InfiniteTides

Last night at work was Nine Inch Nails night.  It’s like that when I have a certain back-up inspector in the front press room.  We both dig NIN a ton, and so it’s the natural choice of music.  No one else seems to mind, so I think it’s growing on them too.

But last night I was getting requests for songs that I didn’t have on my main player.  I had to swap it out for my walking player, the one currently  full of The Hobbit and well, Nine Inch Nails.  A couple of songs I knew I didn’t have on either player, but I refused to copy them over from someone else’s player.  Why not, you ask?  I’m really not sure.  Something to do with not wanting help from anyone, plus my normal insensitivity to someone trying to give me something, plus my attempt to be needless but in reality obtuse.

This morning I’m adding every Nine Inch Nails song I have to my primary work mp3 player.  No more unrequestable Nine Inch Nails songs, and no more reasons to deny help from friends offering to give me musics.

Every so often my tastes in music shifts from one genre to another.  Right now I’m back into alternative/modern rock, so I’m cleaning up my mp3 player to reflect this change.  I’m deleting all of the pop, country, jazz, and even classical that’s been residing there.

At this very moment, I’m backing up everything to my external hard drive.  When that’s done, I’ll reformat my mp3 player’s hard drive.  Then I’ll begin adding music to it again.  In the past I’ve complained about the Creative Nomad Zen’s automatic folder creation, but now that I’ve played around with having one folder containing all of my music, I’ve discovered that the Zen’s folders are probably for the best.  I just need to do better in managing them when adding music.  I’ll try to keep all of each artist’s music together by artist (not by album).  That will make it far easier to delete music added blindly (deafly?), only later to discover I don’t care for it.

I’ll begin by adding Nine Inch Nails since that’s what I’m in the mood for today.  I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I got around to downloading The Slip only a few days ago.  After NIN, I’ll throw on Tool and A Perfect Circle.  Beyond those bands, I’ll be dropping songs on individually, previewing each one so as to not clutter up my player all over again with stuff I don’t really like so much.

Some of my friends were at concerts last night, but I’m not jealous.  James, Erin, and Rachell were at the Nine Inch Nails concert in Cleveland last night.  I was invited to go along, but passed.  The memory of the Fort Wayne Tool concert is still too fresh in my mind.  Josh saw The Megas last night somewhere in New Hampshireland.

There’s another NIN concert in Toledo Monday night, and tickets are still available.  Should I go?  Probably.  Will I go?  Nope.  What’s my problem with concerts?  First of all, I can’t stand being surrounded by other people.  It’s not claustrophobia, xenophobia, or anything like that.  I just don’t feel comfortable in crowds.  I also don’t like the noise level at concerts.  The volume is always too high, and my hearing is quite sensitive.  I’d like to keep it that way.

The other issue I have with concerts is that to my ears, live music never sounds as good as something produced (and sometimes over-produced) in the studio.  I understand that live music provides an energy and a vibe that you just can’t get from studio music.  I do, and I love the few concert DVD’s that I own, but I just don’t enjoy being at a concert.

I haven’t yet heard how the concerts were, but I don’t think I missed much.

1080 FM The Planet is my new favorite best streaming audio station on the internet. It plays alternative rock (sorry, no Beyonce, Kanye, or Carrie Underwood on this bad boy) continuously without commercial (have I mentioned lately that I loathe commercials?) interruption or annoying DJ banter. Just music and the occasional reminder of the station you are listening to.

Probably the best thing about The Planet is that it’s already listed inside Amarok under Shoutcast Streams, under “Alternative.”