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Christmas Songs That Need To Go Away

December 13, 2011 By 10 Comments

While I generally like most Christmas music, there are a few songs that, in my humble opinion, need to go away. Now.


“Last Christmas” by Wham. Can someone please tell me how a song about someone’s relationship drama and his apparent inability to get over it became a beloved holiday song? Why do the light rock stations – you know, the radio stations that start their 24/7 non-stop Christmas music the week before Thanksgiving – have this song in heavy rotation? Because to me, it’s not a “happy holidays” type of song. It’s more of a “you hurt me bad so I’m gonna move on but I really can’t stop thinking about how much you hurt me” kind of song. Not the song I want to be listening to when I’m trying to have a merry Christmas.


“Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney. Normally there’s very little in the musical world involving Paul McCartney that I don’t like. He’s been knighted for a reason! And the message of this song is really what Christmas is about. So why don’t I like it?

One word: synthesizers. Not only are they used with reckless abandon in this song, but the way they are used brings me back to middle school chorus and my teacher’s synthesizer. She would spend tens of minutes going over all the various settings and playing with all the buttons to get exactly the combination she wanted of pre-recorded beats and artificial instruments to accompany our vocal styling. It’s got that “I just got this synthesizer for Christmas and I want to experiment” vibe – sort of like this. The whole song gives me middle school flashbacks. So despite the happy lyrics, I just can’t get into this song because for me, music is all about the mood of the song, and middle school flashbacks do not make for a happy holidays mood.

Like I said, I do like Christmas music in general. I have over 300 holiday songs on my iPod right now so I can listen at work. But these two songs do absolutely nothing for my holiday spirit and I’d be happy if I never heard them again.

Filed Under: Holidays, Music

Musical Memories

September 19, 2011 By

The other night, Mister and I got on the subject of music we listened to when we were young. This went beyond the music we chose when we were old enough to develop our own taste in music – we were discussing earlier musical memories and what we remembered being on the radio when we were really young. Mister remembers a lot of the folk music that was popular in the late 60s, and since I’m 8 years younger than he is, I remember music that is now known as Disco, 70s Rock, and AM Gold.

Our trip down musical memory lane got me thinking about my earliest musical influences. Everyone listens to the radio, so like most people, I’ve been around music my entire life. My dad always listened to oldies. My mom’s tastes tend to change periodically, but I remember her listening to a lot of jazz – modern jazz, but she’ll listen to old jazz too. My stepmother listened to what was probably popular music back in the day, but now it’s the kind of stuff found on those radio stations found in offices everywhere, the ones who play The Carpenters alongside Celine Dion.

I really get into my music, as longtime readers know. I’m the kind of person who, when the need strikes, will gather up a few CDs of my favorite songs, get in the car, and drive. My car is the only place I can play my music at high volume without disturbing anyone, and not only can I play it loud, I can sing it loud. Have you ever had the need to just belt it out? I’m telling you, the car is the place to do it.

As a kid, the person who encouraged me most to listen to what I enjoy and sing it out was my stepmother. As I got older, I didn’t have the best relationship with her, but she really did a lot when I was a kid that had a huge influence in the sort of things I enjoy doing today, and for that I’m glad.

Every once in awhile, my stepmother would pull out all her records and we’d have a music night. My sister and I would take turns selecting which songs we wanted to listen to, and we were encouraged to sing along as loud as we wanted, with a hairbrush for a microphone. Music nights taught me that music isn’t just to have on in the background when you’re driving or at a party. Music, like life itself, is to be enjoyed at every opportunity. I still enjoy the rush of memories that certain songs bring back.

What memories do you have associated with music?

Filed Under: Music

The Music Project, Continued

September 7, 2011 By

Remember when I lost my iTunes library when my old computer crashed? Well, I’ve been working hard at reconstructing my library. I have nearly 400 CDs and about 65 discs from various mix exchanges that I’ve participated in over the years. I’ve been ripping music like crazy and I hope my disc drive isn’t too mad at me for it. Here’s where I’m at so far:

Old library: about 4300 songs
New library (with all discs uploaded): 4563 songs (not including missing files)
Songs that were not able to be recovered by any means possible and I will have to repurchase: 1222 songs

Now you can see why I was so upset about it – that’s 1/4 of my collection! But, I’m starting to see this with a more positive attitude.

First of all, probably a full half of those missing songs are crap. As in, I just used a free download code that iTunes will put on their Facebook page and I downloaded all sorts of crap. I don’t even know what a lot of that is, and a lot of it won’t get added back into my library.

Second, it’s giving me a chance to evaluate my collection. I’ll be more careful in the future, and will likely continue to buy physical CDs when I want the entire disc. iTunes (and Amazon’s MP3 store!) is still a great resource for single song purchases.

Third, when we bought my iMac, they were having a back to school special and I got a $100 iTunes/App store gift card, so even though they couldn’t help me in a technical sense, they’re helping by absorbing some of the cost of those repurchases.

I have to admit, there were some confusing moments during all of this. Some CDs I have no idea why I don’t have them anymore (I’m very organized with my discs and keep fairly meticulous records), and others I can’t figure out why I still have them because they’re total crap. Some of that will be rectified. Other songs in my collection I have no idea where I got or why I got them. I had a lot of “What the heck was I thinking?” moments there.

I’ve also been reviewing my policy for what songs I actually keep in my collection. In the past, I was a collector. (Shut up. I know less than 5,000 songs is not a “collection” to some people, but it is to me.) Thanks to all the mix exchanges I’ve participated in, I started obtaining all sorts of songs to be included on various theme mixes. Now, I don’t think I care that much. I have a robust enough collection to choose from should I do another mix, and I’d rather have only those songs in my collection that I want to listen to. I don’t want to click on a song and rip my headphones off my head in horror as it starts playing. And while I understand that not every song is going to be one that I want to listen to at any moment in time, I’d like to enjoy listening to the song at some point.

So that’s where I’m at. All songs to be repurchased are on a spreadsheet, and I’ll begin making selections from there really soon. And soon, very soon, I hope to have my library back to where I have all the songs I really enjoy.

UPDATE 9/7/11 7:40pm: If only I knew from the beginning that the solution was this simple. You know how when iTunes can’t find a music file it puts an exclamation point next to the song in your library? Well, get this – I deleted the last remnants of the song from my library (basically, the part of it that kept it on my list even though there was no file) and ALL OF A SUDDEN, just like magic, all 709 items purchased from iTunes are available for download. I wish I had known this from Day 1, because I would have saved myself a lot of stress. Also, this frees up the gift card to re-acquire songs that were not purchased from iTunes that I would still really like to have. This totally makes my day.

Filed Under: Music

The Lost Files

July 25, 2011 By

One of the things that prompted me to need a new computer was what has become known as the iTunes Debacle. I was having issues with iTunes that I couldn’t seem to get resolved.

It started a few months ago, when I tried to download a free sampler album that I got the code for on the iTunes Facebook page. I told you a little bit about this when I first got my iMac. Despite being backed up on an external hard drive, everything was lost. I tried googling the problem, tried every single suggestion I could find, and was unable to recover my library.

When I got my new iMac home, I installed iTunes and set about trying to recover some of my purchases. They say that you can redownload items that are not currently on your computer. I deauthorized previous computers, authorized my new computer, and clicked the button. I had over 700 purchases made over the past 5 years, and I was able to recover exactly 6.

Then I decided to contact support to see what they could do for me. I got a long, stock answer that basically told me to do what I had already done. Ok, fine. I’ll try it again. They were able to get a few more songs back. Then I tried plugging in my iPod to see if it could transfer some of my purchased music back to my computer.

This is where it gets fun.

My iPod has some whole albums that I purchased through iTunes, yet for some reason when I tried to transfer the music back, only a few songs went. This I don’t get. I also don’t get why some albums that are NOT on my iPod were only able to recover some songs and not the whole album. The support guy has been really great about emailing me to make sure all was well, so I asked him about this. If the whole album is on my iPod, and one can supposedly transfer purchased back to your computer this way, why was it not transferring the whole album?

I got another stock answer that didn’t really answer my question. “Kirsten, please realize that we made an exception to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale by allowing you to redownload all the items that had not been modified or removed from the iTunes Store since you purchased them. For Example : If an artist has changed the version of the song.”

Ok, but from the looks of things on my end, it didn’t look like there had been any changes. I do understand that a price change can count as a modified item, so all that stuff I got as the free download of the week isn’t coming back. Fine, whatever. But still, approximately 700 songs that can’t be recovered? I really don’t understand.

Since I wasn’t making much progress with support, decided to save all my playlists. I had already copied and pasted my entire music library to an Excel spreadsheet before I got the new computer, and I went ahead and did the same for my playlists. It was the only way I knew to have a record of what I had before I went and tried to fix things.

First, there were the Amazon purchases. Those were super easy to recover because they save in their own folder outside of the iTunes files, so all I had to do was drag and drop those back in. Then I went through and did the same with the other MP3 files I had on my computer that I had gotten from various places online.

200 songs down, only 4600 more to go.

After that, I decided to hit my CD collection. Since the vast majority of what was in my library was from discs I owned, those were easy to do. I’m still working on them as I write this post. Once all those are done, I’ll be able to see what’s left of the missing files and go from there, either repurchasing from iTunes, purchasing the MP3 files from Amazon, or purchasing the actual CD.

Through this whole process, I learned a few things:

  • Backup your backup. I had everything on an external hard drive, but that wasn’t good enough. When iTunes crashed, it took the files on the external with it. The folders were still there, but they were empty. My photo folders, which were also backed up to the same drive, were empty as well.
  • Gracenote is the ruler in the digital file universe. As I was uploading CDs, I got a few that wanted to send updated info to Gracenote. I looked up what that was, and found out that they are the masters of digital music files. When you put your CD into iTunes, WinAmp, or your car stereo and it automatically knows all the track names, it’s because of Gracenote. Artists can submit changes to them about their albums so it will always display correctly. I think this may have been a factor in not being able to recover some of the music.
  • iTunes will always want to install in your default location – the C drive on your PC or wherever programs automatically go. If you later turn around and point iTunes to a different location, be sure to check it once in awhile to make sure it still points there. I had iTunes pointed to my external hard drive, thinking that the music would be safer there (and I had more storage space). But there were times when my computer would stop seeing the external, or when I had to reinstall iTunes, and suddenly iTunes was pointed back at the C. However, since iTunes was installed on my C and only pointed to the external, I don’t think that the external or my computer only sporadically seeing it was the issue. I’m still convinced that everything is related to the crash. On my new computer, iTunes and the music library is in the default location.
  • When iTunes asks if you want to back up your purchases, DO IT. This is probably my single biggest mistake. I figured I was safe because it was all on an external hard drive, but when iTunes asks you this, it will MAKE A DISC of your purchased music. It will be a data disc only, and you may need a DVD instead of CD depending on how much data there is to back up, but if you do this and lose everything like I did, all you will have to do is pop in the disc and all will be well. The support guy sent me a link to this article on backing up your library. You can do purchases only, the entire library, and choose “since last backup”. I will definitely be doing this on a regular basis.

So, that’s where I’m at. This experience has been incredibly frustrating and also a bit enlightening. I still have a ton more work to do, but I will get it done. Music is too important to me to not have any on my computer, and I would like to update my iPod.

Have any of you suffered a data loss in iTunes? How have you resolved it?

Filed Under: Grrr, Music

Got Music?

November 30, 2010 By

I’m in the process of updating the music on my iPod. I listen to it at work, because when you work in finance the silence can be deafening, and it’s better than a radio because I can listen to stuff that’s not exactly appropriate for work and no one is the wiser.


With the holidays fast approaching, I wanted to put some Christmas music on my iPod and take off the Halloween music. I started by going through my Holiday playlist and adding the songs I wanted to my list.

(For those who are wondering, I have a playlist in iTunes called “Upload this list” and I have it set to automatically sync to that list only, which makes it easy to manage what I’m listening to at work. Then I just put the iPod on shuffle for some mindless listening.)

I ended up with a playlist that was over the memory size of my iPod, so I needed to weed some things out. Shouldn’t be too big a deal, because I have a habit of downloading free stuff. Amazon.com has a huge selection of free MP3′s (check back often for new stuff!), and if you Like iTunes on Facebook, once in awhile they will have codes for free sampler albums. I download most of this stuff without giving it a second thought, because it’s free and legal and the RIAA won’t come after me for it. Anyway, once I download new stuff, I add it to my playlist to check it out.

Problem is, when I’m at work and I come across a song that doesn’t really do it for me, I don’t have time to write it down so that I can easily remove it from my playlist. Instead I wait until 11pm when I’m furiously trying to update my playlist by sampling every single song and deciding what goes and what stays.

I forgot to update this during the 4 day holiday weekend, so I had to listen to the voices in my head all day yesterday at work. Since it’s very late on Monday night as I’m writing this, Tuesday will be much of the same. By bedtime (or way past bedtime, since I tend to stay up way too late) I wasn’t even through the C’s. I guess I know what I’m doing after work today if I want to listen to music at work ever again.

Do you listen to music at work? What do you listen to?

Filed Under: Music