iTunes Library Management Tool

As some of you know I made it through iTunes detox and am happily free from its evil grasp. However I know some of you aren't, so I thought I would pass along a heads-up to this tool recommended by a mac-head friend. Some of the features read like solutions in search of problems to me but the metadata clean-up sounds nice.

Enjoy!

Let's see if we can help newbees -Recommended system <$5000

I thought that maybe we could help newbees who come here and want advice on building their first audiophile system. Here are the parameters: try and keep the whole system under $5K and it should consist of CD player/amp-preamp and speakers.

Here is my recommendation:

Amp-Rotel 1062 SLP ($699)

Speakers-Excite X16 ($1800)

Marantz 8003 SACD CD Player ($999)

Warped Vinyl

I'm a newbie here and have been purchasing most of my vinyl new online. I've run into the problem of a couple of lps being slightly warped. Not horribly warped, just along the perimeter that it is occasionally audible. Is this to be expected of vinyl in general? or is it grounds to send it back to the retailer and request a replacement? Is there any easy way to flatten vinyl?

Ran Blake's Driftwoods

Ran Blake's Driftwoods

Among the many compelling jazz pianists still around, Ran Blake may be the oddest (and the most unjustly, though understandably, obscure). He can’t swing for more than a few bars; he tends to change keys at random intervals; for this reason, he usually plays solo, figuring that few musicians have the patience for his quirks (though some of his best albums—<I>The Short Life of Barbara Monk</I>, <I>Suffield Gothic</I>, <I>That Certain Feeling</I>, and <I>Masters from Different Worlds</I>—were collaborative efforts, involving such established artists as Steve Lacy, Clifford Jordan, and Houston Person). Yet there’s magic in Blake’s music; his chords, dissonant but heartfelt, seem to waft out of a dream. Now in his 70s, a longtime teacher at the New England Conservatory, Blake has called himself a filmmaker who doesn’t know how to hold a camera, and his albums all have a cinematic flavor. (Many years ago, he recorded the soundtrack of Hitchcock’s <I>Vertigo</I> and told me afterward that he could see scenes of the film in his head while he was playing.) Even when not playing movie themes, his songs possess a narrative impulse; he’s a very instinctive pianist (by his own admission, he’s not a strong sight-reader), and he seems to have some weird synaptic nerve that translates images in his brain to chords and intervals in his fingers.

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