Stef and I made a website. Now we made it so you can cut and paste the wishing code into your blog to display a speech bubble like this. And when I say “we” made it… I mean Stef.

I thought I’d start with one told to me by Walter the Goon from the band John Shelly and the Creatures. It explains the origins of the band’s name in a bar in Berlin some years earlier.

.

I stayed the night at Walter’s house, watched a bit of Glastonbury on TV, ate Chinese food and drank American beer. The next morning, we did the full Ulster Fry breakfast including farls, strolled through the Botanic Gardens and finished off with a pint of Guinness at a very traditional establishment, before I jumped on the bus back to the airport.

NZ readers might be interested to learn that John Shelly and the Creatures were the support band of choice for the Brunettes when they played in Ireland.

Lovely man - and very hospitable. If you ever want to go freeloading in other countries, my tip is to seek out musicians. Here’s what the band sounds like. The single ‘Angeline’ is coming out in September.

Last week I came up with a silly idea for a website. A place you could make a wish. That was kind of it. My name is Andrew, and I wish for a pony. That sort of thing.

And then people would come along and make their own wishes, or see that you’d wished for a pony and go ‘I wish that too!’. Very simple, dumb stuff - but the sort of thing that people seem to like.

I so wish…

And so I told my friend Stef who made Odadeo about the idea, and he made it for me.

Then we put some ads on it that are contextually relevant to the wish - that is to say if you wish for ponies, you’re going to get ads for books about ponies. With any luck, people will see things that they’re interested in, and while they’re waiting for their pony to arrive, they can read about ponies.

It took Stef a matter of a few hours to code the site (he’s quite clever) and then it took us a few days to get the domain and hosting sorted out before it could be launched… but now it’s live.

The plan is to make the wish speech bubble into something you can easily embed onto your blog or social networking page, and make it go a bit viral.

But you can be one of the first to take it for a spin, as it’s only been live a couple of hours.

What do YOU wish?

http://isowish.com

Not having any way to pay for things is awkward - but it’s the loss of the phone that has thrown me out the most. Weird how you come to rely on stuff like that.

I didn’t have a mobile phone till I got to the UK, and could not, at that time, imagine ever really needing one. There are no media lecturer emergencies in life. But I pretty much run on the handset now. It’s my watch, my portable calendar, contact directory and short messaging service.

I keep an eye on what all my (more techsavvy) friends are up to in real time using Twitter and I send and receive an awful lot of text messages to arrange and rearrange meetings, get alerted to pick up milk on the way home, and learn where Jake is going to be from moment to moment.

Pretty much the only thing I don’t ever use my cameraphone for - is taking pictures and making calls.

Oh, and I hated it too. It was a dumb phone. The reviews were off the hook, but it was on the Windows platform so it crashed all the time, took ages to do anything and had a pointless slide-out keyboard that just added bulk to the device without improving the user interface. I’d have an iPhone in a moment, if only the university wasn’t locked into a deal with a mobile carrier that isn’t on the iPhone menu.

So I find myself reaching for it about every 15 minutes and realising it’s gone, which brings on a weird mix of relief, annoyance and frustration. And every time it happens, I entertain the idea of not replacing it and weaning myself off constant information flow. It would fit nicely into the overall info-diet project I’ve embarked on, but there are some things I still need it for.

Clutch and I made our way to Stourbridge by train yesterday evening. There was a tasting of Springbank Distillery whiskies happening at a specialist shop there called Nickolls and Perks.

I happen to have bought a bottle of Springbank’s 10 Year Old Longrow 100 Proof when last in Edinburgh and had loved it to bits, so I was really looking forward to the evening.

We made it to the town, and then found our way to the shop. There had been talk of food, because we were making good time and thought we’d have a chance to stop somewhere for a bite before things kicked off - but as we got to the store we saw that there were already people with glasses in their hands, and we didn’t want to miss anything.

We were hungry - but there was fine whisky on offer.

Damn.

Expensive wines in need of a polish

The tasting started upstairs in the main part of the shop, then we moved down to the cellar where all the expensive and dusty stuff was kept. I had to be careful of my elbows, because I’d been placed next to a handful of bottles of 1973 Bollinger, which made me a little nervous. I don’t know my champagnes, but I’m guessing this would be an expensive breakage.

The evening was interesting, though there were of course the real whisky nerds, the people who know-it-all (but have no clue) - and Takes-It-Too-Seriously-Guy and Inane Questions Man were both in attendance. All that was missing was a couple of guys in the back making inappropriate jokes and giggling, so Clutch and I took it upon ourselves to fulfill that role.

We were given a sheet of paper each and the tasting began. The woman from the distillery talked us through the process of making whisky, and the ways in which the different varieties we were trying were special or interesting.

Tasting in the cellar

There was quite a young one that had been matured in wine barrels, and another that was a mix of several different years. The 100 Proof that I liked was featured at around the midway point, and the evening finished up at an 18 year old that retailed for £95. Lovely, but not my favourite.

All in all, a very good night. We stuck around afterwards for the socialising and the finishing off of the opened bottles… and had some good conversation. And missed our last train home.

Damn.

Out on the streets
By this time, of course, the gravity of our situation was tempered by the levity brought on by a succession of good drams on an empty stomach. So, since we were no longer in any hurry to get to the train station, we thought we’d explore the Stourbridge nightlife.

Out on the street, we got into a conversation, as you do, with a couple who a) seemed friendly and b) weren’t half our age like everyone else on Stourbridge High Street on a Friday night. Once it had been established that the Scot and the Kiwi were of limited threat potential, we were invited to join them at the local nightclub bar.

Lee and Nicky were, respectively, lead singer and lyricist in a next-tier-down ska band from the 80s (supported the Beat, the Specials, Selector, and so on) and a department head from the local College just down the road from me. They were great value and good company.

We entertained ourselves by talking music business, the inadvisable clothing and personal tanning decisions of some of the other punters, and (as usual) why on earth someone would move from New Zealand to Birmingham.

The night drew on and Clutch and I decided it was time to face the exorbitant cost of a cab back to South Birmingham. It was a pricey ride - but other than that, it was pretty much a perfect night out. Great company, excellent whiskies, a lot of silly joking around, a very nice addition to my collection, and limited next-morning damage.

Perfect, that is, except for leaving my phone and my wallet in the back of the cab, and having to spend the day cancelling cards, blocking my number, making frantic calls to the taxi company who claim no knowledge… and wondering how I’m going to manage in Belfast next week with no method of paying for anything or calling anybody.

Damn.

My website New Music Strategies is offline. I’ve been getting a lot of email about that. So I’ve put together a stock response, and it gets emailed out to everyone who enquires. Essentially it explains the fact that I’m moving hosts, and the old guys are being generally unpleasant.

I was coming to the end of my contract with the old hosts, and all of my other sites (including this one) are hosted at GoDaddy. The idea was that I would do a seamless move from one to the other. That didn’t happen.

Instead, they’ve put the above holding page advertising crap in its place, and have presumably deleted the site. Fortunately, I’ve been taking daily backups of the database, so I can simply re-upload it in its last known state and continue from there.

My plan is that it’s back up by Monday. But that depends on whether I can get the domain transferred or not. At the moment, the rude people at my ex-hosting provider, who I’ve had significant problems with in the past, are refusing to answer my emails and aren’t very responsive to phone calls either.

It’s a bit of a pain, but hardly the end of the world, so I’m trying not to get too stressed by the whole thing.

I’m working on it.

Somehow, alongside a bunch of celebrities and A-list bloggers, I was invited to have a play with the Spore Creature Creator.

Spore is a new game developed by Will Wright - the guy who came up with The Sims and Sim City. Watch this video to get a sense of what it will do - pretty amazing.

I’ve been reading about it for a long time in Jake’s PC Gamer magazine, and it really looks pretty awesome. Essentially, you create creatures and they develop colonies and live their lives.

But the trick (and this is the really clever bit) is that all of the game’s creatures are created by the users.

Here’s my first go at making a creature. It’s called a Bropholus (don’t ask me why) and this is me testing out the different things it could do. The amazing thing is that I built the creature from scratch. Chose all of its characteristics, shape, limbs and colouration - everything.

Building a creature was so easy even I could do it. And I am not a gamer. The only other PC Games I get involved with are the ones where you drive cars, and it doesn’t matter if you hit stuff. I quite like those. Other than that, I get bored almost immediately. Introduce any complexity and I’m out of there.

You can get your creature do all sorts of things and express a range of emotional reactions. Now I get to upload a creature to a site where people will vote on the best ones, and that creature will link back to the site of my choosing. Apparently, only a handful of “creative opinion leaders” in the world got to do this.

So there’s Brian Eno, Elijah Wood, Richard Branson, David Lynch, Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Adam West, Carlos Santana, MC Hammer, Ze Frank, Flight of the Conchords, Seth Green - and me. Cool.

Here’s another creature Jake and I made. Its voice is kind of wrong, but there’s not much I can do about that…

Spore itself isn’t out till September, but they’re doing a spot of PR. We’ve just got the creature creator bit, which is one small part of the overall game - but frankly, I’m really stoked with it. Jake and I have been making lots of different creatures and testing them out doing all sorts of different things.

It’s quite a bit more sophisticated than when Will Wright showcased it at TED last year. Our creatures are on the tame side - but I think we’ll get more ambitious with them as we go along. Jake’s already coming up with some amazing animals.

We’ll post new ones up on YouTube as we make them. One-click uploading is actually built in to the game. Nice. Glad that the YouTube account is finally useful.

Here’s one more for good measure:

Can’t wait for the whole game. It might even be something I’d distract myself with on a semi-regular basis. And… they’re releasing it for Mac as well as PC. Simultaneously. Brilliant.

We bought some garden furniture last weekend, and this weekend, it decided to be sunny. So I’m right here, on the laptop, sipping a cup of coffee and tapping away at the internet. All going well, this is where I plan to spend as much time as I can over the next few months.

It’s Bobbie’s birthday at the moment. It lasts from the 6th to the 9th due to a bit of confusion about the date of her birthday in her childhood years (she’s the youngest of 12). The real party is tomorrow: a brunch at the Fighting Cocks in Moseley, but the celebration lasts four days solid.

Presents are important when your birthday is closer to a week in duration, and I thought that in keeping with the theme I’d compliment this particular outdoor set with a nicely laid-back Habitat deckchair and a little wooden sidetable for her drink and book.

I also managed to find handmade coconut ice (her favourite) dipped in chocolate (her other favourite), so I definitely had to get that for her as well.

Here come the Germans

Yesterday, Jake came home from his week away on the German trip. It’s the first part of an exchange programme he’s been on before where a bunch of German kids come over for a week’s stay in Birmingham in June - and then the UK kids get to go and stay in Frankfurt in October. On the last night, we usually end up with a couple of Germans staying at our place. This time, we had three: two girls (17) and a guy (18).

Image via WikipediaMicah, Sam and Martin (above with Jake) shared a birthday dinner with us, and Juliet came and joined us too. Yummy Spice Empire (our current favourite) followed by chocolate cake with buttons, and then a game of cards called Phase 10, which was so good, we went and spent the rest of our Christmas Amazon voucher (thanks, Lee!).

Everybody stayed the night (so that’s seven in the house including Juliet) and then dispersed this morning. The Germans are off back home, Bobbie is spending day two of her birthday chilling and going to look at dresses for Greg and Nadine’s wedding in Hamburg, Jake’s upstairs either doing his homework or playing computer games (probably the latter) and I’m - well, I’m where we started.

Outside in the garden, in the sun, sipping my coffee and tapping away at the internet.

Here’s one of their latest ones. It’s for someone called Ashanti.
Wikipedia thinks she’s famous.

I’m so not down with the kids. But I like that ‘people-I-know-and-like’ get to work on top end stuff and, presumably, get paid for it. Go the Birmingham lads.

Warning: this is long and quite geeky.

I’ve always been a little bit obsessive about music consumption. I love records and I have a large mp3 collection. They suit different purposes - and the best way I describe the difference is that I say that mp3s are for having on, while records are for listening to.

But that overlooks the fact that I will quite often pay a good deal of attention to my digital music files. And of course, music consumption is about far more than just buying and listening to music. Anyone who’s ever put their records in alphabetical order will tell you that.

So while I obsess more over my vinyl, and treasure it more highly than my digital music collection, there’s a hell of a lot more music in the mp3 collection than the record collection and I take it pretty seriously. Roughly 5,000 albums in the iTunes library - and it needed a bit of a spring clean.

Phase one: Consolidation
First of all, thanks to various computer crashes and changes of system, the files were in a mess. There were thousands of duplicates, a whole lot of albums with tracks missing (thanks, Windows operating system!) and a whole bunch of individual tracks I’d downloaded off mp3 blogs in the past.

So first job was to make sure I had all of the music that had not been lost to the vagaries of Windows back into the system. I’d taken DVD backups of what remained of my collection after the last serious crash, so for the past couple of months, Jake and I have been importing the tracks back in as and when we remembered. This, of course, created a whole lot more duplicates.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through the iTunes collection removing these duplicates, deleting partial albums and orphan tracks. I now only have full albums. I don’t mind duplicate tracks, of course. A song can appear on an album and on a best-of compilation and that’s absolutely fine. It’s when I have three copies of the best-of compilation that I get busy with the delete key.

Of course, because of audio fidelity - and because hard drive space is not the issue it was for me when I started ripping my CDs 4 years ago - I now favour the higher bit rate files. If I have an album at 128k and at 320k, it’s the former that gets binned.

Incidentally, I’ve said it before but it’s worth mentioning again - this is also a physical storage space solution. CDs get discarded once they’re in the system unless the object has particular personal significance (gift, autograph, a mention in the liner notes, etc.).

Phase one is complete

Phase two: Primary metadata

It’s important that the metadata is correct. Name of song. Name of album. Name of artist. Spelling, capitalisation, and naming conventions are all important. The Artist field on a single track cannot be ‘Various’ and shouldn’t be ‘Unknown’. If I don’t know who the artist was, I go digging and I find out.

There’s an exception to this. A rare compilation of rare music put together by Quantic for which I’ve only been able to locate about half of the track titles, let alone artists. If it was anything else, I’d delete it because it messes with my ordered system - but it’s just awesome.

Oh yeah - I’ll usually happily delete music I like if the metadata is irresolvable. My music collection activities prioritise systems and conceptual mapping over aesthetics of the audio itself. I don’t tend to keep records without sleeves either. Why would you?

Consistency is also important. If I have albums by ‘Cinematic Orchestra’, ‘The Cinematic Orchestra’, ‘Cinematic Orchestra, The’ and ‘Cinematic Orch.’ - then I’ll make sure they’re all called the same thing. This practice also reveals some more duplicates. I had the following albums:

Every Day by Cinematic Orchestra
Everyday by The Cinematic Orchestra

Clearly the same recording. I made my choice (easy - one was at 320k and the other at 192k) and I rationalised my collection a little further. Changed the name to what I consider to be the correct one - and the universe was put right again.

Phase two is complete

Phase three: Secondary metadata

Okay - so my music collection only contains full albums. There’s only one copy of each. The key information about those albums is well-presented and ordered. I can sort the collection by album and artist. But there are three other bits of metadata that are important to me and still need work.

1) Genre
I currently have music listed under 142 different genres. This is the unfortunate side effect of user-submitted database information on CDDB - that clever thing that iTunes checks with for song titles when you put a CD into your computer. I can’t make sense of 142 genres, and - in fact - genre barriers are so grey and mutable that they don’t really help. I mean, where do you draw the line between Alternative Rock and Indie? Hip Hop and Rap?

My solution here is to use the genre tag in a different way. I think of it in terms of sections in a large record shop. The classical stuff all goes together in one section with things ordered alphabetically regardless of whether it’s Baroque or Romantic period music. Pop and Rock go together. Electronica and Ambient. Soul, Funk & R&B. Folk & Country.

You may disagree with my compartmentalisation - but this is my conceptual record shop and I’m its only customer, so I can live with that. I have 25 sections. And I’m working on filing all of those albums into these sections. An album cannot be split across sections. Even if track one is clearly hip hop and track two is clearly jazz - it’s the album that gets filed. This is purely in the interests of time-saving and tidiness.

2) Date
The year in which the album was released - not the year in which the track was recorded. This is a purely practical solution to the problem of retrospective compilations. I don’t have time to go and research each individual track on a Prince or an Elvis best-of album. It does make the field a little less useful as a search tool - I mean, it’s nonsense to have a Beatles album from 1996. What does that mean? But let’s not be too fussy. I may be obsessive, but I’m not a complete perfectionist…

3) Artwork
All albums must have artwork. Simple as that. If no artwork exists for an album (for instance, a compilation made by a friend, or a radio mix put together by a DJ), then I improvise. A photo of the person who made me the compilation will do the trick. But these exceptions are the vast minority. If it’s an album, typically there’s album artwork and I’m going to find it and put it on so it will display nicely on my computer and iPod.

This is a bit of a research job, because I have a lot of albums that are not on Amazon or in the iTunes Music Store. I rely on other music fans (particularly for the NZ records) who have scanned and uploaded images.

There’s another piece of secondary metadata that I used to pay attention to but have now given up on. It’s the Comments field. I once listed the record label on which the album was released in this field. I don’t care anymore. Too much like hard work and I’d only managed about a third of my collection. Besides, that field is now used by a piece of external software… which I’ll come to shortly.

Phase three is in progress. Might take some time…

Phase four: Volume

There’s no point going to all this trouble making the information about the music consistent and nicely presented and not spend some time working on the music itself. It has to be a pleasurable experience to listen to on the computer, the portable player and the home stereo. And one of the biggest problems has to do with consistency of volume.

Some things have ended up on the computer at a whisper, and others at ear-bleeding levels. I’ve tried a number of systems to make a good sounding, consistent listening experience that doesn’t have me reaching for the volume knob every second song. Some of these systems have introduced distortion and others have solved the problem by turning everything down. Not ideal.

So I’ve found a three-tiered software approach that makes me happy.

Now, if you’re a hi-fi nut, chances are this is going to make you crazy. I’m not a fanatic about the Loudness War. A little bit of compression - especially in non high-fidelity listening environments (eg: headphones on the bus) - can be a welcome thing. Dynamic range is not the only important thing in music listening.

But do bear in mind that I do my ‘proper listening’ on vinyl, seated at one point of an equilateral triangle between speakers positioned at head height. I get my music fix without the evils of hyper-compression. Mostly jazz records from the 60s. I know what the issue is - and for digital music, I don’t think it matters as much as some people do.

Here’s the software I use:

1) iTunes Sound Check
This, by itself, is next to useless. It looks at the peak level of the tracks and adjusts so they’re at the same height. But it has to be turned on for this system to work. You get to this by going into Preferences > Playback in iTunes itself. More info about Sound Check.

2) iVolume
A piece of third party software that uses the iTunes Sound Check tag, but which actually calculates the perceived volume of the track and adjusts accordingly. You can adjust albums as a whole, which is a good idea, because it keeps the relative levels between tracks as they were intended, but still makes all albums seem to be at the same consistent volume. Very nice.

This is the bit of software that uses the comments field. It writes a little thing in there that tells your iPod to play it at the correct volume. Pretty clever - and far more useful than my previous ambition of having all of the label information in the comments field.

Good bit of software. You have to pay a little - but I recommend you download iVolume.

3) Volume Logic
An iTunes plugin that actually uses multiband audio compression, limiting and Auto Gain Control to make the music sound consistently bright, loud, punchy or just at a decent, consistent level.

Audio purists will be horrified at the thought, but audio purists aren’t listening to mp3s on computer speakers - even half-decent JBL ones like the ones I use. This is the secret sauce - the magic ingredient that makes it all sound great (relatively speaking). I love it to bits. Download Volume Logic (Mac).

Phase four is in progress. iVolume is still processing.

While I’m sorting out these four phases of my digital music library organisation, there are several other considerations that are related to this activity that I need to be thinking about. One of them is, of course, about the discovery and acquisition of music. That’s a whole different blog post in itself - and this one’s plenty long enough as it is. But I thought a quick mention of backup, networking and portability was in order in this context.

Backup

Having gone to all this trouble, you’d want to know that your music is safe from accidental erasure through computer mishap. Hard drives fail. Trust me on this. So I use SuperDuper - a backup system that I think is superior to the Mac Time Machine system - though don’t test me on that. I use it because I like it, not because I’ve done exhaustive comparative research.

Every night, at around 3am, the computer whirrs into action and makes a duplicate of itself on an external 1TB hard drive. If the worst happens, then I still have a completely up to date copy of everything.

Actually - the computer frying itself is not the worst, is it? Fire or break-in could dispense with my computer and my backup in one go. Off-site backup is the next thing to investigate. But in the meantime, I feel broadly confident that the music collection’s not going anywhere.

Networking

Of course, sometimes you don’t want to sit at your computer in order to listen to music. And nor do you want messy wires lying all over the place. My simple solution is to use an Airport Express. This little device, for Mac or PC allows you to stream your music wirelessly to any stereo in the house straight from your computer.

My computer is upstairs, my stereo is downstairs. I press play upstairs and then I go and listen to music. Not convenient enough? I open my laptop, connect to my main iTunes library over the wireless network, choose songs and press play from the comfort of the sofa. Laptop acts as remote control that sucks music from the big hard drive upstairs and sends it to the little white box attached to the back of the stereo. Nice.

Portability

And finally - to take the music with me when I go, I conform to the stereotype and use an iPod. I don’t have a large one any more. There’s no point. There exists no iPod onto which I can put all of my music. So I go for pure convenience, and use a Nano.

I’m never going to be away from my computer long enough to get bored with 8GB worth of music, and it’s so slim and tiny, it’s actually genuinely a pocket device. Like jeans pocket - unlike the larger iPods (Classic, iPod Touch, etc) which kind of have to have a particular type of pocket in order to fit.

Of course, you can throw away the headphones that come with it and get something that does a bit of external noise blocking. I don’t have expensive Bose noise-reduction headphones (one day…) but the cheap Koss earplug headphones get rid of a substantial amount of background noise for pennies. I like them a lot.

You freak, Dubber…

So yeah - that’s how I spend my spare time. I don’t build model airplanes or collect stamps. I don’t make intricate buildings out of matchsticks or write down bus numbers on a clipboard. I am a music consumer - and music consumption is not just about purchasing and playing. In fact, it keeps me pretty busy.

So I guess that makes me a hobbyist when it comes to this stuff. And like all hobbyists, I find it interesting, and so I quite like talking about my hobby, hence the length of this blog post. But my suspicion is that there are other hobbyists out there who like talking about it too. And that’s even more interesting.

So if that’s you - how do you consume music?