Virtual Thought

Just got back from the Weezer / Foo Fighters concert, which was mighty excellent. It was a whim purchase, mostly for Terra’s sake… ended up she couldn’t go, no one I could get ahold of wanted the ticket… so my brother and I had some extra room near our seats, got to spread out.

The Foo Fighters reminded me of what I liked about arena rock while Weezer was poppy to the extreme and the whole thing was just great. Had a great time.

Not as great a time as Mike, though. Mike was the guy Weezer pulled up on stage to play the acoustic part of some song I don’t know but really like (I’m not a good Weezer fan… it was pretty famous, I think it was a single… could it have been “Undone”? My memory is hazy now). They’re all playing along, Mike included… the lead singer motions him over, says into the mic, “Now G… C… D… C… G… C – yeah, like that!... D…” Pretty awesome.

I’m going through a “I’ll listen to anything anyone recommends me” phase. It’s led me to some interesting stuff as well as some bad industrial (I love bad industrial).

However, what I don’t love is iPod weirdness. Covenant has this one song called Afterhours on their album United States of Mind. The song is 5:04 long, but my iPod stops playing it at 3:20 and skips to the next song. It plays fine in iTunes and on CDs. WTF?!

I’ve tried reinstalling everything on my iPod. I’ve tried repurchasing the song from iTunes. I’ve tried burning it to CD then re-ripping it then putting it in the iPod. No dice. Seriously, WTFF?

I’m guessing there’s some sort of frequency in the song that isn’t friendly to iPod’s firmware. Does that mean that people can release songs that are non-iPoddable by inserting those frequencies in their songs? That doesn’t make a lot of sense though – how did that frequency survive the burn-rip process? It got recompressed to MP3, so shouldn’t it have gotten shifted somehow?

Drat.

So John was just over and he had some songs on his iPod that he wanted to give me. Thing is, these songs weren’t songs he bought, they weren’t protected songs… they were songs he’d ripped from a CD he owned, stuff that’s hard to find in America… y’know, all those other excuses people have. ( =

HOWEVER – iTunes won’t let me get the stupid songs off his iPod onto my computer so I can put them on my iPod. How lame is that?

Along comes Xpod and iPodUtil... these apps are great! I like the user interface for iPodUtil much better than Xpod, but since I’ve been using them for like five minutes I’m assuming that there’s stuff the one can do that the other cannot.

I found something else out: here’s the command line that, on a Mac, will dump your iPod’s songs out somewhere:

ditto -rsrcFork /Volumes/your_iPod_name/iPod_Control/Music/ ~/Desktop/temp_folder

Sweetness!

(psst… thanks to macosxhints Forum for all this info!)

Looks like Google decided to give Mac users a little love: They’ve finally released the GMail notifier for Mac.

On the blog entry they say there’s more to come. Hooray.

That’s a great picture. I bet they lied to the chimp, told him he’d won the Banana Lottery.