Review: Bang Gang's The Wolves Are Whispering (2015)

  • June 26, 2015
  • James Skemp
The following is a review of Bang Gang's 2015 album The Wolves Are Whispering. Another beautiful album Warning: I find music to be very subjective and find it hard to explain why it is that I might like a song in words and without being able to sit someone down and let them listen with me. So the number of music reviews I do is very low. However, this album has been out for three days and has no reviews on Amazon.

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Well done, Amazon (re: Amazon Cloud)

  • March 29, 2011
  • James Skemp
Well done, Amazon. They've been saying for quite a while that music was heading towards the 'cloud,' and while it seemed for a while that everyone was betting on Apple doing it first, you've trumped them, with what seems like a very consumer-friendly service. 5 GB for everyone? Check. Free upgrade to 20 GB if you buy an Amazon MP3 album? Check. Amazon MP3s purchased and stored to the cloud (seemingly at purchase) don't count against your limit?

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Favorite new (to me) music of 2010

  • January 1, 2011
  • James Skemp
Continuing with the tradition started last year, I present my favorite albums purchased in 2010. To be on this list I must have purchased the album in 2010. This also doesn't include all albums I purchased. Easy winners What Is Free To a Good Home? and Knives Don't Have Your Back - Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton : Emily Haines was on my 'too hard to tell' list last year, and this year I ended up picking up her four CD digital collection on iTunes.

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iTunes Playlists to Xml: Parsing categories with LINQ

  • October 20, 2010
  • James Skemp
I recently had the need to determine what types of music I had within my collection of music. Since I created iTunes Playlists to Xml so that I could export out my library on my iPod, it was easy enough to run that and then open LINQPad to run the following query. Obviously, you must export the Genre field in order for the following query to work. // Location to the XML from iTunes Playlists to XML String playlistXml = @"

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Review: Nady Audio Stereo Headphones (HP-03)

  • September 12, 2010
  • James Skemp
The following is a review of Nady Audio Stereo Headphones, model HP-03. I received a pair of these headphones in a bundle, and wasn't really expecting much. After sitting around for a couple of months (okay, more like a handful) I finally opened them up one day and plugged them in. Surprisingly, they work pretty dang good. I'm in no way a sound expert, but I dare say for the average (music) listener these will work perfectly fine.

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Review: La Ballade Of Lady & Bird : A Project By Keren Ann Zeidel & Bardi Johannsson

  • August 17, 2010
  • James Skemp
The following is a review of La Ballade Of Lady & Bird : A Project By Keren Ann Zeidel & Bardi Johannsson. I believe this is my first review of an album ... I have a difficult time seeing how one can review the actual music on an album, since tastes are so personal, so I'll focus on myself. I'm a pretty huge fan of Keren Ann's work. I started with the absolutely beautiful Nolita, then the okay La Biographie De Luka Philipse, La Disparition, and then a big shopping spree of Not Going Anywhere, Keren Ann, and Lady & Bird.

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Music Recommendations Please! version 0.5 beta

  • May 28, 2010
  • James Skemp
While not necessarily a step forward from version 0.4.5 of Music Recommendations Please!, version 0.5 is nonetheless a positive step. Consider this an idea-based release. As such, this application is in no way final (but might be more complete after this long weekend). Download Music Recommendations Please! version 0.5, beta. You can see a general idea of where I'd like to end up by reading my music application idea. .NET Framework 4 is required for this application.

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Music application idea

  • May 25, 2010
  • James Skemp
Surprisingly, it was way back in September of last year that I realized Music Recommendations Please!, which I hoped would help me discover new music (and perhaps help others as well). Since then I haven't used it as much as I would have hoped, but that's mostly because I'm not happy with how easy it is to get more than one artist in at a time, and generate helpful 'reports' from data returned for multiple artists.

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Dead? The digital download is barely out of its teens

  • May 22, 2010
  • James Skemp
Yesterday Slate posted an article by Farhad Manjoo titled The Digital Download Is Dead: How Google's music-streaming venture will change the gadget and entertainment worlds forever. After first, rightly, attacking Apple's iTunes and iPod (and related) platforms as being slow and unwieldy, especially on the predominate operating system Windows (not even mentioning Linux), and overall behind on the times, Farhad moves us from syncing our music collections out to the cloud.

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iTunes Playlists to Xml - version 1.6 released

  • May 8, 2010
  • James Skemp
Version 1.6 of iTunes Playlists to Xml is now available for download. Download iTunes Playlists to Xml 1.6. Installing and more information If you're new to iTunes Playlists to Xml, I've created a 'product page' for iTunes Playlists to Xml with all the information needed to get started. Upgrading To upgrade from any version of 1.4 or 1.5 you need to replace the following files with those in the above archive:

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