interwebs.

So it's difficult for me to blog now because my laptop's powercord died so I have to occasionally borrow my mom's. this led me to realize how incredibly dependent I am on my laptop. Seriously, everything I do ends up having a connection to this baby so I thought I'd discuss programs I use to do what it is I do and the saving grace for people with un-backed up files/unreliable computers or those who work on multiple computers, web-hosted applications.

Of course all of these are free because I DON'T BELIEVE IN PAYING FOR SOFTWARE.

Section 1. Music

One thing I do all the time is download music and that music needs to be played and tagged and whatnot also that music comes in various file forms and I use two programs to get that done

and Media Monkey

They're both pretty sweet in their own right, thus I use both, but I use foobar significantly more. I'm even using it now. I like its bare bones, highly customizable (but barely customized by me) format also, it's the least resource intensive media player I've heard of also it plays almost any type of music file you'll come across (m4a, flac, ogg, wma, etc.) only one I can think of off the top of my head it can't play is .shn files but the only player I know of that will play shorten is winamp and I don't like winamp.

I use it to listen to files, to rip cds, and conversion all of which it does extremely well and foobar does a really good job at not getting in your way. It doesn't monitor your files and add them automatically, which is a plus for me, personally. I don't trust too many automatic things.

Media Monkey on the other hand, uses more resources but is no iTunes and what it absolutely excels in, is tagging. When you get music that either isn't tagged at all or music that doesn't exactly have the most reliable tagging in the world (I get a LOT of those), Media Monkey will be your most trusted companion it has this sweet tag from the web feature, that you have to kind of help along, but it makes finding the name of the actual artist or album names, album art, full titles, etc so much easier than just googling part of the lyrics. (you might still need to use google sometimes though). Also in the tools>scripts section you can auto increment track numbers, basically this mofo has a lot of stuff to make mass tagging less tedious. another thing I love about it is it'll give you stuff like play counts and skip counts and a bunch of really fascinating ways to sort your music.

Media monkey does automatically update your library with the folders you tell it to monitor and I just recently learned is great at ripping cds as well. also it plays all the file types foobar does except some weird obscure type of wav or something I read about online makes it crash.

media monkey can also be used to sync your ipod, if you use one of those devil machines and you hate iTunes as much as I do. You at least won't have your crap erased if you use the pod with more than one computer.

I'm sure iTunes is great if you buy all your music from itunes and you only listen to mp3s and aacs, and you own a mac and are retarded, but on a pc iTunes acts like a foreign body and tries to destroy your computer and everything you hold dear from the inside and if I ever see iTunes on the street it won't walk away without at least a black eye to match that stupid freakin mock-turtleneck. Eff that program. Stay away from it unless your last name is Stanley or Jobs. It really doesn't help that everything Apple makes seems specifically geared to destroy me.

As far as downloading music goes, a thousand or two of my 7000 song library comes directly from the free safe and legal archive.org they have this live music archive where thousands of artists/bands approve their shows to be recorded and uploaded. This includes ones I listen to semi-religiously Jason Mraz, Bushwalla, and Bob Schneider and ones you might know, Maroon 5, the Grateful Dead, and John Mayer.

You can see the full list and number of shows each artist has in the archive here:
http://www.archive.org/browse.php?collection=etree&field=%2Fmetadata%2Fcreator

most of them will be encoded loslessly in wav, flac, or shorten files, but you can find a good amount of mp3s or convert them with flac frontend or Mkw audio tool.

Another thing I do is make music. Since I broke my mp3 player, lost my camera, and bought a computer mic, I've been recording with audacity. but one online application I absolutely LOVE is called Noteflight



You can write sheet music on it and it's all stored online so your effed up computer can't ruin it all. It's not FULLY featured I guess unless you buy crescendo, but it's really great you can do so much with it. If you're into composing music with, like, actual notes I highly urge you to check it out. You can even compose with guitar tablature. I don't, cause eff tabs, but YOU can.

As far as listening to music online. I used to use imeem, until myspace ruined it. if anyone knows of a website that is what imeem used to be, let a brotha know. I miss that thing. I'm not too into last.fm or pandora. I guess, for those you have to be in the mood to listen to stuff similar to what you like but not exactly what you feel like listening to at that moment.

To be continued (hopefully)the sequel will be about writing.

-Marlon