I am thrilled to be presenting at TMEA again this year. Both of my sessions, “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and “Working with Digital Scores” will be taking place on February 17th, at 8 am and 11 am, respectively.
Here are the session notes:
Holiday traditions I love:
Grandma’s Christmas Day lunch party
Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve
Drinking black and white peppermint mochas from Starbucks
Compiling and sharing a steaming playlist based on the NPR’s Best Albums of 20—insert year here !!!
The time is here. Below you will find a link to the playlist. Its Apple Music again this year. Sorry Spotify folks. This takes way too long to do twice and all of my “convert Apple Music to Spotify” workflows are broken.
Consensus wasn't easy in 2017. Maybe that's because the news this year kept us on edge, our eyes and ears pointed in many directions. Maybe it's due to the growth of streaming as the dominant listening platform, one whose rules have not yet fully been written. Whatever the cause, with the exception of our No. 1 album, it felt like there were few pieces of music this year that captured our attention instantly and simultaneously. Instead, we spent our year tracking down new sounds that gave voice to our struggles and breakthroughs, our search for joy and our need for release. When it was time for our staff and member station partners to come together at the year's end, we found there was plenty to celebrate. Here is NPR Music's list of the best albums of 2017.
There are a few albums on this list that are some of my favorites of the year. Thundercats’s Drunk and Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. made up a sizable portion of my listening while on runs and in the kitchen at evening.
Many others on the list excite me. I am always down for an escapist pop album to carry me into the new year (Paramore). Vijay Iyer continues to be one of a few spiritual successors to Esbjörn Svensson Trio but I missed listening to the latest record this year. Same for Sylvan Esso. Everything they do is gold but I am just behind on listening.
A few reflections on the process from this year…
Only one album was not on Apple Music. And it was Marc-André Hamelin’s For Bunita Marcus (Feldman) . Which bums me out because I was really looking forward to it.
Apple Music has become considerably better at search, speed, and user interface. This was the easiest NPR best-of playlist I have built.
Anyway, here is the playlist: NPR’s The 50 Best Albums of 2017
And here are links to all of my other playlists… (2013 and 2015 are personal favorites)
NPR Best 50 Albums of 2016 (Apple Music)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2015 (Spotify)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2014 (Spotify)
NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2013 (Spotify)
When Apple Music was released just over a year ago, Apple also debuted iCloud Music Library, a way of storing your iTunes library in the cloud. There were two ways to seed the cloud, either with iTunes Match or Apple Music. If you were an iTunes Match subscriber, matching your songs in your local library to your cloud library was done one way, and if you were just an Apple Music subscriber, matching was done differently.
This created some confusion about the way tracks were matched and stored in iCloud Music Library. Now, Apple is changing this, and will use the same matching method for both services. The company said in a briefing that Apple Music now uses acoustic fingerprinting and provides matched files without digital rights management (DRM), or copy protection, just like iTunes Match.
It seriously blows my mind that this isn't the way it worked from the start. Even after reading this article, I am still unsure if it is safe to cancel my iTunes Match subscription or not.
Subscribing to Apple Music is a huge risk on my part. For the record, I keep two local back ups and one cloud back up of music files in addition to my iTunes Match/Apple Music subscriptions. I of all people want Apple Music to succeed but things like this make me wonder why Apple isn't doing more to secure their footing as a musically relevant tech company.
For the times that Apple Music works as I want it to, it is still worth the experiment. More often than not, it syncs my iTunes Library across all of my Macs and iOS devices. But there are still frequent syncing bugs, in particular, the accuracy of metadata like album art and song titles. And don't get me started on how my MacBook frequently logs me out of my account. At the end of the day though, Apple Music shows potential to be much more than other streaming services..
If you are looking for a music subscription service like Spotify or Google Music, I think Apple Music is getting close enough to complete. But if you are more like me, and you keep a vast library of rare and live albums, personally created and uploaded mp3s, and rely on iTunes to get your job done, it might not be worth the headache.
Robinson Meyer's The Tragedy of iTunes and Classical Music is the best thing I have read all week. It is a perfect overview of the problems haunting serious music geeks when it comes to archiving large and complex music collections in iTunes.
When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.
Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough, and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.
And they really, really fall apart when they need to classify classical music.
Read the whole thing, it's great! File this under "things I wish I had written myself."
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