A few days ago I acquired a lot of music, and I mean a lot of music off an old HDD. Sadly the music was horribly unorganized, so I have spent the better part of the last two days deleting duplicates and editing song info.
The first thing I would like to cover is the "Show Duplicates" option on iTunes. It's pretty much a worthless piece of crap. When I first clicked it after importing the music, it game me something around 10,000 registered duplicates. This overwhelming number was compounded by the fact that it gave me duplicates, the originals, as well as songs that had no duplicates! It also tagged as duplicates songs that were the same, bu from different albums. I was expecting the ability to do a Ctrl-A -> Delete -> Done! But I was shown a daunting mess of information. After initially reviewing the library and cleaning out a significant amount of duplicates, a faced another annoying challenge.
Around 7000 wma files had been queued for converting, 6000 were already in my library. I had to wait out a 2 day long conversion process only to go through through another manual duplicate hunt. My point is iTunes, please give people who don't exclusively but from your overpriced store some actual options to manage their libraries. Or free my iPod and let me convert the m4p protected music files to mp3's, your choice.
First impression of The Resistance: Not as good as Black Holes and Revelations, but it still has the Muse sound, although I feel as if the album has a more "flat" feeling to it. I feel that the ups and downs are not as sharp as the previous release, for example you could see the same thing in Beck's Guero and Modern Guilt. Both are good albums, you just have to listen into the background a lot more in Modern Guilt to find all the little things in the song. I do wish there was a song like Invincible from BHaR, maybe I'm missing it, it hasn't jumped out at me yet. In conclusion The Resistance is in essence more complex than BHaR, and only slightly less superior. I bought the album off of iTunes to check out their new "iTunes LP" feature, and my feelings are generally positive. I doesn't seem as if the price was higher than normal, with the damn $1.29 price point taken into consideration. The LP features lyrics, comments from the band, three videos, and ten photos. The video's were cool, a trippy live performance of Supermassive Black Hole, and the making of videos were fairly interesting. I would recommend the iTunes version if you can't get it from somewhere else for cheaper. I didn't check anywhere else, but a dollar less probably would have swerved me away. I guess if your Muse crazy you would enjoy it a lot more, I just find it to be an interesting piece of eye candy to look through. Judgment Zone! Rating: ★★★★☆ Good: Keeps old Muse feel, interesting undertones Bad: Not as epic as BHaR, less ups and downs |