My new Joe Satriani Guitar picks, very cool…doubt they’ll make me play better but we can hope 
Category Archives: Music
My very cool new guitar!
Make some noise!
This year I am doing something different. I am resolving to give something up.
I have many interests and hobbies as I suspect most creative types do, I have always been this way as I believe we owe it to ourselves to expand in any way we can. For me it has almost always been via visual challenges, photography, art and design with one notable exception being music, I have played guitar for many years now (I am going to guess around 20).
I am resolving to give up playing guitar this year to give myself more time and energy to focus back on my Photography and design interests, over the past few months I have found for some reason that I am struggling to keep my guitar playing at the level I have reached let alone move it further down the road. I am sure there are many reasons for this but perhaps the most obvious ones being time spent on other hobbies, work and life in general.
So in order to discover how far I can take my other interests I am willing to let go of one that has seen me through thick and thin to get to me this point. I will miss playing, the hardest part will be hearing blues licks and wanting to pick up the guitar and play along.
I do believe though that its time to focus on a couple of core interests and give them the attention they deserve whilst saying thanks and see you around to those that have become stagnant.
Should be a hard but interesting challenge.
1. The bar on the iPod screen now shows me how much space is taken up by applications.
2. The new album grid browsing is nice, I am going to try it for a while and see if it replaces the old top browser method of viewing.
3. It does feel faster, but maybe that’s just me hoping it is.
iTunes became my default entertainment manager when I first started using it and I see no reason to change it, every update has been reliable for me. And so far it has not reached the bloated status of nearly all the other entertainment software hubs out there.
In all I think it’s a solid upgrade just don’t ask me about the ‘Genius’, its primary goal is to increase iTunes store sales I’m sure. After all, don’t we already know what we like in the music we own?…Surely that’s why we own it and that doesn’t take a genius to figure out.
I guess they need to get out more since apparently they’ve never heard the rather popular AC/DC tracks. And yes I did update as the dialog suggests. And I guess they are suggesting that AC/DC is not a group I should listen too.
‘Let’s Rock’ event rocked about as much as a Britney come back.
OK so no surprise on the new iTunes and the new nano looks just like the shots everyone has seen and clearly Apple considers the nano the new ‘standard’ iPod. One thing though…they sure are pushing the hell out of the Genius features in the iPod and iTunes. I’ve yet to find an application that can actually recommend music based on what you are listening too and actually get it right other than hitting the same genre or bpm.
However, the features to the iPod touch are what catches my interest.
Does anyone know of a client for the Mac that I can use to transfer my Mini-Disc Net-MD files with? I hate having to use an old PC laptop with SonicStage just to transfer files to my mini-disc player. The Mini-Disc technology is still great for musicians just wanting to record while they practice or jam some ideas, just a shame it never really continued to catch on.
Sure I know there is plenty of ways to do it in real-time with audio in/out etc. But that’s not really what I want to do.
This is probably obvious to many out there but for those that want an easy way to back up their Amazon purchases in itunes, this is the way I do it.
Yes I know that the Amazon files download to a folder as well, but sometimes we just forget to back up stuff if it’s not right there in our face, and you never know when that internal drive is going to die on you. You simply make a smart playlist that uses the ‘comment contains Amazon’ to select the files…assuming you have not altered the comments in the files this will work.
Playlist would look like this
And when burning them to a disk just use the mp3 option as below
This has worked for me, and should work for others.
