#they would have definitely been on rotation on my ipod shuffle for sure

[half-doomed]

I wonder what the universe where the hoodies got signed to like fbr or something is like

[5-star-songs]

Weekend Rant: My FIOO X5II

I post a blurb a day here, Monday through Friday, but from time to time I might post something music-related but not song-specific on a Saturday or Sunday. The occasion for this one: my love for my new mp3 player.

Maybe it’s odd that a guy who spent ten years helping build and evolve Rhapsody, and then the next four doing the same for Google Play, even has an mp3 player. My Android + the music streaming subscription service of my choice should serve all my needs, especially since Google Play lets me store 50,000 of my own songs on their servers, and mix and match them with everything else in their catalog.

But my phone’s battery is a precious resource I must conserve, and I spend too much time flying or driving long distances with no internet connection. And I prefer having access to my entire music collection at those times, rather than whatever subset of it I remembered to save for offline listening before the trip began.

For years, that meant carrying a 160GB iPod classic with me wherever I went. But Apple discontinued that a while back, and even before they did my collection had exceeded its capacity (roughly 31,000 songs), which meant that every new record I added to it required deleting an old one. And that caused me physical and emotional distress, every time.

So when my iPod started showing signs it was on the verge of failing for good, I began hunting around for a replacement. Which led me to my new favorite possession, the Fiio X5 2nd gen pictured above.

Fiio’s a Chinese company that makes, among other things, surprisingly affordable, audiophile-quality digital audio players. That means all the elements inside the player have been selected and engineered to appeal to people with picky tastes and expensive headphones and lossless audio files who like to fiddle endlessly with EQ settings.

While I own and appreciate well-designed amplifiers and speakers, I’m not really an audiophile. I can reliably tell the difference between a WAV file and a 192kbps mp3 of the same song, but bump that mp3 up to 320kbps and I can’t tell you which one’s which anymore. I believe there are people who can notice the difference (Neil Young is most definitely one of them), but I’m also pretty sure they’re less than 5% of the population, and I am not among them.

So the X5ii’s real appeal to me is its storage capacity: rather than the outdated hard drive of my old iPod, this Fiio holds two micro sd cards of whatever capacity you choose -- both of mine are 200GB at the moment, meaning this thing already holds more than twice what that iPod did, but as technology advances and 512GB cards become more affordable, I can expand it further, if and when I need to. So, while I don’t personally need my entire collection in any of the lossless formats Fiio supports, I do plan on upgrading all of those 120 and 192kbps mp3s I ripped or acquired in the aughts.

The X5ii has a similar form factor to an iPod, including a scroll wheel, but because Fiio is a small company the bulk of their resources are apparently focused on the hardware, not the software, leaving a few trade-offs for iPod users to get accustomed to. Most significantly, since the X5ii doesn’t come with any media management software, you have to update the device manually -- that means dragging and dropping any new songs directly onto the device via your computer, and that means taking some time, if you haven’t already, to organize your collection in a logical folder structure so what’s on your device can be compared at a glance to what’s on your computer, and swapped back and forth most easily.

Once you’ve got the music you want on the device, you’ll find that navigating within your collection takes longer compared to an iPod, and the UI feels like it was designed by nerds for other nerds, rather than by nerds for their parents. If, like me, you have thousands of artists in your collection, and feel like playing a specific album by someone in the middle of the alphabet (as pictured above), it’s going to take you a minute or more of spinning that wheel before the music’s playing. I do the bulk of my listening by putting my entire collection, or some large subset of it, on shuffle play, so I don’t really mind the lag.

(Addendum, 3/12/17: I started minding the lag, a lot. My breaking point came last month, on a flight, while trying to write up “Waterloo Sunset.” It took me so goddamn long to navigate to the track I wound up timing it: one minute and thirty-four seconds. That felt unacceptable, so I came up with a better solution: I re-arranged my filing system so that there’s a separate folder for each letter of the alphabet on simcard #1, and artists are filed in the appropriate folder like they might be in a record store (except, since it’s a digital age, Bruce Springsteen goes in B, not S, etc.). This change improved the navigation experience dramatically: I can now have “Waterloo Sunset” playing twenty-three seconds after wishing it, or more than four times faster than before.)

There’s only one thing I consider a serious degradation of my old iPod experience: my X5ii hates external playlists. Just getting one onto the device is probably too daunting for the average consumer: you have to export the playlist from your media manager, open it in Notepad, and do a universal find-and-replace operation so that all the paths to your tracks on your computer (ie: C:/Users/Tim/Music/Magnetic Fields/Love at the Bottom of the Sea) get switched over to the paths on your device (ie: TF1:/Magnetic Fields/Love at the Bottom of the Sea). (Or, as of 3/21: TF1:/M/Magnetic Fields/Love at the Bottom of the Sea.)

That I could handle easily enough. Unfortunately, it turns out that even though the X5ii can hold tens of thousands of songs, it can’t handle a playlist with more than ~3,000 tracks at a time. Attempting to play one uses up too much RAM, and the device freezes. That was a major bummer, since the playlists I rely on most are anywhere from ~5,000 songs (“4 and 5 Star Soul”) to ~24,000 songs (“4 and 5 Star Everything”).

I tried to deal with this by splitting up my massive playlists into smaller ones, and rotating through them. But that was unsatisfying, because it meant one of the eight “4 and 5 Star Everything” playlists was all songs that started with H, so I wound up hearing a bunch of songs about hearts in a row. Note to all musicians (including myself): you can stop writing songs about hearts, and how they break, and how to heal them. It’s been done.

There was one other solution, which I was hesitant to try, and even more hesitant to admit to actually going through with, because it’s kind of insane. But it’s also why I’m posting about this on 5 Star Songs, as will become clear in a moment.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, my X5ii can easily handle a playlist with tens of thousands of tracks if it’s made directly on the device. So, I could replicate my “4 and 5 Star Everything” playlist by clicking the device’s “favorite” icon 24,760 times (doing so actually required 74,280 clicks, because you have to click once to reveal the icon, click a second time to select it, and then click a third time to move on to the next song you want to flag).

This seemed nuts. But, if it’s not already obvious, I really like my music, and I’m really particular about how I listen to it. And I loved everything else about my X5ii. If I could just favorite those 24,760 songs I already knew I liked best, keeping that Favorites playlist updated as I added new music would be much simpler than constantly exporting, editing and saving Notepad files.

So, um, I did it. Took me a week -- turns out it’s something you can do each evening while binge watching Horace and Pete. And though I’m a little embarrassed about it (and my wife is completely bewildered by my compulsion), I’m quite glad I did. For one thing, I now have the perfect portable device, capable of powering the highest quality headphones while carrying the sum total of all music I’ve collected over the past forty-odd years.

For another, it made me commune with that collection in a manner that turns out to be much more immersive and satisfying than scanning the spines of LPs or CDs stored on shelves. Over the course of a week, I stared at every album cover briefly, and made note of each song title, learning things I’d never realized along the way (for instance: Mavis Staples covered one of my favorite George Soule songs; also: the list of things bands have written odes to waiting for or on (A Friend, The Guns, Superman) is pretty funny when considered in a row).

So, that’s why the header at the top of this Tumblr recently switched from saying, “My iPod has 31,302 songs…” to “My mp3 player has 36,374 songs...” The number, which had stalled for years as I had to banish songs that had commited no crime beyond earning a mere 3 stars, can now start growing again. And that makes me so happy, I don’t mind it took me clicking buttons almost 75,000 times. I will always be an obsessive idiot when it comes to music.

There are far worse ways to muddle through life.

[weekendwarriorblog]

ED’s Very Important Thoughts About Baby Driver

Before I get to my review, I have to say that I have a soft spot in my heart for Edgar Wright that sometimes makes it hard to be truly critical when sitting down to watch one of his movies. Sure, a lot of that has to do with my love of his previous films, but he’s also what we of the Chosen people would call a “mensch,” a guy who has such a steadfast moral compass about right and wrong and being kind to others that you wish there were more like him in Hollywood.  It’s something you can tell from following him on social media but also from spending any amount of time talking to him. He’s also one of those rare directors who seems as at ease interacting with press as he is with his fans, which is probably one of the reasons he has such a devout fanbase.

But I’m not here to judge or review Edgar Wright, as much as I am to talk about his new movie, Baby Driver. 

Mind you, I’ve already reviewed this for the NY Daily News, but part of reviewing for the blog is being able to write longer form (still spoiler-free!) reviews that I can get a bit more personal with than my paid assignments... which are few and far between right now.

I think I was as excited or maybe even more so to see Baby Drier than for some of Wright’s other movies, mainly because it’s another movie that comes straight from his innovative brain. This is something he wrote himself, without co-writers, and is probably by and far the closest a movie has come to the original vision.  Not to take anything away from his previous movies, which were probably just as much his vision, but even Scott Pilgrim was adapted from an existing graphic novel and had to somewhat adhere to what was so great about it (and it did!)

If you don’t already know from the trailers you’ve watched a dozen times, Baby Driver is about a getaway driver named Baby, played by Ansel Elgort, who falls in love with a waitress named Debora (Lilly James), and who tries to get out after “one last job.” Baby has a bout of tinnitus (hearing loss) from a childhood accident that killed both his parents, including his waitress/singer mother, and he constantly is listening to music on his rotating iPods to drown out the resulting ring.

That’s probably all I’m going to say about the plot, because Baby Driver is one of those movies that’s more fun to enjoy if you watch the story unfold for yourself. I will say that Kevin Spacey plays “Doc,” the mastermind of the bank heists for which Baby drives and whom Baby is driving to pay off a debt.   There’s also a group of unsavory individuals—bank robbers and blood-thirsty killer, mostly—who are in Baby and Doc’s circles as they plan and commit elaborate heists with Baby’s driving skills used to escape 

There are some fun characters actors including Jon Bernthal basically in the opening scene heist and then gone, and then Jon Hamm plays another one of the robbers in that scene who returns later. Jamie Foxx plays “Bats,” a ruthless criminal who doesn’t take a liking to Baby (similar to Bernthal’s character) and whose unpredictable behavior is what leads to that “one last job” going so wrong.

So there’s this cool American crime film vibe going into the movie throughout, and Wright’s dialogue is as sharp and clever as anything Tarantino does in that respect. It’s impressive, since he’s clearly adapted himself to the way Americans speak through osmosis from spending so much time here. (Incidentally, the film takes place entirely in Atlanta, GA without a single British character in the cast.) 

Ansel Elgort does a fine job playing more of a leading role—fresh-faced and innocent as Baby needs to be--and Lily James continues to impress with her ability to transform herself. Debora is such a different character from the ones she’s played in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (a seriously underrated genre mixer) and The Exception. (I’m sorry that I still haven’t gotten around to watching Downton Abbey yet!)

They make such an adorable couple, which makes their sweet romance in the movie such a large part why I enjoyed the movie, similar to Scott Pilgrim and Ramona in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Once again, it’s a relationship that provides a much-needed emotional core within all the action and killing, and I think it’s what will really make people love the movie so much, since it’ll be far easier for them to relate to young, first love then the bank robberies. Don’t get me wrong... those are great, too!

The rest of the cast is equally fantastic, from Kevin Spacey, who is given so many great monologues that only Spacey could deliver, but also Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm, great roles by having them playing very different criminals. Foxx is “Bats” who like Jon Bernthal’s character in the opening sequence, doesn’t understand or get along with Baby, both of them picking on him mercilessly, which he shrugs off as he continues to listen to his tunes. Hamm’s “Buddy” plays a more significant role in the back half of the film as the group is instructed to rob a post office. I also loved Eiza Gonzalez as Buddy’s sassier better-half “Darling,” and the only other significant female role in the film.

Most of their heists happen fairly quickly (and inside buildings seen from Baby’s point-of-view at the driver’s wheel, listening to his iPod). It’s the getaway chases and the amazing car stuntwork involved--cut to the sounds of tunes by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (“Bellbottoms”*!), The Damned and even prog rock group Focus--that make them some of the best action scenes of the summer.

It’s impossible to talk about any of Wright’s movies without diving deeper into the music. That’s especially true with Baby Driver, because so much of it working so well is based on the songs in the soundtrack to the point where the title sequence is cut to Bob and Earl’s “Harlem Shuffle” with Elgort walking through downtown Atlanta miming to the song, as you “follow the bouncing ball” in the city’s graffiti. The soundtrack isn’t made up of the hip and cool newer acts that have been featured in Wright’s earlier movies, but a mix of classic rock (live “Radar Love”) and soul tunes, the latter being used quite brilliantly as part of the narrative, especially later in the movie. 

This can be everything from a conversation between Baby and Debora about songs using their respective names in the title. Even with my vast musical knowledge and iTunes library, there’s still a lot of fun new discoveries in there that would make the soundtrack album (out today!) worth investigating further, but most of the songs make more sense when seen within the context of the movie. I had a lot of personal connections to some of those musical choices, but I’m going to talk more with Wright about those for Den of Geek next week.

There also seems to be a few deliberate nods to many of Wright’s earlier films, whether it’s the trademark close-ups whenever Baby revs up his car, the use of Queen’s “Brighton Rock”—Queen was used in Shaun of the Dead, Too—not to mention the use of Beck’s “Debra” being that Beck wrote the song “Ramona” for Scott Pilgrim. It’s fun stuff like that, which makes Baby Driver the kind of movie that can be watched over and over, just like most of Wright’s previous films.

I’ve seen it twice myself, and sure, I have a few issues with some of the tunes used that I’m not sure I believe (like Baby listening to a rather esoteric Queen song by U.S. standards) but it’s hard not to just love the amazing ride you go on over the course of the film. 

This is just a grand entry into more straightforward American** genre film-mixing by Wright, while still maintaining all the things we’ve loved about his previous movies. I’ll definitely be interested to see how well this does, since the diverse audience I saw it with last night absolutely loved it! This is a seriously fun movie experience, unlike anything else out there.

Rating: 9 out of 10

* I was kinda tickled by the movie starting with “Bellbottoms” because I remember seeing the Blues Explosion in the early ‘90s, probably opening for another band and when Spencer announced that the next song would be called “Bellbottoms,” everyone looked at each other quizzicably, but by the end, everyone in the audience was changing “Bellbottoms! Bellbottoms!” along with Spencer. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen them live but I imagine they’d have to play much larger venues now. 

** This is assuming you don’t consider Canada where Scott Pilgrim was based “America,” which I do... but that’s just a different tone being based on Canadian Millennials and Bryan O’Malley’s work, rather than gritty, hardened criminals based in the South. Heck, like in Hell or High Water, one of their getaways is disrupted by a bystander carrying a gun... only in (the real) America.