The Children's Hour
Spurred by a post over at Said the gramophone on Josephine Foster and The Supposed, I thought I'd follow up with one her earlier projects that I rarelty see mention of The Children's hour. This was my introducti0n to Josephine Foster the opera school dropout. While the Album SOS JFK really does begin to wane in interest near the end, the first half is worth the cost of entry. It is a simple album, with a simple idea, beauty. I tend to choose what albums I listen to based on the feeling that they can conjure within me. This is clearly filled under sunday afternoon feeling groovy( yes Paul I know how much you hate the word groovy, and regret putting in one of your songs but I love it anyway).
The Lumberjack song
The Lumberjack song
posted by Jay at 6:59 PM
11 Comments:
That's a great song; thank-you!
(I gotta say, though, that I find the 'artist=popsheep' tagging slightly annoying... Have you considered putting yr blog flag in the Comments field? More difficult to sort by, but also less likely to be deleted by irritated users.)
Extremely pretty. I hadn't heard The Children's Hour yet. It's a lot sweeter than Born Heller or Hazel Eyes. I like Josephine Foster more every day.
I'm glad to get some feedback regarding our tagging scheme, which I'll add Ian does not fully agree with either. I not quite sure what part you find annoying about the tagging scheme, but I would appreciate your
clarification.
I'd like to outline my reasons for changing the tags. I like to think of mp3 weblogs as an ongoing mix that is open for anyone who may be interested to listen to as such it makes sense that it would be easy for them to listen to our posts in a logical fashion.
This is where my Mac bias burns strong. I have an Ipod and I use
itunes. Most of the songs on my iPod are full album rips of cds from
my collection. I usually browse the somewhat overwhelming amount of
music by artist->album. Adding tracks by an artist that only has one
song adds so much clutter to my Library that I don't do it, or when I do I rename the artist blog so I know where the song came from. This
form of categorization I understand may not be for everyone, and I am
not really a fan of conventional archiving(my Records and CDs are not
alphabetical, yet they are carefully organized so that I can find all of my
albums).
To aid someone who dislikes the scheme I have added the artist name to the composer field. So you could take all the popsheep mp3's run a script that swaps those two fields and removes the artist name prefix from the song title...
I have to second Sean's opinion on this one, the artist tag is there for a reason, and by misusing it you're only complicating things for your users. The artist tag should have the artist in it, I think that should be straightforward. You're forcing your preference on people, rather than giving them the standard scheme and letting them organize how they wish.
Why don't you make the album tag "popsheep.com", and then make a smart playlists to organize them how you want. This makes sense to me since they're effectively no longer part of their original albums, and it goes with your whole "mix tape" idea.
I also want to say that the music has been excellent, and I'll definitely keep reading regardless of the tagging scheme. it is an annoyance though.
I'd like to hear more comments regarding this issue. I'm leaning in the direction of not modifying the tags whatsoever. The Main reason for changing them was to prevent the 1000 different artist problem while searching the library by artist. I had no idea people found it anonying, as I find the opposite anonying(as I mentioned earlier I don't add music from blogs into my library, they currently sit in a directory that I sometime listen to via the quicktime preview from finder). I don't really need the files here to be organized in that way for my personal collection as I always have the full album! So the demands of the readers will be listened to.
I guess really the real problem is itunes, which in my mind is the worst part about using osx. I have no idea why people like it.
My position is basically identical to Neale's. I don't see a use in listening to a popsheep-exclusive playlist (or a Said the Gramophone-exclusive playlist); I like to listen to either a) recent songs, b) things from a particular album/artist, c) [more rarely] a playlist I create. "Songs compiled by a particular group of people" is rarely very important to me when I'm out on the go.
I DO want mp3blog files to remain associated with the blog they came from, so that I can go back and reread/cite, as I wish. But that can be done through a second-tier tag like genre or comment, or maybe even album. Right now I either have to remember to strip the Popsheep artist tag as soon as I DL a popsheep song, or else get irritated when I'm listening on my iPod and can't figure out who the real artist is.
And as for mac stuff, etc., I know that Neale and I are both using macs + ipods.
As for the 1000 different artist thing, I don't see why this is a problem... I like to be able to choose tracks by the artist! :) (Of course, maybe this is because of the well-established ipod challenge of distinguishing between single tracks and entire albums, from the artist level, which i solve by genre-naming all my album tracks as "album" and all my single tracks as "single", and then drilling down by genre when I want to distinguish.)
ok, enough with my metatag rant!
The genre "single" and "album" is a really good idea. I think I may expand the idea for my collection to include "compilation" and "Said the gramophone". Playing with the genre tag basically circumvents one of my main itunes gripes, the one big library problem. Thank you for the suggestion.
You're welcome! I hope, too, that you understand my criticism as entirely procedural and rooted in the love I have for what you guys have been doing.
I personally like iTunes quite a lot, but then again I have a very modest music collection, a paltry 4 GB, which I assume is a mere fraction of what any of the other posters here have.
I listen to my music based on a number of smart playlists. My most listened to is one that simply amalgamates all the songs I've added in the last month. I just put it on shuffle and go.
you guys are dorks
dude, you don't know the half of it.
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