Gawker "actually likes" year-old song that everyone else in the world already knows, likes

Gawker Editor-in-Chief Gabriel Snyder has discovered the Pheonix song "1901"! And he has graciously shared this gem with us, for our benefit! Too bad that Phoenix is already so well known that they appeared on SNL like 8 months ago, and "1901" is currently running about 1,000 times a day in a Cadillac commercial.

From Gawker yesterday:

"A few months ago this song started popping up in my iTunes on shuffle mode, but I kept forgetting to go back to my computer and learn the name."

Yeah, all that crap that keeps popping up in shuffle, but you can't be bothered to actually find out the name of the song or artist, and of course you never knew it to begin with because you don't ever buy any music or seek any out anymore. It's just sort of there. Playing on shuffle.

There's so much wrong with this post, I don't really know where to begin. First is the dated, tone-deaf headline "French Music We Actually Like." Yeah, because, like all French music sucks, dude. I challenge the author of this post to name 5 French artists he either likes or dislikes.

And the whole "actually like" conceit is annoying: apparently they are so discerning in their taste that only occasionally do they come across a song that meets their impeccably high standards. Maybe the trick to finding music you "actually like" is to pay a little bit of attention to music and to occasionally take your iPod off of shuffle mode.

I have to say, though, that the commenters didn't let me down. They quite fairly made a mockery of this post, prompting a bit of snarky defensiveness from Snyder. Examples:

"So tell us about the French music you actually hate, Mr. Snyder."

"I love this song! I do not like the whole "French music we actually like" attitude, though. Have you tried to listen to any French music? As if all French music sounded the same. Oof.

"

My fave:

"Wow, and only eight months after they appeared on SNL! When do you think Gabe's gonna find out Michael Jackson died?"

And Gabriel's weak response:

"I go out on Saturday nights, but apparently not to cool enough parties to know this band as soon as you."

But apparently you don't have to go to parties at all to know about this band:

"You do know this song is also blaring to Cadillac commercials every two or three minutes, too, right?"

and

"The producers of Cougartown, Entourage and every late night talk show ever are going to be so jazzed to find out they go to cooler parties than you too."

Anyway, this whole post is a train wreck and bothers me inordinately for some reason. Gawker, please stick to whining about media layoffs and the recession and New York and leave the music blogging to the pros.

(This, by the way, has nothing whatsoever to do with my commenter account being mysteriously suspended when the refresh happened, and not restored, despite my requests.)

MGMT's Children's Show Appearance

The weird thing is that they look about the same age as the average viewer of Nickelodeon's Yo Gabba Gabba! program.

iDJ2 - What I know

Hey, now that this election is over and the barracudas are safely back up north, we can get back to debating frivolous bullshit!

Actually, I want to lay out what I know about my new Numark iDJ2 digital DJ station in the event that others are searching the internet for knowledge of this device and coming up with nothing, the way I did. Since Numark is being very secretive about coming features and they have apparently *shut down* their discussion boards, it's time to take matters into our own hands.

Facts:

1. Supported File Formats
   The iDJ2 only fully supports MP3, non-DRM AAC, and WAV files. That's it. You can play copy-protected AAC files (but not Apple Lossless) in iPod direct mode, but switching back and forth to this is not recommended in mid-party. Don't believe the (mostly British) websites that say it supports FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. It does not. I believe it will in a future firmware release, though, which would be awesome.
2. Unstable Numark Keyboard
   My cool little Numark keyboard which comes with the excellent flight case is working sporadically. I have to repeatedly unplug it and plug it back in to make it work. Numark told me to try another USB keyboard, so we'll see. I may have to exchange mine.
3. Drive Disconnections
   I've had some weird disconnections from the USB thumb drives I am using. Numark didn't have an answer for this. By connecting a 4 port USB hub (which you will eventually need anyway) and connecting my thumb drive to that, it seems that I have improved the fit between the connections. We will see if this completely solves the problem.
4. USB CD Drives
   Hidden in the 1.09 release notes, there's section about how USB CD/DVD drives are now supported. This is amazing, because you can take an old drive and basically turn it into a CDJ1000. You get complete pitch, scratch and search control, like you do any other drive. Just don't try to play two tracks off the same CD at once. It won't work.
5. File Quality/Provenance
   It is critical that you get the highest quality digital files that the device supports and know the provenance of the files. It may be a WAV file, but if it came from a compilation CD where the producers ripped from a record on their own semi-crappy turntable, it won't matter what format the file is in. It will suck either way. I have found from the live gig I did that the best sounding track of the night was JayDee's "Plastic Dreams" downloaded legitimately from beatport.com as a WAV file. It had a clarity in the mid-range and bass that other files lacked. That said, 320K MP3's really aren't bad. Hopefully, the next release will support FLAC and/or Apple Lossless, so we don't have to settle for lossy compression at all.
6. Prepare for the future
   In ripping digital files from my records, I am planning on using 88.2/24-bit wav files for archiving. This way I can render down to 44.1/16-bit with minimal digital artifacts and either use those files to DJ or further compress to 320K MP3 or some flavor of AAC. I'm not sure there's a difference.
   

More to come...

UPDATE:
The iDJ2 claims that there is no standard for tagging within WAV files (this is debatable), so it does not support tags for WAV files at all. My understanding is that the emerging format is ID3v2 tags within the RIFF portion of the file. Instead the device just presents the filename as in the Title field.

This is somewhat confusing because the standard for music file naming is [Artist] - [Title]. Searching filenames with the title would work fine though.

Numark iDJ2

One good thing about L.A.

Although I generally feel that L.A. is a loathesome, soulless place, it does have excellent radio. Coming from New York, where the middle of the dial is dominated by tacky lowest common denominator shit, turning on the radio in L.A. can be an exhilarating experience.

In L.A., KCRW and KXLU are great options for alternative or just downright weird music, and when I was growing up KDAY (1580 AM) was one of the first stations in the world with an all rap format. And let me tell you, in 1988, it was off the chain.

This last time I was in L.A. I discovered Indie 103. At first I was like, oh God, another corporate entitity appropriating the term "indie" to push populist corporate dreck. But the DJs quickly put me in my place with The Juan Maclean, The Duke Spirit, obscure 80s stuff, and the better part of an hour dedicated to verbatim Motown covers - in German.

Sure they had to play some lesser Death Cab for Cutie tunes and TV on the Radio and Does it Offend You, Yeah? etc. But they counterbalanced that with free-spirited programming unheard of outside of college radio, practically rising to the gold standard set by BBC 6Music.

Indie 103