Just a short post tonight. I plowed through the rest of my Vivaldi discs, grabbed Michelle Campanella’s recording of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, and Mark-Almond’s Greatest Hits (no, not Soft Cell, but the British duo that played with John Mayall at one point). Of course, I can’t help but think of Looney Tunes when I listen to the Liszt (though there is SO much amazing music in this set of 19 pieces that it is also hard not to become completely engrossed in the piano writing), and I can’t help but think about being a really small kid in a dark rental house in Ohio when I hear the Mark-Almond. I put it on the other day because I had ‘The City’ stuck in my head for some reason, and Tamiko shot me a look that I interpreted as ‘why in the world are we listening to this 1970s old sad bastard music?’. When I said ‘hmm… are you wondering why we are listening to this 1970 old sad bastard music?’ she said – ‘yeah … I’m want you to hear something else) at which point I quickly took off Mark-Almond so she could play me her faves off a new mix discs she got from Bryn.  Tamiko was right. BUT – I did put it on today while I had a little time alone, and I forgot how great some of that song is. There is also a cover of Billy Joel’s ‘New York State of Mind’ on it that doesn’t conjure up the stadium sized crowds that would cheer when Billy Joel would sing it, but more a run down slummy tenement in pre-Koch New York that is gritty and great. What a wonderful cover (even if listening to it may be depressing).

On the software front, still not sure what to replace Simplify Media with. So sad. DOT.TUNES really seems to have its CPU problems. I tested it at Origin 23 this afternoon, and running the laptop on battery power I saw the CPU spike and the ‘remaining time’ shrink to about an hour on full battery. Well – that just won’t do. And it is really too bad, since the interface in iTunes is EXACTLY what I would want. It mimics the playlist layout exactly (something the Simplify Media, for some reason, couldn’t seem to do). Hopefully more on this front later in the week.