A friend of mine told me he did something special last year: he deleted his complete mp3-collection. Say what? Yes, deleted all his music on his computer. He told me he was fed up with all the crappy encoded mp3's. The quality of music on cd/dvd is good and consistent.
Another thing that bugged him was the sheer amount of music that is available on the internet, both legal and illegal. I must agree on that point. Before the internet you bought each month just one or two albums at most. You had something to look forward to. And you listened the complete album. Even if it was mediocre. You paid for it!
But internet changed the scene. Even with zero budget there is more to listen to than you can handle. It certainly changed my way of listening to music. In the pre-internet age I only listened to complete albums. Now because of the sheer abundance of music, the value and appreciation of a song is so much lower that I cannot listen to a complete album. I just want to save those few songs that I really like and go on to the next album to pick out the good songs.
Although I like the abundance of music, I must admit that I think I'm acting like a spoiled brat. I just don't have the patience anymore to listen to songs that aren't good enough. So I can understand that you want to turn back the time. Although it sounds temping, I'm not going to pull the plug. I like to stay in abundance for as long is it will stay that way.
Sound quality by the way isn't such a problem for me. The spirit of a song is much more important than the sound quality.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Pulling the plug and back to the music store?
Friday, January 01, 2010
What pictures does a 3-year old make
Isabel has her own camera now. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of pictures a 3-year old makes, you just have to see Isabel's Flickr page.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Musical heritage
While busy with my annual compilation I came across music I found on musical-heritage.blogspot.com (as always: found through www.weirdomusic.com). It's a great weblog about world music with many downloads. So here you have my tip of the day :)
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950
A few weeks back I had much fun with the 2-disc compilation Pop Music: The Early Years 1890-1950 that I found on Bravo Juju. The title of the compilation pretty much explains it all. Disc 1 starts with the "Washington Post March", which may scare you off because of it's poor recording quality and because, well, it's a march. But stay in there. The second song "King of the Bungaloos" already sounds a lot better.
Other favorites are:
- How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm? - Nora Bayes
- Black and Blue - Ethel Waters
- Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man - Aunt Jemima
- Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition! - Kay Kyser & His Orchestra (who doesn't love a song with a title like that? :) )
I'm back
The last few years I gathered a multitude of accounts on social networks such as blogspot, last.fm, hyves, facebook and even twitter (just to name a few). Because with each social network account comes a blog, I had to a post for each and every social network. What a drag. Now I managed to collate hyves, facebook and twitter to my blog on blogspot.com.
To make a long story short: I saved myself some work so it's fun to start blogging again. I'm going to use my blog to post my latest discoveries in music, so be prepared :)
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Shirley Ann Lee
I found a great weblog called World Music (http://musical-heritage.blogspot.com) to find, well, all kinds of world music. There I came across an album called "Local Customs: Downriver revival". On the album I found a few songs of Shirley Ann Lee. It were simple, but beautiful gospel songs. Listen here to There's A Light by Shirley Ann Lee.
There was not much information about this Shirley Ann Lee. The artist page on Last.fm was intriguingly empty. Lucky for me some Michael Goldberg wrote some something about Shirley on his blog. There should be much more songs of Shirley Ann Lee, but have all been forgotten.
Until now. A label called The Numero Group is looking for great stuff to re-release and came across old recordings of a label. So 40 years after Shirley Ann Lee sang her songs in the studio, people come to her door to show her her own music on cd.
Her songs were not only saved from being lost in oblivion, she could also hear her own songs after decades. But they had to listen to it in a car, because she did not have a cd player in her home. It resulted in a cute youtube movie.
You'll probably thinking what's so interesting about it. There is much more in the world than that. Well, this is just a small story, but somehow it's very heart-warming to find that there are people that try to save music from oblivion. And the internet is full of interesting little stories. It's a good that I have children and a job. Otherwise I could easily fill my days with tracking down these little musical pearls and the stories behind it (and blogging about it).
Monday, May 04, 2009
three mattresses and a baby
The extra mattress has arrived! That does not seem like a great deal, but this makes our co-sleeping very official: the whole Bos family sleeps in one great bed and had to buy another mattress since we are now with the four of us.
The extra space is especially handy with Isabel. Often when I wanted to go to bed I found her on my part of the family bed. If not, she would take at least as much width of the bed as possible. But to be frank: I hope they will stay in the family bed for a long time.
For those who are interested (or shocked) by co-sleeping some links from Ester: