iTunes 8.0

Wednesday, 10th September, 2008

So, new iPods were announced by Apple yesterday, which is all very nice. However, I bought an iPhone in November last year (when they were released in the UK) and part of my justification for spending the £269 on that phone was that I also needed a new iPod, and the iPhone provided me with that too.

As well as the new iPods, Apple also released iTunes 8 yesterday. I’ve been using it since yesterday evening, and it’s pretty good. I’ve not yet tried out the new ‘Genius’ feature, but I’ve read some good stuff about it already, and as the data available to help generate these Genius playlists grows, this feature can really only get better and better.

My favourite feature of iTunes 8 has to be the new Visualiser though (they call it Visualizer, but I can’t bring myself to use a ‘z’ when an ’s’ is the correct choice). I’ve just ‘watched’ about half a dozen songs on my MacBook Pro, and the effects are quite simply stunning.

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27

Mar

Sore fingers

Thursday, 27th March, 2008

Recently talking of things being “like riding a bike”, I also recently started playing my guitar again, as frequently as I did when I started to learn it years ago. I used to play every single day, for at least an hour, and quite often for longer. I built up a decent repertoire of songs that I played, and learned most of them off by heart (didn’t need the tabs).

I’ve never actually stopped playing, just that it had become a very infrequent activity, even though one of my guitars is constantly accessible as it sits on a stand in the corner of my living room. On the rare occasion when I did pick it up and play, it was a very small subset of the songs that I knew that I played on it.

Playing it much more frequently now means I need more things to play, as it gets very boring playing the same songs over and over again. So, I dug out the big box I have with all of the various tabs that I had collected years ago, and started to flick through them: cue lots of “oh aye, remember that one!”

What I find remarkable here though, is that just getting a reminder of a song that I used to play on the guitar (eg. Strong Enough by Sheryl Crow) and a quick look at the tab to see where it starts is enough. It just sort of comes back to me - my hand just moves from shape to shape without me even thinking about it. Songs that I haven’t played in six or seven years, played from start to finish without any bother.

Maybe my memory isn’t as bad as I thought it had become!