headphono.us » Music

Fatboy Slim – Greatest Hits Remixed

Pras Sarkar — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:05:00 +0000

I ran into a single from this album over at a random music blog somewhere, and I’m really glad that I did. Simply put, it’s too good to miss. Most of Fatboy Slim’s memorable hits from the 90s through today are reworked, remashed and given a fresh unique twist to the old sounds.

Some of the must listens are Right Here, Right Now (Redanka Mix), Everybody needs a 303 (Plump Djs Mix), Weapon of Choice (Junkie XL Mix) and Kiddas Fatboy Bouillabaisse (Bonus Track). A few have been released as B sides and on other LP releases previously, so they might sound familiar.

Keeping iTunes organized with tags

Pras Sarkar — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:49:03 +0000

I go through a lot of music through the day – my ipod through commutes, workstations at work and home, etc. Keeping my music organized is not only necessarily but also lets me look up the right song for the right moment. So I got to thinking, why not use the social tagging concept for my mp3’s. Luckily, iTunes already has support for a mp3 tag called “Grouping”.

Searching around a bit, I found that Chris Brown had already thought of this way back in May 06. He created an applescript called TuneTag which was exactly what I was looking for. Except that I wanted to use the Grouping field instead of the more general Comments field (which I use for other purposes).

After a little bit of tweaking (actually just a search and replace), I integrated the script with Quicksilver (copy the .scpt files to ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions). Once you’ve gotten that done, pull up the Quicksilver menu, hit the “.” and type your (space-separated) tags, tab over and type in “tag” to pull up the script and hit Enter.

That should start you off adding tags to your current playing song. But proper organization goes a little further. I listen (read screen) a lot of songs to see if they’re up to my *ahem* world-class quality. I usually have a smart playlist set up to only include the songs added to the collection in the last day. I go through this list, and if I like any of the songs, I add a tag (using all the stuff above) called “atc” (add to collection). The final step is to add a new smart playlist to only keep off of the “atc” tag so that you can copy these songs over to your permanent collection while getting rid of the rest easily.

Here’s the modified script released under a Creative Commons license.

Karri O and Flight404

Pras Sarkar — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 00:25:46 +0000

Processing is something I wish I could spend more time coding in. It’s grown up to be a de facto of the computer graphics world, now being taught in almost all computational art courses. Robert from Flight404 is an artist with mad Processing skills. Check out the visualization video below to get an idea of the tremendous talent.

Magnetic Sphere (audio by Karri O.) from flight404 and Vimeo.

Not only is the video spectacular, but I rediscovered a great DJ – Karri O. (from Finland) – featured in the video. He deals mainly in Minimal Techno and has some great sets on his website – monorecords.com. I highly suggest the Elektrokueche mix.