Playing Albums with Quicksilver, iTunes and Artist Search

This is just a short note for anyone else that has encountered this most annoying trait in Quicksilver.

I started using Quicksilver to select the songs I wanted to play recently instead of dropping into iTunes itself (I’ve been using it to play/pause and move to the next song for some time). The ability to browse you’re library via the iTunes icon is very cool (and even better is setting up a trigger for Search by Artist), but it had one annoying trait: when I wanted to play a whole album, it set up the playlist in a seemingly random order. I say random because I couldn’t figure out why it had chosen the order it had, but it used the same order every time. My best guess is that it is something to do with the order on the filesystem.

I tried fiddling with lots of different options, and saw a number of people in the forums complaining about similar but slightly different problems. It’s surprising to me that not a lot of people seem to play whole albums in track order any more 🙂

The option that ended up fixing it was the one I least suspected: under preferences, in the iTunes tab, make sure "Fast Browser Play (less accurate)" is checked. Albums will then play in the correct order.

Now the only thing left to figure out is how playing albums in correct track order might be considered "less accurate"…

Evanescence in Sydney

I had the opportunity to catch Evanescence at the Sydney Entertainment Centre on Saturday, and it was great to get out to a concert for a change. I haven’t seen a lot of live music in the recent past – apart from some live music on Australia day I can’t really remember the last gig I went to.

The band was great. One of the advantages of seeing someone that only has a couple of CDs out is that you’re almost guaranteed to hear your favourite songs (though I did miss out on one in particular). I was surprised to have a newfound appreciation for a couple of songs that had either become stale or never really appealed to me that much from Fallen. While in many ways the live music is very close to the CDs, some of them are definitely stronger live and vice-versa.

It’s pretty obvious the band is now centred around Amy Lee, if it wasn’t before. Of course, she has an amazing voice and really makes the show. My only complaint is that some of the older songs lack something without the male vocals. She does all of the audience interaction, though I wasn’t sure that was going to happen at one point – the practice of blacking out between every song and then immediately starting up the next one was a little weird at first.

I’ve noticed encores become more and more like a late intermission. It really seems to be either an opportunity to make noise for no reason in some cases, or a “I paid enough for this ticket, don’t you dare leave without playing My Immortal!” cry.

The Entertainment Centre is a funny venue. The seats we had were average, but still reasonable viewing. But it seems that the crowd is more audible than the band. Maybe I’m just getting old, but the crowd was loud. Thankfully they didn’t try and sing every song 🙂

One of the funnier things was between bands – seeing the Mexican Wave. I’ve seen it indoors before, but not go around, go up across the crushed crowd in general admission, and then around again. Was neat.

Was definitely worth getting out to. Hopefully that’ll remind me to get out and see some bands more regularly.

I Wish More Bands Did This!

Having received an iTunes Music voucher for my birthday, I thought I’d pick up a copy of the new Barenaked Ladies album that I’d seen on the Apple home page, in the US store. However, it wasn’t in the Australian store. No worries – it’s a pre-order and we don’t tend to have them in the iTunes store here (though, I have since discovered that they have started to appear) – so I was just going to wait until it was released to grab it here.

With the international and US release dates passed and nothing appearing, I went to check out when it might be out in Australia. While I didn’t have much luck on that front, I discovered that the official BNL web site offered both the standard and 2-disc edition albums – DRM-free – at the US prices that are much cheaper than in Australia.

So I’ve bought it online – received it already despite not being released here, it’s DRM free and at a cost I presume is about 30% less than iTunes will sell it for (an even greater discount than if I were to buy it in stores which could be anywhere from $40 – $60 instead of $24.45 when it comes out).

I expect they can only do this because they now have their own record label, which is a shame as it should happen more. I buy all my music, and would really like to be able to play it everywhere without having to go through a burn/re-rip cycle. I certainly hope it turns out as a success for the band.

As for the album, I’m still listening (since there’s a huge 27 songs on the deluxe edition). I like what I hear, but nothing has grabbed me as particularly special yet. It doesn’t seem to be getting great reviews so far, but I’m also aware that I tend to like their songs more as I listen more, especially as I start to catch the lyrics.

The Official Fiction

I’ve been listening to “The Official Fiction” by Something for Kate for a couple of weeks, and I highly recommend it. A very consistent sounding album with some catchy songs. Deja Vu is definitely one of the best songs on the album, but I can’t fault any of them.
I was interested to see google searches in my referrers today. Checked them out for curiosity and it seems I now top the listings in a vanity search for “Brett Porter”… but now I’m wondering who was looking for me 🙂