Topic: Unspeakable pain.

[Quemaqua]

I came home from work at lunch today.  On top of this being one of the worst fucking weeks in years, I somehow managed to completely throw my back out.  Haven't done that since the first year I was at my job (2002) because of the chair they'd given me.  But somehow I did it again today, and good lord it hurts like hell.  So I went home and picked up a few new jazz CDs on the way since I've been ripping the whole collection to MP3 (I know, Que use his old MP3 player?  WTF?) and wanted a couple extra things to throw on there.

So I'm going to have a cup of coffee, suck on a few painkillers, and spend the rest of the night with Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, and Art Blakey.  Anyone looking for good music may petition me for samples on IRC.  Bring drugs as payment.

[nickclone]

Painkillers kick ass don't they!? I took five with a 12 pack last night and now here we are at 5pm. I don't know how old you are, but perhaps you should go to a doctor. I know you're young and a dude who probably hates going to doctors (who doesn't?), but I think you should bite the bullet and get checked out.

[Quemaqua]

It's good advice, but I'm pretty sure I'll be fine.  I actually did go to the doc the first time I hurt it, and they had me out for a week, but a couple pills, an anti-inflammatory, and no lifting or bending for the rest of the weekend will probably do fine this time.  That's basically all they did for me when I went in last time.  Said there wasn't much they could do other than give me a note.

[gpw11]

Unless your back is seriously fucked they can't do anything for it as far as I know.  This, of course, excludes the whole "see this chiropractor every week for the rest of your life" scam.  One of the reasons so many people deal with chronic back pain - it's not like slipping a disk, it's just something that seems to be there.

[scottws]

I've been ripping the whole collection to MP3 (I know, Que use his old MP3 player?  WTF?)

What are you talking about?  I have an AAC-enabled iPod and I still rip all my stuff to MP3 and don't buy from iTunes.  MP3 is still a very relevant format.  AAC's advantage is at lower bitrates.  They are pretty much equal at the bitrates I keep my music at, and since MP3's tagging is standardized I'm sticking with that.

As far as your back goes, that sucks.  I threw my back out once trying to move a 500 lb. trailer (what was I thinking?) and it sucked bad for like a week.  That first day I couldn't even stand up even close to straight.

[Cobra951]

I doubt he was talking about the format.  I assumed he meant old hardware.  MP3 is still the one and only universal free format for me.

[Quemaqua]

Actually, I wasn't talking about either.  It's generally known (or at least I thought it was) that I hate the digitalization of music in general, I hate people buying individual songs online (the loss of musical identity saddens me, and albums, complete with cover art and liner notes, are still very important to me), I hate Apple and the iPod, etc. etc.  I had an MP3 player long ago and just decided that I didn't like using it very much.  Like most people you see on the subway who do nothing but sit and click through half their playlist to find a song they actually *want* to listen to instead of the 8 gigs of crap they downloaded, I just ended up listening to most of the music like I would a CD, and usually in a logical succession within the same genre, and I don't find it very difficult to carry a CD wallet with a couple CDs (and the player I had wasn't as small as the ones we have now... this was 2003, I think).  So... yeah.  It's weird for me to be going back, but having my entire jazz collection with me makes sense where I guess the other stuff didn't.  When I listen to other stuff, my preferences tend to vary pretty widely depending on what it is I want to listen to, so I never end up using a wide array of music at once (hence it seemed silly to go to the trouble of ripping something when I could just toss the CD in the wallet, which takes .2 seconds), but when I listen to jazz I generally want my entire collection around because I have very specific tastes there that all work well together (smooth jazz is out, Latin jazz is out, and anything from the 30s to the 60s is in along with some other stuff outside those boundaries that still fits the profile), and it was getting to be a pain ferrying CDs to and from work.

How's that for more information than you wanted?  Sorry, I'm trying really, really hard to distract myself from the fact that my neighbors have started playing music again and are likely going to force me into opening yet another can of worms that I don't want to open.  The anger is probably going to give me an ulcer.  And beating my neighbors to death might throw my back out again.

[W7RE]

I'm the same way with listening to songs together Que. When I got my iPod I made a whole mix of songs, no more than 2 or 3 from any artist, and threw them all on the iPod so I could just listen to it on shuffle. That lasted about a day. I find I'd rather have several full albums on there and skip to the one I want to listen to, and hear and entire CD in order.

[Quemaqua]

So good, that means I'm not crazy then.  I was never quite sure.

[TheOtherBelmont]

I find I'd rather have several full albums on there and skip to the one I want to listen to, and hear and entire CD in order.

I do the same thing as well.

[gpw11]

That's where I differ I suppose.  With a few exceptions, my Mp3 player is full of full albulms, but generally I listen to this on random.  I find it a lot less tedious when I don't know what's coming up next.

[Quemaqua]

That only works for me with jazz, probably because there's such a focus on live performance, improvisation, etc.  That makes a difference.

My back is still killing me today.  Felt nice to be in bed, felt nice to sleep, but upon waking... whammo.  Suck.  Neighbors are being very noisy this weekend as well, including this morning, which is stressing me out.  I wish I was better so that I could go poison their drinking water.

[scottws]

Heh, things are funny when you go back to older threads.  Apparently in 4 months you can go from a staunch supporter of the venerable MP3 format to moving on to AAC and never looking back.

Anyway, I realized I never responded regarding the album vs. individual song thing.  I too rip full albums, but there are very few artists I listen to that actually make full albums that are any good.  I find myself eventually marking many of the songs 1 or 2 starts so I know to uncheck them in iTunes so they don't sync in the future.

I still try to buy full albums and rip them, but I have bought the occasional song off of iTunes (and then stripped them of the DRM).

[Quemaqua]

A good way around that is to start listening to musicians who actually have, y'know, talent.

Okay, that's just kind of a joke, but in all seriousness I've never understood that.  90% of the musicians I listen to write and record amazing albums which are completely worth listening to from start to finish.  With so much good music in the world, I can't understand why people listen to talentless hacks who write a hit or two along with their 5 jillion gobs of schlock.  If the artist you listen to can't make a full album of good music, he shouldn't be making music.  IMO.  It's one thing to have an occasional dud or two, or a few things you don't like based on taste, but consistent musical output is the staple of any decent musician.  The only exceptions to this are people that do stuff in widely different genres, hence not being able to avoid some liking part of their work but not another.

Anyway, just a rant.  I just never quite understood that, which I guess is part of why I hate individual songs being for sale.  All it leads to is more money and exposure for people who don't deserve to be considered professional musicians, but are considered so because they managed to get lucky once and run with it.

[scottws]

I've gone on record here before to say that a vast majority of what I like and listen to is mainstream stuff... what you hear on the radio.

I've tried looking for sites with indie stuff you can listen too but I was overwhelmed.  I mean I ended up sorting by rock bands in Cincinnati and there were hundreds upon hundreds and I'd never even heard of any of them.  I listened to some of the stuff that was on there and to be honest it was all horrible.

Now, it's completely possible that Cincinnati rock just sucks, but all I'm trying to say is I don't know where to start.  How do you even discover a new band when there are apparently billions of bands out there?

[Cobra951]

Heh, things are funny when you go back to older threads.  Apparently in 4 months you can go from a staunch supporter of the venerable MP3 format to moving on to AAC and never looking back.

Anyway, I realized I never responded regarding the album vs. individual song thing.  I too rip full albums, but there are very few artists I listen to that actually make full albums that are any good.  I find myself eventually marking many of the songs 1 or 2 starts so I know to uncheck them in iTunes so they don't sync in the future.

I still try to buy full albums and rip them, but I have bought the occasional song off of iTunes (and then stripped them of the DRM).

The timing makes me smile.  Your post here and Que's post on hating the digitalization of music "sync up" to what I did yesterday for my mom.  Months ago, she mentioned that she wanted to find a song from Leo Marini, a Latin American singer from 50-60 years ago.  She said it was special to her and my dad, but couldn't remember the name.  Yesterday the topic came up again, and it prompted me to try to help her find it.  After some searching, I came up with this page at Amazon.  It lets you play samples of all his music in succession, without even having to press a button to advance (perfect for my tech-challenged mom).  So I set it up and let her listen.  Turns out to be #31 on that list, which belongs to this album. 

So I tell her we can order the CD.  She likes to play CDs in this little Bose thing she's had forever.  I've had a hard time teaching her all about the thousands of songs I put on her PC when I set it up for her years ago.  Like I said, tech-challenged.  She hands me a credit card, and I go buy the thing . . . no CD.  Apparently, it's out of print, so the only way to get this album is to buy the MP3s.  I tell her that I've never done that before, and that it would take me a few minutes to figure it all out, but that if she wants the album, it's the only way.  She wants it.  The process was painless, as Amazon usually is.  Get their downloader, click on the "Buy MP3 album" button, wait for it all to come down.  It goes into the 'My Music' folder, and gets added to Windows Media Player behind the scenes.  Bring up WMP, find it, play it.  Sounds amazing for the age of the music.  While she's listening, I dump the album into a memory card, take it to my PC and burn her a CD.  Listening to the tracks on Winamp, I see that they are VBR, ranging from 192-320 kbps except during gaps.  So these are top-quality MP3s, not some schlock.

Here's one case at least where I'm glad things are the way they are.  It may be easy to de-personalize music and the music experience, but it's also so much easier to find, sort, pinpoint and get stuff--on the spot.  With old-style trial-and-error, and the physical media unavailable anyway, she never would have found what she wanted.

[scottws]

I've had a hard time teaching her all about the thousands of songs I put on her PC when I set it up for her years ago.  Like I said, tech-challenged.

I totally know what you mean.  My grandfather about a decade ago decided he was going to get on the Internet.  He'd heard that "everything was available on the Internet" and at the time was interested in astronomy and finding his old Army buddies.

Now, this was a daunting challenge.  The only time he'd ever dealt with computers at all was when he was the manager of a computer programming department for a small mechanical engineering firm.  He freely admits he did not and never did know anything about what the programmers did or how to use the computers... he was just the manager.  I guess he did scheduling and passed on new projects?  I don't know.  This was in the 70s or something.

So, basically I was faced with the challenge of teaching him personal computer basics, Windows 95, and the Internet.  It was very difficult.  He didn't understand the concept of single-clicking and double-clicking at all, or when to do which.  And then of course you have the vastly differing navigational methods in Windows and on the Internet (in Netscape).

He just didn't understand.  He thought Netscape was "The Internet."  The best explanation that I could come up with was that imagine you are in a house.  Everything outside the house is The Internet.  Netscape was just a window.  Anyway, one time Netscape said a new version was out and he called me and said "My Internet expired."  I also got calls about him being worried about getting in trouble for doing something illegal due to those Windows "illegal operation" errors back in the day (I know this is one of those frequently told stories, along with the one about the person who thought the CD-ROM tray was a cupholder, but I'm serious).

And he asked the cursed "why" question about everything.  "Why did you click on that little N icon?"  "Because you want to get on the Internet and this is how you do it."  "Why do I have to do that to get on the Internet?"

Then I had to explain that while the Internet was full of all kinds of things and you could learn about whatever you wanted, the only reason anything was there is that people decided to put something there.  So I told him finding his old Army buddies would be hard because unless one of them made some page about his old unit, he probably would never find anything.

It was just a daunting task and he never ever got it.  We take the knowledge about how to operate a Windows computer that we gained over the years for granted, but to teach someone all of that at one time is just too much.

[TheOtherBelmont]

Scott, pandora.com is a good site to hit up if you are wanting to find new artists.  In case you are not familiar with the site, you type in an artist or song title you like and it finds stuff similar to it, some of the stuff is going to be mainstream stuff you've heard of and other times its going to be a small unknown artist.  If you don't like the selection they played for you, you can give it a thumbs down and they will fine tune the selection to something else.  It's how I've found lots of artists that I hadn't heard of.

[Quemaqua]

I got my mom set up with an email account and such, so she uses that constantly, but she doesn't understand how to operate a computer on any level.  My dad kind of a knew a bit, but he came from the old days of personal computers with two large floppy drives and a nice green monitor (which is where I got started, too, but much younger)... Windows took a lot of adjusting for him.  He did fine with it, though, for a guy who couldn't see... but I was the guy who had to deal with all the technical stuff.  Hardware and networking and troubleshooting major problems.  It really is a long learning process, and difficult for people who just aren't accustomed to the way stuff generally works.

As for the music thing, I don't in any way feel that having out of print music available digitally is bad, nor that MP3s and such don't have their advantages and uses... it's just the whole sort of global idea of it that puts me off.  The problems are myriad and not just related to one thing or the other, this is just an aspect that's become a pet peeve for me.  I mean fuck, I'm trying to BUY a portable CD player for my wife, and we can barely find any.  There are almost none in stores now, and some places don't even carry them around here anymore.  The ones that do inevitably carry ones that are ridiculously overpriced or will fall apart the day after you buy them.  And it isn't even like fucking CDs are old and outdated now.  Go the Best Buy, there's 8 thousand of them on the floor.  What gives?

Eh.  Anyway... I wish I had some great suggestion for you as far as music goes, scott.  I have zero perspective on your situation, though.  I can't afford even a 15th of the music I'd buy if I had the money.  But Pandora, as Belmont mentioned, is a fairly cool thing.  Not perfect, but it's a way of getting a little exposure to stuff you might not hear otherwise, and at least have a slightly higher chance of liking it than randomly sifting through stuff.

[Antares]

I've found it nearly impossible to discover music through the internet, or by just browsing in a record store.  The problem is that there is simply so much music out there there and that it takes a long time to listen to each and every one, even if you know you're only looking for one specific genre.  Pandora is actually a really cool tool.  I was pretty into it about a year ago but haven't used it in a while. 

Most of the new music I discover is through seeing a band in concert, or by hearing about it through friends.  I am in agreemnt with Que on this one. I don't buy an album unless the whole thing is worth listening to, if there is only one song worth hearing I usually don't bother because chances are I'll be sick of it in 3 months after the radio is done overplaying it anyway.

[gpw11]

I have a horrible confession to make:  I don't buy albums at all.  The upside to this is you can just download whatever the fuck you want, put it on your mp3 player and see if you like it.

I have, however, found that if I put an unknown album from an unknown band on my small capacity flash player I use at work, I'm far less likely to write them off prematurely than I am if I put them on my 30GB player. Music tends to grow on you like nothing else.

[ren]

I'm on both sides of the camp. I buy lots of cd's, probably average 5-10 a month, open them, rip them, look at the album art, read all the liner notes, put them on my cd rack and never touch them again. 90% of the time I listen to full albums instead of individual tracks. I like having all the cd's but I don't see any reason to use physical media everytime I want to listen to my music.

Computers also keep play counts which I absolutely love for no particular reason except to watch the number get higher and higher as the years progress. Actually, play counts is probably the biggest reason that I'm entirely digital.