send me a notice" website/tool out there called ifttt.com. Basically, it's an awesome little site that lets you plug things together and trigger actions. The premise is "If [this] then [that]" (hence ifttt.com). I'd been using it to send me emails before it's forecast to rain (can't forget that umbrella!).
It also lets you send notifications based off of RSS feeds. And it can send those notifications into Boxcar.
That opened up a whole world of possibilities.
First, I plugged in my podcasts. I turned my weather notifications from email to Boxcar push notifications.
While dorking around inside these cool webapps, I noticed that Boxcar also ties into Growl (the Mac desktop notification system). "Awesome," I thought, "I can have my computer push stuff to my phone when scripts finish and stuff."
And that is entirely possible. You simply install the Boxcar Growl theme, configure a few easy settings, and boom, your computer can send your Growl notifications to your phone, straight through Boxcar. Mine is configured to only do so when my screen saver is on or I'm inactive. If I'm in a meeting, IMs will get shot to my phone so I can determine if something is urgent. Long backup jobs or scripts will let me know they've finished.
Tying all of this into growlnotify (the command line tool to let you send arbitrary stuff into Growl) means you can basically trigger almost anything into a push notification. It's an amazingly powerful toolset.
I’ve spent the last few weeks getting iTunes Match up and running across all of my machines that support it. This includes a couple of different laptops with iTunes Libraries, an iPhone, iPad, and a couple of Apple TVs. For 80% of the population, I’m guessing the basic iTunes Match service will work splendidly. They’ll turn it on, feel better that they’ve got all this music up in the cloud, and love that they can pull down all their music on their phone without plugging it in over USB.
However, if you’ve got more than 5 or 6 GB of music, or keep your iTunes metadata clean, or are familiar at all with smart playlists, you’re probably going to bump your head a time or two.
If you read through this, you may avoid those unsightly welts on your noggin’. Sadly, I didn’t.
Getting Music into iTunes Match
Again, for most folks, you’ll just turn it on, let iTunes Match chug for a while, and then you’ll be done. That while might be an hour or two, but start it before you go to bed, and when you wake up, you’ll be all cloudly.
The rest of you are likely going to run into a couple of things uploading your music. The first thing you’re giong to do is turn on the “iCloud Status” column in iTunes (right-click on the columns at the top of your iTunes). The second thing to do is make an “iCloud Errors” smart playlist so you can triage any of those songs.
What we’re basically doing is looking for all the songs that are in our library that didn’t get matched or uploaded (or weren’t already purchased from iTunes). This playlist is going to basically show you two types of errors:
Errors
Ineligible
The first thing you’re going to do is select all, right-click, and choose “Add to iCloud”. iCloud, often, just messes up the first time through and it’ll upload or match a bunch of tracks the second time. Once you’ve done that, you need to deal with these tracks individually.
Let’s deal with the Ineligible tracks first.
Ineligble Tracks
These, by and large, will be tracks that fall below iTunes Match’s standards. Usually they’ll be tracks you ripped a long time ago and are below 128kb (bit rate) or will have been ripped at a variable rate and didn’t require much (often vocal or quiet tracks end up at a low bit rate). Fixing these is simple: right-click on them, choose “Convert to MP3” (or AAC, whatever your iTunes is set to), and let it go. Your iTunes will make a copy of your track (metadata included), at a bitrate high enough for iTunes Match to be happy.
Occasionally, you’ll find iTunes Match needs a bit more coaxing, which involves turning your track into an AIFF track and then back to mp3. Macworld covers that process in detail, so I won’t repeat it here. I only had to do that twice out of ~9k songs.
Error Tracks
If you find a bunch of tracks marked as “Error”, in my experience, just retrying the “Add to iCloud” option fixed them. For a handful of other tracks, the issue was that the mp3 is corrupt and iTunes Match couldn’t read the song to match it. Your best bet is to re-rip that music, because surely you ripped that music off your own CDs and didn’t steal it from Napster or someone else’s collection, right?
One more hiccup …
I ran into a case where Purchased music that was definitely on my machine stopped working. I have no idea why or how, but it did. It was the most recent album I’d bought via iTunes. All of a sudden—my guess is that I ended up with a contention between the songs downloaded to my computer and to my iPad—iTunes lost the metadata and couldn’t play the music.
The solution was one of the major features of iTunes Match. I deleted the songs, and then re-downloaded them. Problem solved.
iTunes Metadata & Libraries
iTunes Match does a reasonably good job of managing metadata. It doesn’t replace any of it, so if you’re hoping that you’ll take all of your crappily tagged music and have iTunes replace it with much better data, you’re going to be disappointed.
However, if you’ve done a reasonably good job of keeping your iTunes library tagged, iTunes Match allows you to merge all of your iTunes libraries into one big library in the cloud. Doing that is insanely easy.
Turn on iTunes Match on your first library
Let it do its thing
Turn on iTunes Match on your second librar
Let it do its thing
Rinse and repeat for each library
There are some gotchas that pop up when managing your now merged libraries in the cloud.
If you enabled iTunes Match on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, Apple TV), Album Art doesn’t show up on a song until you play it. I’m sure some engineer at Apple thought that was a great idea, and it is a good way to ensure you’re not keeping a bunch of extra art on your device. But it sucks in real life, especially if you’re someone who tries to keep your album art up-to-date on your music. Hopefully, Apple comes up with a better solution.
Smart playlists that rely on other playlists simply don’t sync. You can probably rebuild those playlists using nested playlist logic (option-click on that little plus icon), to create a playlist like this:
My “Radio” playlist
Smart playlists that rely on the “Limit” feature simply don’t work on iOS devices. They ignore the limit. This is, by far, one of the most infuriating things about iTunes Match. I have a ton of playlists that rely on that feature. Your “Top 50 songs” playlist that is limited to the top 50 most played tracks, or your “Best Rated Songs” limited by tracks you’ve most recently added are both not going to work. Or, more accurately, they simply ignore the limit, which probably destroys the value of that playlist.
I’m guessing that this is because the iOS device doesn’t have the iTunes Library or the necessary database to make those limits work. This seems reasonably easy to fix (store that data in some sort of binary file and sync it out periodically).
No Genius playlists on iOS devices. You can still create them on your Mac/PC, and then click the “Save Playlist” button. This playlist will then sync out to your devices. I’m assuming, once again, that this is because the Genius database is no longer getting synced to your phone. Apple should fix this. Genius is awesome.
Playing songs on another device seems to only update the play count for the first song. This is just a weird bug.
Is it worth it?
In the end, is it worth it to move to iTunes Match? So far, for me, I think so. I no longer have to manage multiple iTunes libraries the way I was before, which probably saves me an hour or so a week. When I’m at work on my Macbook, I can listen to music that isn’t locally on my machine. If I ever run out of space, I’ll just blow up a bunch of my music, but still be able to listen to it as long as I have an internet connection.
The fact that I no longer need to have my media server turned on just to serve up music to the Apple TV is going to save me more in electricity than iTunes Match costs per year.
One day, when I get bored, I can go through and replace all of my old bad rips with pristine iTunes copies. That’s kind of nifty too, and probably worth the $25 by itself.
The broken smart playlists and Genius on iOS devices is a bummer, and in some cases, so un-Apple-like that I wonder how the hell it got out the door. Then I remember that probably 5% of iTunes users have ever created a smart playlist or used Genius and it makes a bit more sense.
In 6 months, if we’re still complaining about poorly matched songs, broken playlists, and all that fun stuff, I certainly won’t be happy. But, we’re still talking about $25/year, which to me feels worth it just for having a backup of all my music off-site, and the reduced electricity use in my house from not having to keep a media server turned on.
Which kinda blows the whole thing up. Sure, Clemson losing twice didn't help, but it wasn't killer. And it would have been helpful for Notre Dame to beat Stanford.
But none of those were killer. Those were all nice to haves.
The must have was Auburn defeating Alabama. And it didn't happen, leaving my Hokies' chances of a BCS title bid much, much, much thinner.
They are, however, non-zero.
First, the Hokies need to take care of business and defeat Clemson to lock up the ACC Championship. Oklahoma needs to show some pride and beat Oklahoma State for the Big 12 title.
Those two events should move Virginia Tech into 3rd in the BCS standings. It's not definite—but that would be likely. Then we need some voter angst. Not wanting to pit Alabama, who didn't even win their division, in a rematch against LSU for the title. Maybe Georgia knocks off LSU in the SEC Championship game, taking a guaranteed bid, and the voters get cold feet about basically having two non-conference champs facing off for the title.
That's our best bet. It's unlikely, but there's a small chance everything could fall the Hokies' way.
Given that, they better take care of Clemson next week. ACC Champions. That's goal #1.
The Hokies vault from the bottom of the BCS to 5th, with at least one team above them guaranteed to lose. It looks like the BCS now shakes out like this:
6) Virginia Tech
5) Stanford
4) Oklahoma State
3) Arkansas
2) Alabama
1) LSU
LSU plays Arkansas this week. At this point, we have to be rooting for an LSU victory, since I’m not sure an LSU loss would move them down the polls enough.
So, let’s put in LSU over Arkansas.
Alabama plays Auburn. We need an Auburn victory.
Oklahoma State plays Oklahoma in two weeks. We need the Sooners to bring it and beat the Cowboys. Oklahoma over Oklahoma State.
Stanford plays Notre Dame this week. A Notre Dame victory would be ideal, since that would hurt both Stanford and Oregon’s chances of jumping up the list. Stanford is then going to play UCLA or Utah in the Pac–12 Championship Game. We’d like Stanford to lose there as well. But we don’t need to be greedy.
Of course, we really need the Hokies to beat Virginia (not a given), and then defeat Clemson in the ACC Championship Game. Neither of those will prove to be easy tasks, but there’s a chance that with both of those wins, the Hokies would vault over Stanford, regardless of the outcome of their games.
I think, if all of this happened, you’d end up with LSU #1 and Virginia Tech #2. I think that’s the best thing we can hope for at this point. To make it more confusing, we could also hope for Georgia over LSU in the SEC Championship Game.
Let’s see where we stand next week. If Alabama beats Auburn, the odds of the Hokies getting up into the top two drops considerably. Of course, if the Hokies play the way they played against UNC, they won’t defeat Virginia, which will render the whole thing moot.
File this one in the Google tenet of "Do No Evil", right?
"We're introducing a method that lets you opt out of having your wireless access point included in the Google Location Server. To opt out, visit your access point’s settings and change the wireless network name (or SSID) so that it ends with "_nomap." For example, if your SSID is "Network," you‘d need to change it to "Network_nomap."
So, if I don't want Google to map my (private) wireless network, I need to change the name of my network, and go around and update the 15+ wireless devices that I have around the house? How about if I want you to map my wireless network, I change it to "_map"? Wouldn't that be more fair?
(I realize that arguing about Google mapping a radio signal that's broadcasting from my house is sort of pointless, but this is more of a principle thing.)
Just another sign of Google's growing tone deafness.
