Hi-fi Audio

So, after months and months of debating, googling, youtubing, and asking around I've finally picked up a pair of studio quality monitoring headsets and a portable DAC/AMP for my listening enjoyment. For the low low (for most people u_u) price of $300, you too can listen to FLAC and other lossless files with the same enjoyment I do. All you need is a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M50S headphones and the portable Fiio e7 DAC/AMP. I ensure you the sound quality will blow your socks off. I'm listening to songs that I've heard hundreds of times before and I'm hearing things in them I didn't know were there and the way the song builds up and is put together is a lot more apparent. All that complex stuff aside, it's easier to enjoy your music and lose yourself in it with top notch equipment. I'm currently in the process of getting lossless versions of all the great albums I've listened to over the years. Wish me luck! 

Five Stars

Finally!

After what seemed like an eternity, I have rated every single song on my computer. We're talking 2829 songs, running more than 175 hours. Now, I can finally start downloading new music. First two on the list - Garden State Soundtrack and B.o.B

iSteal

I've taken the bus the bus enough times to know that every fifth twelve to fourty year old that you run into will have some sort of music playing device on them that also has some way of taking notes or messages and that's when I came up with the iSteal. I'm pretty sure the concept is illegal but what it is is an mp3 player that has absolutely no music on it - what it does is lift music from people around you. The player will obviously have a size limit but it takes a few songs from each playlist you get into a certain distance from and removes the oldest songs on the list so you have fresh new music all the time! Yeah!

So, I just told my sister about this idea and she said it was invasive. I said shut up. Then thought it over again. Still doing it. But now I'm a badass pirate.

Five-Star Rating

So, recently I've been trying to rate every single song on my computer using Window Media Player. It's a back and forth battle because, sure I make good progress listening to albums I've ignored - this is a great way to find new gems hidden away on your own computer, by the way - but I find myself still downloading albums, probably even more often. For example, I saw heard Flight of the Conchords streaming from my sister's computer and thought to myself, why don't I have 'em?! So I just had to download their album then I realized they had another album that I hadn't heard of so I needed that one too. Bam! Two more albums to rate. Okay, time to get back to the grind; two more songs and I've listened to all of Veckatimest.

Thousand Song Cloud

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One of the advantages of having a Last.fm account is that you can make these sweet tag and album clouds. It quickly, in under a second, takes all the artists you've listened too and puts them down in this sort of collage. The cloud is formatted so that the text size reflects how much you listen to that specific artist. Anyways, this is what my artist cloud looks like after a thousand songs. Neat, eh?

Pirating Music

I remember being in highschool and going over to my friend's house who had high-speed internet - he bragged about being able to download songs in under a minute. We all went over to confirm his boast and we all tripped out when we saw the downloading speed.

Now when you here a song you like, you can stream it off the internet and have it in your own personal library with appropriate tagging and cover art before the stream ends. Oh, we've come a long way.

Handles & Monikers

For whatever reason, I think names are pretty important and I think there should always be at least a little story behind them. So, over the years I've had a ton that I thought were good at one point or another. Here's the list in no particular order.

  • zugzwang is a chess term meaning "compulsion to move" which describes a situation in which any legal move would result in an unfavourable position
  • haribon is the common name for the Philippines Eagle which comes from haring ibon meaning "King of Birds"
  • eurekaMachine stems a little bit from the Eureka7 series, machine was just for uniqueness
  • Hokuro Doukan is an unintentional typo on the Japanese words Dokuro and Houkan which mean skull and jester, respectively
  • fushigidane is the Japanese name for the very first pokemon, and my personal favourite, Bulbasaur
  • jester is the call sign of Casey Nolan - your wingman in MechWarrior 4 and your enemy in MechWarrior 4: Vengeance
  • ikigai is a Japanese term roughly translating to "the reason you get up in the morning" - no jokes
  • dumbLuck is a twist on my friends XBox live name dumbCrack
  • Fahrenheit this is in reference to the Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now" in which Freddie calls himself "Mister Fahrenheit"

My Life in 100 Songs

So, for a long time now I've been somewhat of an audiophile. I've found some amazing sites for discovering new music like last.fm and, more recently, hypemachine but I've always had a hole in my heart because of the loss of Pandora to Canadian denizens. That hole has been filled by an amazing site called Grooveshark. This site lets you look up songs, put them into playlists, and most importantly, it allows you to create a radio of streaming similar artists. It's also super easy to use. So easy infact that I managed to create this playlist of a hundred songs that would give you a good idea of the kind of music I have been and am into. If you knew the story behind everyone song I'd even go as far to say that you know me pretty damn well.