Every once in a great while I get to buy something new. It does not happen often, and it is not usually on the scale of the HDTV that I want, but sometimes making a really good choice on a smaller purchase is even better.

I have been working on several music projects for the last couple of years and am constantly listening to music and evaluating its quality. My experience with the Apple headphones that are included with the iPod have been disappointing. Don’t get me wrong I am as much or more of an Apple fanboi as the next twenty-something, but the included headphones have been a sore point for many others and really the worst part of the entire iPhone/iPod experience.

This past year I was able to get an iPod Touch. It has been fantastic but I kept on fighting again with the really poor quality headphones. For me part of the listening

experience is being able to hear bass. In the earbuds the upper registers are tinny and the lower registers are pretty much non existent in my experience. When I would listen at home I could use my big over ear cans (and the experience is amazing) but for listening in the car or when walking through a store no one wants to be that guy.

I finally broke (one of the buds randomly stopped giving out sound) my first pair after about 2 months of use back in February. Because it was so new, the guy at the Apple store slipped me a new pair and it was all good. Then I broke a second pair (those legitimately cracked because I let the earbuds swing down to the ground while I was picking up Greyson and walking) about 2 months ago and I realized that I needed

something better sounding and more durable.

A friend of mine from work pointed me in the direction of skullcandy. I had heard of the company because of their partnership with major music artists on some ridiculous headphones but had never looked into anything else the company makes.

That was a mistake. I was able to get a pair of inexpensive, in-ear headphones that fit so well they are almost noise cancelling. The sound is fantastic. I can hear bass. I can hear background conversations between band members before songs start all without turning the volume up past half even in a noisy environment.

I would like to use this opportunity to ask Steve Jobs: Why can you not bundle the Skullcandy Inked line of headphones in with iPods? They only cost $20 at Best Buy. They sound fantastic and they don’t look weird or anything.

For the rest of you, if you listen to music on a regular basis or even casually, I fully recommend these headphones. Listening with them on is like getting to listen to all of your music for the first time again, rediscovering whole portions that you were not even aware existed. Let me know what you think or if you have other affordable alternatives that you have come across. @danieldezago.

I have a friend who is a big Kanye West fan. So it was with him in mind that I started listening to Kanye’s latest album a couple of weeks ago.

I want it to be know that despite my strong dislike of Kanye as a person, I think he does have talent in spades. I really wanted to like this album or at least a couple of songs from it. So I listened to this album all the way through six times before I decided that it had great potential and was a cool project but I just did not like it.

The songs themselves are great with catchy lyrics and beats. There were actually a few, Paranoid and Love Lockdown that made it into my 4* play list so the whole album was not a wash in that regard. It is a pretty big change as far as style from other albums of Kanye’s that I have listened to and to his credit I think that the content of the album was great and that is what got me to listen to it so many times before I made up my mind.

Really what tipped the scales agains the album making it into my good list was that voice effect that has become more and more popular in recent years. I think it can be great as an embellishment but really there was not a pure word uttered until sometime in the seventh song. Now if it was anyone but Kanye I would have said they were covering up for their inability to sing, but since I know that he has ability, I just do not understand the point of it being so prevalent throughout the album.

Overall there are some things that I think would have made this idea better. First I think that it should have been released as an EP. There are enough good songs on here to warrant a release of some kind, but in my view not quite enough to have a solid full album. Sure there have been some hits off of it but those could have been hits off an EP just the same and he still would have been able to have his “personal” project. Also, I wish that he had done the writing and the beats but maybe gotten someone like Justin Timberlake to sing some of the tracks. Like I said before I liked the lyrics and beats of several of the tracks but an outstanding singer would have taken those to the next level.

Pros: Good lyrics to the songs, catchy beats, Kanye West.

Cons: Overuse of vocal effects gets annoying, no huge standout tracks, Kanye West.

Summary: Listen to it a few times, take the tracks you like and pitch the rest.

I have been working on a giant music project partly for myself and partly for a good friend of mine. There have been countless hours getting correct album art and lyrics and ordering things correctly.

Saturday afternoon I thought that it was all gone. When I went to open my library to listen to some music, it would have the little progress bar saying checking library, then the correct menu bar on top would show up but the window of the application would never come up. All of the options in the actual menus were grayed out and I had no choice but to start a new library and try and import the library data that i could. It brought in some of the play lists, but none of the ratings or play counts and since I have a whole bunch of smart lists dependent on those things I still feel like I lost a lot. The last thing that you want to have to see on your screen if you have a decent music and video library is a screen that looks like this.
The good news is that I do have all of the data back and in the case of my giant project, it is forcing me to go back and fix some mistakes and make everything a bit more comprehensive and consistent. Just as a reminder to you all there is a backup option for your library in iTunes and there is also a way to export your library data which is what I should have done on a more regular basis. So bittersweet. I have all my stuff but not all the data.

I thought that I would throw up a little video showing what I am listening to. I could post it in a boring old list spreadsheet style with hundreds of links to the song, album and artists but what fun would that be. See if you can recall the band based on the album art.

Recently I posted about how much I like the Raconteurs new album Consolers of the Lonely. Nice little post. In an off the cuff sort of way I said:

Ok so I am not as huge a fan of music as my good friend Mark Artrip but I do have a bigger iTunes music library…not that I’m keeping track.

Now I did not necessarily mean for that to start a “mine is bigger than yours contest” because I thought that it would just be accepted at face value by whomever chose to read my blog. I now realize that Mark does take music much more seriously than I do and so he commented:

wait a minute, I would like to know how big your itunes library is? and if it is bigger than mine, I would like to know how much of that music you obtained legally. I like to think that I have one of the biggest legal libraries around….all terrible christian music from back in the day….but still:)

Now I will say to start off with that a blog on the internet popular or not is probably not the best place for anyone to quantify or justify the status of what is contained in their collection of media no matter what the format. What I will say is that I have never counted a library that way because honestly, I have moved my music around so much to so many different computers and in different formats that I am not sure anyone could really tell what is from where other than what I have bought from the iTMS itself. So for just the sake of defining legality lets say that only songs purchased from iTunes count since if you believe the record labels importing off of your own cds breaks copyright since it constitutes a change in format and is thus illegal. In that arguement I have 156 songs which take up 562.7MB of space and would take 9.5 hours to listen to. Not that much. Here are screengrabs of my overall library.

A lot of this actually has been ripped off of CDs or DVDs that I owned (and since got rid of because CDs take up space) at one time. Most of the stuff that I got in college has been long since deleted as my overall storage capacity expanded or contracted. I will say that changing from a desktop to a laptop prompted me to unload a huge amount of content both in the tv shows area and in music. Things like the entire audio books for the LOTR trilogy added a ridiculous number of tracks and play time to the stats. I have also been getting rid of a lot of albums that quite frankly I will never listen to again and am not even sure where they came from. 

As a wrap up to this post about music and libraries let me include a link to an amazing post that I read this morning on this very subject. Below is one of my favorite quotes from it but you can read the whole thing here if you want.

Because of the availability of music online, a very strict social hierarchy has been created within white culture whereby someone with a large MP3 collection is considered “normal,” a large CD collection is considered to be “better,” and a person with a large vinyl collection is recognized as “elite.”

Update: I added video captured of my desktop hosted on YouTube

I briefly mentioned this little application in my about page and I just wanted to throw it out there as something that I use. Something that I have wanted for a really long time is to be able to always have my screen savers on. People put a lot of time into screensavers and things like that so it only seems reasonable that I should not have to be away from my computer to be able to enjoy it. This is what a cool screensaver looks like when it is your desktop. Also a cool way to read the news.