bookmark_borderPodcasts

Podcasts

I’m way way behind the curve on podcasts and I’m laying the blame firmly on my parents and their use of radio.

I grew up in a house where music was the backdrop to most activities – my first hearing of Appetite for Destruction? My Dad loaned the cassette from the library and I walked in as Welcome to the Jungle kicked off, epic! – so I never really had much of a view of things like the Shipping Forecast, radio plays and so on. I’m sure my parents did listen to ‘talk radio’ on occasion just not when I was around so I’ve always associated radio with music.

I won’t bore you with tales of recording the Top 10 to cassette, but my maturing musical tastes have mirrored my growing distaste for radio DJs and all the talking, yak yak yak they go, largely spouting nonsense and noise when all I really want is to listen to the music. So I’d turn off the radio and start listening to my own music; the rise of the MP3 made this approach all the more satisfying.

Of course the real problem wasn’t radio at all, but my choice of radio stations. Thank heavens for the internet I say, as I’ve many more ways to find music I like and, as the charts descended in mass produced pap… sorry, pop, I increasingly looked to the Pitchforks of the world to find new music. For quite a while I eschewed all radio as, wrongly, rubbish.

Recently that’s been changing as I’ve switched on (sorry!) to the richness and depth of talk radio, and whilst that’s largely been via Radio 4 at present, I’ve been enjoying the discussions, debates, and plays on offer. But how did I get here?

Bye Bye Radio

From tapes, to MiniDiscs, to CDs, I’ve spent countless hours creating playlists and recording it to the media of the moment. Where MP3s triumphed was speed, create a playlist on your computer and seconds later it’s copied to a USB stick. Roll forward a few years and, with all my music stored on my iPod, a quick sync was all it took to update several playlists and I had hours and hours of music at my fingertips.

An avid consumer of new music, I’d scour review sites and buy several new albums every fortnight or so, soon building a bank of new artists and albums (yes, I had a system for this to make sure everything got a good rotation).

So with my appetite for music being whetted elsewhere, and perhaps with my advancing years, I looked around for something a little less full-on for my morning commute.

Talk is cheap

Most mornings I’ll listen to the news as I drive to work, although it depends how much tolerance I have for whatever topic they are manhandling into a forced argument on any given day. Leaving work at odd hours to drive home (sometimes mid-afternoon, sometimes late evening) meant I was exposed to more of the planning and soon found I was getting drawn in and seeking out more alternatives.

Hello Podcasts

Podcasts are not new, I’ve listened to a few now and then but in the past, with my association for radio (which is still how I view podcasts oddly) being music, none of them ever stuck. Perhaps I was just listening to the wrong podcasts, god knows there are some awful ones out there but that’s the same for everything.

However, I was determined to find podcasts that work for me, so after a fair bit of digging I’ve not got a nice workable solution that gives me a selection of podcasts available to me on any of my Apple devices.

The latter part of that solution is provided by Downcast, a multi-device podcast app which syncs my playlists. It’s installed on my iPhone, my iPad, and both MacBooks, so if music isn’t cutting it I can get to many different podcasts and usually find something to keep my attention.

Admitedly some of my these aren’t strictly podcasts but recordings of radio shows but I’ve never really been one for following rules, all I know is that they are spoken word recordings that give me an option when the radio fails me and I’m not in the mood for music.

My current playlist includes:

Do you listen to podcasts? If so, any recommendations to share?

bookmark_borderSpotify Benefits – Shared Playlists

I’m in the midst of writing up my thoughts on Spotify, or rather my own experiences moving from ‘ownership’ to ‘streaming’ but until I finish that, there is one thing that Spotify makes very easy, sharing playlists.

Screenshot of playlist header in Spotify

Yes, I like to give my playlists silly names.

I’ve been compiling a little playlist of songs that make me smile and feel happy, the tracks share no musical genre, anything goes really, just as long as it brings a smile to my face and lifts my mood. To get some other ideas I took to Twitter and got lots more great tracks and ideas.

Twitter to Spotify success!

And I did! Not all of the tracks were to my tastes, obviously, and some tracks were passed over in favour of others by the same artists but, regardless, it was a nice little experiment (my second this week) to see how easy it would be get a crowd sourced playlist without asking people to collaborate directly.

I’ve tried to get a collaborative playlist up and running in the past but the barrier of having to have access to the right app/website and the extra steps needed to find the tracks you want to add seemed to be a step too far. However asking for suggestions on Twitter (and I didn’t offer any of my own up front) got a good response with a few people offering up three or four tracks to be considered.

It didn’t take me long to parse through the suggestions and update the playlist I’d already started and, as it was partially crowd sourced, I thought I’d share it here.

And if that doesn’t work, here’s the direct link for Spotify app users and the link to Spotify web for everyone else.

If you have any other suggestions, leave a comment!

bookmark_borderHow do you do yours?

It has taken me a while to get the Spotify bug but as I can’t seem to escape it I’ve done my usual and leapt in at the deep end leaving my iTunes library mid-rebuild to explore Spotify and see how it fits with my needs. It’s good! I like a lot of things about it and I will happily admit it’s a much nicer place to be than iTunes which has meant that (as most of music listening is background stuff so I prefer things I’m familiar with) I’ve been going a bit playlist happy.

There are a mixture of things that are driving my behaviour, but the ‘availability’ of a large set of music than I have in my own collection, coupled with the speed at which I can find tracks are the main two reasons why I’m finding it much more fun to create playlists in Spotify.

However, it does leave me with a bit of a quandary.

Because I have access to so much music, I find myself easily distracted and start to get lost as I find more and more tracks I like.

For example, say I’m compiling a playlist of heavy rock music – Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Queens of the Stone Age, that kind of thing – and stumble across a remix of something which takes me off on a tangent into Nine Inch Nails and then to the Prodigy and then on to Chase & Status and… wait, what was I doing? This isn’t rock music!

Back to the playlists, but this time I’ll try and add to my Soul playlist. Ahhh yes, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, James Brown, Eddie Floyd… wait I know that track from somewhere else, ohh yeah, Ami Stewart did a disco version, I liked that, I can add that to my disco playlist, and maybe some Bee Gees, Sister Sledge, Chic, ohh that Communards track that got overplayed… what’s this? Then Jericho, that’ll go in my 90s playlist and… gah! It’s happened again!!

Is it just me or is this a common affliction?

Has social media dropped my attention span so low that I can’t even keep focus long enough to add a handful of tracks to a playlist?

What does everyone else do?

bookmark_borderA day at the Fringe

Last Saturday we headed to Edinburgh for some Fringe frolics, with only a vague plan but no real expectations of what we might see, so as we walked towards the Gilded Balloon we accepted a few flyers and made some quick decisions!

First up was a musical comedian from Boston, Katie Goodman. She got things off to a great start with some lovely little songs and raps. Funny, crude and provocative, she certainly doesn’t mince her words; She thinks that some men are probably Gay, there are some things she doesn’t remember, she didn’t fuck it up and is a big advocate of Unfuck It Up.

Next up, and the highlight of the day for me, the Wellington International Ukelele Orchestra. Cover versions, sing alongs, laughter, glow sticks, inflatable palm trees, DIY spotlights and mirrorballs not to mention some brilliant performances and delicious harmonies! It was an hour of joyous music and fun, I only wish it had lasted longer! (they do a nice line in tea towels as well). I am a ukelele convert!

Finally, we head down to the Pleasance and after some sustenance decide to pick whatever was next. And so it came to be that we found ourselves in the audience for Pete Firman, a magician with a nice line in cocky comedy, and some clever magic. He delivered some laughs, a some good tricks and it nicely ended the, somewhat random, day on a good note.

We struck it lucky for sure, three random shows that were all great, but of the three it would have to be the WIUO was definitely the pick of the bunch.

bookmark_borderGigs

I have no idea how many gigs I’ve attended in my lifetime. I do know that I have tickets for them all, stored away in a drawer, all the way back to the first one (Simple Minds).

I’ve sporadically written up attendance at some of the more recent gigs, but by and large I’ve not bothered, mostly because in the warm afterglow of a gig, EVERY gig is pretty damn good!

It’s a common enough experience, you go and see a band you like and (for the most part) you have a great night hearing your favourite songs played REALLY loud and get this amazing feed of energy and vitality from the crowd. Sometimes it’s almost completely overwhelming and you get carried away in the moment, losing yourself in the moment.

Of course not every gig can be that good and, to date, I’ve only ever walked out of one gig. Sigur Ros and after 20-30 minutes of wailing droning noise I gave up. I like Sigur Ros a lot, but it wasn’t what I expected. But then, what does a band ‘owe’ us when we pay to see them perform?

One thing I have started to do over the last couple of years is be a little choosier as to who I see. Steering away from the ‘big venues’ and looking at smaller bands, or more intimate settings. Tonight I’m off to see KT Tunstall at Oran Mor, and old converted church near where I live. I’ve seen her live before so I know what to expect (great cheeky banter, and a very talented performer).

On the flipside of that I have just bought tickets to see Queens of the Stone Age (again) at the new Glasgow Hydro. Partly because I love the band, partly because of the new venue, which I really hope sounds the death knell for the Big Red Shed (SECC) in which I refuse to attend gigs because it’s so achingly bad.

Next week we are off to Glastonbury and, unlike two years ago at our first, this time around we aren’t massively planning who we want to see. We’ve picked out two or three bands we want to catch but, for the rest of the time we will be determinedly wandering around and hearing what we hear.

One day I’ll revisit that list of gigs, go through all the tickets and jot down any memories they stir up because, for me, that’s one of the reasons to go. To change the connection to the music, to be part of an experience that is both shared and individual. My memory of a lot of my life events is hazy at best, but when it comes to music I can remember lyrics and tracks from the day I bought my first LP (Friend or Foe by Adam and the Ants, favourite track the guitar heavy, A Man Called Marco) and it’s the same for gigs. I’m instantly transported back to the place, who I was with, my emotions at the time and, usually, a specific recollection or two (Runrig at Loch Lomond, smuggling in alcohol by injecting, with a syringe borrowed from some nurses, cartoons of juice with vodka).

bookmark_borderiTunes / Airplay issues – FIXED

“It just works”, they said.

“Except when it doesn’t” they didn’t say.

What follows is a bit of a rambling post about random playback issues I’ve experienced when using iTunes to stream music to an Airplay. Simply put, for no reason I can fathom, iTunes playback across Airplay will stop. The track is still playing in iTunes but there is no sound passed to Airplay. Searching for this issue has helped me narrow it down to the problem being iTunes, beyond that I’m stuck.

Read on for some lessons learned…

Continue reading “iTunes / Airplay issues – FIXED”