Simalot and I both mentioned several music podcasts where we get a lot of free music. I found that since iTunes uses the name and artist given in the podcast feed rather than that which may or may not be set in the mp3 file itself, many of the tracks iTunes downloads have names such as ‘#nnn [Track Name] by [Artist Name]’ rather than having Track Name as the track name and Artist Name as the artist. Also, by default, they’re ignored in shuffle mode, and they remember where you’re up to if you stop in the middle of a song, since that’s what you’d want to happen if they were normal podcasts. So I made some AppleScripts to fix all these problems, and after making a few more for the podcasts @simalot mentioned, I finally decided it was worth making them public, in case there are other Mac iTunes users who subscribe to free music podcasts and like to have all the tags of their mp3s in order.
So anyway, there are links to the various scripts and podcasts in
this blog post. If you’re not using iTunes on a Mac, the AppleScripts won’t be much use, but you still might find the list of podcasts useful. Feel free to suggest other music podcasts I could subscribe to and make scripts for.
As for new music, I mentioned in the other thread that I’ve discovered a lot of good music through
Zunior samplers. One of those was
Wax Mannequin, who I saw in concert a couple of weeks ago. It turned out we were in the same hotel, and we ended up on the same train and in the same Starbucks (I swear I wasn’t stalking) talking about music and stuff. (He even brought up
Gödel, Escher, Bach unprompted. Squee!) I mentioned JoCo and Paul and Storm a couple of times; in fact it was he who told me about
Ween’s fancy pants song. Anyway, one of the other singers he recommended to me was
B. A. Johnston, and just looking at the
tracklistings of his albums I knew he would be a good fit with JoCo fans. Zombies, nerds, pants, hobos, robos, video games, even a theme song for a TV show about a monkey butler, of all the ridiculously specific themes he could share with JoCo. And what’s more, I believe he and Wax Mannequin are currently
touring Canada together, so you can see two great artists in the same night. Check ’em out. By the way, I filmed the Wax Mannequin show (it’s what I do!), but he’s going to watch it first before I put it on the YouTubes.
Oh, also, after that I found an
old EP of Wax Mannequin’s on which there is a song about weird beards. We like beards, right?
