I had a bit of a nightmare getting set up on OS X, though. At first I tried installing mplayer and lame using Fink; this didn’t work, so I switched to Darwin Ports. This was fine for lame, but the DP version of mplayer didn’t play ball with downloaded RealPlayer codecs.

I then googled and stumbled upon this blog entry where the author describes how to set up lame and mplayer on OS X, for use with his own shell script.

Anyway, there it is: install the ffmpegx version of mplayer and all will be well. I can now listen to Gilles Peterson and Hotpot Radio (Mr. Scruff & Treva Whateva) on my iPod. Yay!

An aside: one of the limitations of Radiopod was that the start or end time couldn’t be after midnight. This is a bit of a limitation, as most of the shows I timeshift are late-night ones. I modded the script to take a duration option (in seconds), which the script then uses instead of the duration it calculates from the start and end times anyway. If I pull my finger out, I may submit my patch back to SourceForge.

Total volume

I think iTunes contains about 12.5 GB of music: a mixture of my own CDs, downloaded CC music, free singles from iTMS, and podcasts.

Last CD bought

Ben Folds: Ben Folds Five

Song playing right now

Jazz Cafe 8/01/2005 Track 07 by The Bays

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

1. Count To Six (I Am Robot And Proud mix) by The Überkids
2. She Goes On by Crowded House
3. Lonely Soul by U.N.K.L.E.
4. Where Angels Play by The Stone Roses
5. Drive by R.E.M.

Five People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton

TBD

Tracklist

1. Lou Bega – Mambo No. 5
2. Wham! – Wake Me Up Before You Go
3. Michael Jackson – Billie Jean
4. Janet Jackson – What Have You Done For Me Lately?
5. M.A.R.R.S. – Pump Up The Volume
6. Betty Boo – Doin’ The Do
7. Mel and Kim – Respectable
8. Kylie Minogue – I Should Be So Lucky
9. Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas?

UK record companies are celebrating their best ever year for album sales, with a record 237 million sold in the 12 months to September.

But I thought that file sharing was killing music ? That’s what the RIAA has been saying for the past few years, since Napster came on the scene in the late 1990s. The RIAA has been suing its own customers – good move! – and our very own BPI is now following their lead.

Give it up, guys. You’re starting to look desperate.

Copy the list on to your blog, put in bold the ones you have listened to (completely from begining to end) and then add three more albums that you think people should have heard before they turn into their parents – remember, it isn’t necessarily your most favourite albums but the ones you think people should listen to… and when we say listen we mean from track one through to the end.

If you put a link to your follow-on post in the comments of the site where you found it, the chain will be trackable.

You are also allowed to DELETE up to THREE albums on the existing list, if you feel a) that this is an album which should not reasonably be foisted upon anybody, or b) that one Steve Earle album is quite enough for one lifetime, thank you.

• London Calling – The Clash
• Think Tank – Blur
• This is Hardcore – Pulp
• Moon Safari – Air
• Elastica – Elastica
• Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols – Sex Pistols
• OK Computer – Radiohead
• The Kiss of Morning – Graham Coxon
• Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars – David Bowie
• The Wall – Pink Floyd
• Setting Sons – The Jam
• Toxicity – System of a Down
• Train a Comin’ – Steve Earle
• Folksinger – Phranc
• Come From the Shadows – Joan Baez
• The Very Best of Joan Armatrading – Joan Armatrading
• Outside – David Bowie
• What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
• Metal Box – Public Image Ltd
• Orbital #2 (The Brown Album) – Orbital
• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain – Pavement
• Club Classics Vol. 1 – Soul II Soul
• The River – Bruce Springsteen
• Apple Venus Vol. 1 – XTC
• America Beauty – The Grateful Dead

OK. Not much dice there then. I clearly have some work to do! I also added:

• The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses
• Orbital – Snivilisation
• The Cinematic Orchestra – Every Day

According to the BBC Bristol web site, Neil and Tim Finn are to play the Colston Hall in October. As a long-time fan of Crowded House (I went to see them in the slightly larger surroundings of Birmingham’s NEC in 1994), this will doubtless be a top night out.

Of course, the Archos is allowing me to carry vast amounts of music around with me, including Crowded House’s four studio albums (Crowded House, Temple of Low Men, Woodface and Together Alone) all of which continue to delight and surprise me with their musicianship and intelligent lyrics. I’d better start saving up for those tickets!

I’ve been gathering data from eBay (manually) of the closing prices of iPods, which model they are and which generation.

[Note for the uninitiated: the latest "All New!" iPods are the fourth generation. The first ones were…oh, I think you get the idea]

At the moment it’s a CSV file. I will probably make a PHP script at some point to do strange and wonderous mathematical things to the numbers. Well, it will take the average for each model and generation, at least.

I suspect, though, that the numbers will bear out what I already know: second-hand iPods aren’t worth the bother, especially as the 4G models are (in the case of the 40GB) £100 cheaper than the 3G ones. I can only guess as to the mental state of the person who spent £215 (plus £8.50 p&p!) on a 3G 15GB iPod from eBay, when the 4G 20GB is £220 direct from Apple! If you’re on a budget, the Apple Refurb store last week had 3G 15GBs going for £175 with an Apple warranty.

The mind, quite literally, boggles.

When I was in the sixth-form at school, I bought the early-nineties equivalent of the iPod: a slimline, powder-blue Aiwa personal stereo. Yes, I know it sounds a bit QEFTSG, but they were cooler than Sony (at the time) and had better build quality. Oh, and they were barely bigger than a cassette case. And they cost "only" £60: a lot of money for a 16-year-old, but still cheaper than an iPod.

I would wear my Aiwa on the school bus, and still be listening as I walked into the form room at the start of the school day. I would be greeted with comments like "Tim’s got his life-support on again, then!" I would guess that I was being talked about, and remove my headphones just in time to catch the comments.

I sold the Aiwa less than a year later for £50 – not a bad residual, really, making it even more iPod-like.

Anyway – I digress. I’ve ripped several CDs (albeit only the tip of the music collection’s iceberg) to 160Kbps MP3, and transferred over some other MP3s and OGGs from my work machine – and I’ve still only used 2.3GB.

Being a Mac user, I’m finding the Archos to be a little limiting in terms of synchronising with iTunes, which only supports the iPod. The Jukebox mounts just fine as an external hard disk, though, and it’s not as if I have the room to store 20GB 18.6GB of music on either of the main computers; if I did, then synchronising would be a better option. I will one day buy that 120GB hard disk and put it in my 4-year-old Mac. (PC users: Hah! Try doing that in an old x86 box. I know, you probably will be able to, but my own experience of upgrading outdated PC hardware is frustrating, to say the least. Say ‘Hello’ to BIOS incompatibilities!)

Sound quality is good, but is obviously dependant on the bitrate with which you encode your music. As I said, I’m doing all new stuff at 160 Kbps, which for me is a good compromise between file size and quality. I have some older 192 Kbps files, as well as 128s downloaded off the web (Mostly Epitonic.com – ‘tis trés legal). The fact that Nick supplied a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones helps, as they are some of the best earbuds available, and they’re reasonably priced, too.

The Epitonic+Not-An-iPod issue brings me to my final point: I don’t doubt that I could fill the Jukebox many times over, even by just ripping our CD collection and not going anywhere near my vinyl and old tapes. So far, though, I have (with one exception – my Coldcut tunes) just transferred entire albums onto the AJBR, because playlist managment is (I’ve found so far) not as good as iTunes and (apparently) the iPod. Thus a folder structure of artist/album works best for me (until I get to grips with the AJBR’s m3u-creation functionality) and artists which only have a single track, many of which I have downloaded from Epitonic, will become frustrating to listen to.

Little known US singer Gary Jules has clinched the Christmas number one with his cover version of Tears For Fears’ 1982 hit Mad World. — http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3302887.stm

What’s even more refreshing is that it’s a "real" song (albeit a cover), rather than a cheesy "comedy" outing (think Mr. Blobby or Kim Wilde with Smith & Jones).

Rumours of the death of real music have been wildly exaggerated, it seems. Things go in cycles: rock is now "in"; dance music is on the wane. It’ll be back, though. The only constant is change.