August 24, 2005
My Cup Runneth Overentry, August 24th, 2005
Discovering the Overclocked Remix site was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I have plenty of lyric-less, infectious music goodness to which I can make like a worker bee and get busy. On the other hand, my poor little 15gb iPod will no longer hold everything I've got in my iTunes library.
Sandra informed me that I'll "just have to deal with it." Apparently cartoonists whose children qualify for discounted school lunches don't get to go shopping for new toys.
(Note: This is not a plea for money, nor is it a plea for someone to send me a new iPod. It's simply a statement of economic fact and my concomitant responsibility that some of you kids today might just be able to learn from.)
It took a little doing, but I finally figured out how to teach my iPod not to automatically download everything in the library. It was either that or start, you know, throwing music away, and there's simply no way I'm going to do that. Yeah, there have been a few really lame video game remixes in these torrents I downloaded, but only a few have been lame enough that I deleted them from my personal lie-berry.
(Note: I'm a good torrenter -- I deleted a few entries from my iTunes library, but kept the original torrent files and directories intact until I'd uploaded four or five times what I downloaded. Note also that all these OC Remix tunes are 100% legal for file-sharing. Not only am I a good torrenter, I'm a law-abiding former record producer who recognizes the inherent value of intellectual property.)
In a related matter, I discovered something about my Griffin iTrip radio add-on: if I pre-boost the volume of a song in the iTunes (select song, File -> Get Info -> Options -> Volume Adjustment) I can totally ruin that song's playback when I'm in my car. The Griffin iTrip is very sensitive about this whole "gain" thing: too little volume, and the broadcast won't get picked up by the car stereo; too much volume and the music plays back all distorted. Whatever pre-amping is invoked by that song-specific "volume adjustment" can't be de-amped with the master volume control.
It's a good thing I used to be an audio guy. I very quickly figured out that "excessive gain" was why "Girls With Guns" started to sound like crap in my car. The bad thing is that in order to solve the problem I had to reset the volume in iTunes, and then sync my iPod, and I'd just exceeded it's poor little 15gb memory limit, which meant that before "Girls With Guns" would sound right, I had go through that whole manual sync process.
Everything works like a charm now. I'm listening to "Castlevania" remixes right now, alphabetically 66 songs into a 1136 song playlist. This one's a speed-metal variation on the Stained Glass theme from Castlevania 3 by someone who calls himself/herself "goat." Not bad, goat. I'll be keeping this one.