Skip to main content

NEW YEAR'S MIX TEASER POST

Just a little post to get people excited about their New Year's mixes . . .


I think this year will be one of my better mixes. Last year was a bit schizophrenic, with a lot of very poppy Jpop and very heavy stoner rock, but too little in between (or for people who like neither genre). 2009 is going to be diverse, although not without last year's trends. It was the year of learning about stuff from the Internet. Top music sites for me included Chunklet, Bitch Magazine, Hardcore Math User, The Prelinger Archive and Stonerrock.com. I also heard songs on Internet stations such as Japan-a-Radio, Groove Radio, Radio Nigel, K666 Radio, and Trance.ch. I would sometimes hear about a band (thanks for your research, Dr. S!) and then check out a sample on Skreemer, LastFM, Lala, YouTube, or even (shudder!) Myspace. Wikipedia is also good for lists of music genres or to see who they compare a band to. The library is still my good friend as well.

Here is my technique for making mix CDs, pretty close to perfected after lo these many years:

1. Keep an iTunes Smart Playlist of music added during the year, so it keeps growing automatically. Songs don't have to be produced in that year, but they should be newly acquired.

2. Go to Office Max and buy printer ink, CD-Rs, jewel cases, labels and case inserts.

3. Listen to the Smart Playlist and pick the best songs for a "base" mix, which is usually for someone I mail the CD to, because they have to be finished sooner. My mixes are based on my experience as a college radio DK, usually 3 or 4 songs in similar genres at a time for variety. I try to have some connection between each song and the following, could musically or the song's topic or the singer's voice or the country of origin. It can be pretty loose and subjective.

4. Copy and paste the songs into another person's mix, then add and subtract based on what I know about the recipient's likes and dislikes or if they would already have it in their collection.

5. Look for an appropriate picture for the cover and label. Font choice and color scheme is important too. I have some templates for the labels and inserts from a Memorex CD-Rom purchased ages ago. I use Photoshop Elements for the inserts and Appleworks for the labels, because those were the options I picked, there are probably some for other software.

6. Edit the mixes in iTunes so that only artist and title is showing, then copy and paste into the insert template. This saves a lot of time. Check for any misspellings and that the songs will all fit at the current font size.

7. Burn CDs and label them with marker. I usually do these in bulk.

8. Print out labels and inserts, also usually in bulk. I have to be careful to label them with a Post-it right away, so I can tell them apart without reading the song list.

Comments

Anonymous said…
[url=http://riskpreorow.com]riskpreorow[/url]
cce25yd7m491vju0db

Popular posts from this blog

MY BUBBLE

This is real heavy metal, by the way . So, this guy whose name I swear I'd never heard but appeared to have gone to my high school tried to friend me on Facebook. His main interests were the band Stryper and Republicanism, so I didn't add him. I mean, really, Stryper ? I thought teens in the 80s only listened to them because they liked metal and their parents forbade any other band as a direct path to the worship of Satan. When you leave home, you throw away their records and listen to real metal. But then I read this article that said we are all getting trapped in a bubble of like-minded people who parrot our ideas back to us, due to social networks and rss feeds and apps only giving us the people/opinions/stories we want to hear. And I thought--maybe I was wrong. Or maybe I'm OK, because I do have a lot of weird interests that make it pretty hard to find people who are on the same page with everything. I have social network connections with people around roleplaying game

TOP TEN LIPSYNCH FOR YOUR LIFE SONGS FOR A DRAG KING EQUIVALENT OF RUPAUL'S DRAG RACE

 The Advocate has suggested that the greatest (i.e. only good) reality show ever, Rupaul's Drag Race , have a drag king contestant.  That's fine, but it would be much more entertaining to have a whole drag king competition. One of the best parts of Drag Race is seeing all the different types of queens compete: beauty queens, funny queens, conceptual queens, androgynous queens, scary queens, singing and dancing queens.  I want to see punk kings, gangsta rap kings, cock-rocking metal kings, panty-dropping R & B kings, country kings, baggy-pants burlesque comic kings, and of course, Elvis. I picked out some songs that make me think of different aspects of masculinity:  swaggering men, heartbroken men, lustful men, romantic men, philosophical men, and suicidally depressed men (interesting fact: I can think of dozens of songs by men about suicide, but only one female one: "Gloomy Sunday". What's up with that?) "That's Life" - Frank Sinatra

HOME ENTERTAINMENT UPDATE: THE EMBIGGENING

  Chromecast CD storage Antenna Blu-ray player Apple TV Receiver Record player VHS Tape player So, I decided to spend my tax refund on home entertainment this year, as TV keeps getting better, whereas movies... not so much. My computer is old, but it still works, and replacing a computer seems less urgent when you have mobile devices. It feels like a long time ago when RAM and processor power seemed so important in order to use the latest bloated software, but now with so many webapps and sites designed for mobile, as long as your Internet is fast enough, you're OK. Lifehacker says to spend money where you spend most of your time, and I now use my tablet more than my desktop. Also, with all the streams I have access to, there was one chink in my entertainment system -- my TV was not actually big enough to appreciate high definition. Well, it seemed like a good deal in 2007, at $200 more than my new one which is almost twice as big. The main thing stopping me