When a blog begins a post with a title like “Starting from scratch” one might expect I’m going to announce some big change in the way I live my life, or at the very least, a re-design of the site. But not this life, not this blog. I’m talking about my music collection and the way I maintain it. Specifically, I’m talking about why I never really liked my iPod and why I’m glad I replaced it with an iRiver Clix.

Several years ago, when I heard there were car radios that could play MP3 CDs, I started saving all my music in this format thinking I would one day own such a stereo. Then came portable MP3 players and the iPod. I resisted for a while, but finally bought an iPod when the fifth generation Video iPod was released.

The task before me now was daunting: How do I fill a 60 gig iPod using a 30 gig laptop? It took weeks to offload small batches of music from CDs and CD-ROMs, make sure they were properly tagged, move them to my iPod, delete them from my computer, and start again. I had a major setback when my iPod froze while being “ejected” from the Mac I used at work. This resulted in a corrupted database on the iPod. Many of the songs were simply missing, some songs played at the same time over the top of each other.

Even in the first few days of use, I’d already noticed the ways Apple’s iPod was not a perfect fit for me or my expectations. No FM tuner (radio) was a big annoyance and should have kept me from buying the iPod in the first place. I listen to public radio a lot. I knew from day one with the iPod that if I ever replaced it, I would have to find something that came with a radio. Second, the iPod is not hot-swappable. I have to plug it in, wait for the computer to recognize it, start up iTunes (Oh, no. Can’t use your iPod with anyone else’s software.), transfer the songs, click to eject, wait for the computer and the iPod to say farewell, stand around awkwardly for a bit, each of them not sure what else should be said, give each other one last embrace, and as they separate, the iPod allows his hands to trail down the computers arms and take hold of her hands, then slowly, slowly but finally, let go. And please, please don’t freeze up.

In the end, I gave up when my iPod was a little more than half full. If I got new music, I’d put it on there, but I never attempted to archive my music on the iPod again.

After I moved to California and had the ability to listen to KCRW while driving, I started using my iPod less and less. But two or three months ago I decided the iPod and I needed to reacquaint ourselves … and I just couldn’t find it anywhere. I really did make an honest effort to find it, but in my heart I was glad to have the opportunity to replace it with something better.

I started researching. I found a great resource called Anything But iPod that helped me narrow down my choices with its thorough MP3 player comparisons and reviews. In the end I settled on the iRiver Clix (second generation). Here’s why:

1. FM radio
2. Hot swappable. This is great for several reasons. I can use it like a USB thumb drive: plug it in, transfer files, unplug it, and go. I can view all my music files in non-hidden, properly named folders. I can drag music from the Clix directly to my computer or any computer I want. I can drag music from my computer directly to the Clix. I don’t have to use an iTunes-like media player if I don’t want to.
3. It can play several different audio types, whereas the iPod can only play two. It plays a few different video types, whereas my iPod would only play one, and not a very common one at that.
4. It has a voice recorder, and can record the FM radio. I can even schedule recordings with the timer.

There’s one thing the iPod does right, and that’s the click-wheel. It just doesn’t get simpler or more easy to use than that. While I don’t mind the Clix’s interface, it takes just a little bit more work to do what you want. But the Clix more than makes up for this by doing so much more than the iPod.

So, I knew that I would never make the most of the Clix if my music remained on CDs and CD-ROMs. So I purchased an external hard drive that is now the home of all my music and photos. It’s pretty excellent to have everything right at my fingertips.

Archiving it was still an ordeal because many of the CD-ROMs I made in the early years did not make use of proper tagging, so the artist, title, album and other relevant information was often missing or had been filled in incorrectly. The last time I tried archiving my music, I filled in the missing information by hand, searching Amazon or the Internet for the correct titles. This time, it’s been a much simpler process thanks to a program called Media Monkey, a music jukebox player and organizer. It’s 100 times better than iTunes for many reasons, but one feature alone made me love it forever. I can highlight the songs in an album and look it up on Amazon. Media Monkey will automatically fill in any missing or incorrect data based on Amazon’s database. It even stores the album art in the id3 tag. Seriously an amazing piece of software. Check it out.

Just got out of my second and last workshop of the day. The morning session was good and somewhat engaging, led by a couple of Yahoo’s developers. After lunch (which was delicious) the afternoon session seemed to drag on. Read on »

This morning, David Kestenbaum had an amusing story on NPR called “How iMet my neighbor on iTunes.”

For those who don’t care to click the links or listen to the story, I’ll sum up. As Kestenbaum listened to music on iTunes, he saw a new source of music show up called “Anna’s Music.” Who is Anna? he thought. He talked to his wife and figured out that it must be one of his neighbors. He looked through Anna’s music and found it was the same music he listened to; she was his new musical best friend. As luck would have it – and in a twist I don’t quite understand – her e-mail address “popped up” when he clicked on one of the songs in her folder. So … he emailed her.

“I am not a stalker. My wife and I would like to have you over for dinner sometime.” That’s basically what he wrote. She never wrote back and it’s obvious that he was a little sad about that. One day his wife did some searching and found out which of their neighbors Anna was – a very nice gesture since she later admits being a little jealous of his “musical soul mate”.

He rang Anna’s doorbell and she came out to talk but was clearly weirded out. She says she wanted to believe that he was not a stalker, but in the end, didn’t trust his email. After all, she thought, he already has my email address, what if he shows up at my house?

In the end, Kestenbaum has no new musical best friend. Anna never came over for dinner. He encrypted his Wi-Fi connection. They don’t talk.

I started out writing a long-ish post about my own experiences as an “Anna” although mine are considerably less interesting since I was never discovered. But what really left a lasting impression on me in Kestenbaum’s story was the unspoken theme of loneliness, or yearning to make connections with people that possibly result in friendship. You see this not only in Kestenbaum’s response when he learns that Anna enjoys the same music he does, but in Anna’s response to his email. She said she really wanted it to be true, but in the end chose not to risk writing him back. Not that I blame her. The story probably would have had a different ending were it Anna writing an email to Kestenbaum.

I figure this theme is pretty universal. In fact, makes me think of this poem.

“Twenty Billion Light Years of Loneliness”
- Shuntaro Tanikawa (trans. Harold Wright)

Mankind on a little globe
Sleeps, awakes and works
Wishing at times to be friends with Mars.

Martians on a little globe
Are probably doing something; I don’t know what
(Maybe sleep-sleeping, wear-wearing, or fret-fretting)
While wishing at times to be friends with Earth
This is a fact I’m sure of.

This thing called universal gravitation
Is the power of loneliness pulling together.

The universe is distorted
So all join in desire.

The universe goes on expanding
So all feel uneasy.

At the loneliness of twenty billion light years
Without thinking, I sneezed.

I’ll leave you to think about that for a little while.

I am currently listening to the neighbors behind my apartment argue in Spanish. She sounds very upset. He sounds very calm, though passionate, which leads me to believe that either there’s just some big misunderstanding or else he is a jerk and is trying to lie his way out of trouble.

I am also trying to get myself out of trouble, as I seem to have broken my Web site.

Update: The site is more or less fixed, though not exactly the way I wanted. I’ve changed the permalink structure for my site so that links to posts look a bit nicer. I also wanted the category links to display as “hellosputnik.com/category_name”, so I edited /wp-includes/classes.php and removed the bit that appends “category/” to the base of the category links. This worked just fine. Categories and pages displayed as I intended, however, the permalinks to individual posts were now broken. I tried updating the permalink structure from the Admin page and all sorts of other things and nothing worked. So, I will just live with “hellosputnik.com/category/category_name” as my link structure.

Also, while upgrading my Wordpress theme to support sidebar widgets, I discovered that the Tiger Admin Theme (version 2.01 at the time of this writing) does not play well with widgets. In the Sidebar Widgets section, clicking on a widget should darken and deactivate the background while leaving the individual widget options in focus and editable. With the Tiger Admin Theme activated, clicking on a widget brings up the widget’s options, but the entire interface darkens and only the widget’s close button is functional. Not a huge problem, I just deactivated the Tiger Admin Theme while working with widgets.

I’ve settled (for now) on the WP-iTunes plugin to display what’s currently playing in iTunes. I started using onAirNow in conjunction with the Now Playing iTunes plugin. They worked very well and were easy to set up. But the developer of Now Playing wants to be compensated for his work (which is understandable and respectable) and I was sure I could find another solution that didn’t cost a dime.

That’s when I found WP-iTunes, which seems to work best with a companion program called iTunesBlogger. Again, they work pretty much perfectly. WP-iTunes even has the ability to track the most recently played songs and also grabs album cover art from Amazon.com.

Here’s the problem, though: A lot of my music is either not sold on Amazon or else has no image file associated with it. And even if WP-iTunes does grab an image off Amazon, I’ve discovered that it’s not always the correct image. For example, while listening to “Possibilities” by Michael Hutchence, Amazon returned the image for Donnie Darko. WP-iTunes is supposed to have local caching abilities to improve performance, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me. If I figured it out, maybe I could store my own images in there for art-less music, but just looking at how many albums are missing art on the Recently Played page, I have a feeling it would be a painstaking luxury that I can live without.

I thought about hacking one of these plugins to get album information from another source, such as Last.fm, but even there, cover art is grabbed from Amazon. Then I thought the solution might (and still might) be to grab the image from the song file’s ID3 tag. Now that iTunes has the capability to download album art, I thought the information might be exported in its XML file, but it’s not. In fact, I’m pretty sure iTunes doesn’t actually store downloaded art with the song file, but locally in the iTunes Music folder, which is another annoyance in itself.

I’m pretty tired of investigating this. For now I’m satisfied using WP-iTunes with iTunesBlogger, but I wonder if anyone out there has a suggestion or a solution.

Things are changing a little bit around here in some visible and not-so-visible ways.

First, for all my friends in Houston who, for some reason, like using Xanga, posts on this site will now be cross-posted to my Xanga account so that you can continue using Xanga to keep up. However, you’ll still have to come here to comment on a post. And that brings me to the next update.

If you leave a comment, you’ll notice some sweet AJAX code will automatically add your comment without having to refresh the page. Far out.

In other comment-related news, gravatars are now supported in comments on posts. What’s a gravatar, you ask? Go here to find out, or leave a comment and find out the hard way. If you haven’t already registered a gravitar at Gravatar.com, you’re currently out of luck since the site is presently undergoing maintenance. But, if you register at Hellosputnik.com, you have the option of uploading your own gravatar for use on this site.

There are other benefits to registering as well, including not having to enter your name and e-mail address everytime you want to leave a comment. You can probably edit your comments as well, but I’ll have to check into that.

You can now subscribe to the site by e-mail if you so choose. You’ll get a basic text e-mail everytime I post something new. If you want fancier options than that, you can have them by registering. Yep, another perk.

Look at the sidebar and you’ll notice a few new features. The first is a “Now Reading” widget that’ll let anyone who’s curious know what book I’m working on.

Next, there’s a “Weekly Poll” which I’ll update once a week with a new question. Could be humorous, could be serious. Depends on my mood and what’s happening in the world.

“Calendar” is exactly what you think it is. It’s connected to my public Google calendar and lists out whatever’s going on in the coming months. Obviously, I need to add more to it.

What’s next? Glad you asked. I’ll probably add live “Now Playing” info in case you want to know what I’m listening to at any given moment. The “Now Reading” section will also be updated to include a library and possibly reviews of the books I’ve read or plan to read. I just need to get it looking nice first.