Music Musings
Filed under: General
My usual music listening software had been MusicMatch Jukebox. It’s an excellent mp3 player, it has a wide variety of good online radio stations, and it has a good selection of downloadable content. Howeve,r I’ve noticed that it’s been eating more and more CPU cycles recently, to the point where I am unable to multi-task (and I live for multi-tasking). It’s not just some quirk with my home computer, I’ve noticed the same problem on my work computer. Because of this, I’ve been looking around for some alternate music software.
I’ve never liked Microsoft’s Media Player (I don’t trust it), so I’ve avoided using that. I tried iTunes, and while I appreciate its mp3 playing, I’m not as impressed by its online music stations. XM Radio seems to have the best online radio. I have an XM radio at home, so I can use its online content for free. In particular I’ve enjoyed station #44 “Fred” — which is described as “classic alternative rock”. Basically, it’s the alterntive rock I listened to during high school and college.
It’s been great listening to all that music again. In addition to the usual suspects (the Cure, Oingo Boingo, Depeche Mode, REM) , there have been the occasional bands that I enjoyed that I had loved but totally forgotten about: the Jesus and Mary Chain, Book of Love, and Bauhaus.
I think I’m scaring the nurses though.
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December 4th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Scott, I’ve noticed what you’re talking about with Musicmatch Jukebox. I run version 7.5 on my computer, and my wife runs verison 10.something. I have a post about it at http://boardgamemadness.blogspot.com/2005/07/open-letter-to-musicmatch-regarding.html
From other people’s comments, the solution is to remove MMJB 10+ and go back to 7 or 8, which is where the sweet spot of features vs. bad programming is. (Also, I hear that if you have iTunes 4, and you upgrade to version 6, your library’s metadata and ratkings are lost. Not sure where you’re at with that, but I wanted to throw it out there.)
I discovered your site from a link to your Advent calendar from the Howling Curmudgeons, and was delighted to find your House reviews.
There’s a lot of interesting reading here, and I’m looking forward to going back through your archives.
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