Image BY-NC Rsms @ Flickr

I like music. A lot. I listen to as much as I can as I believe it makes me more productive.* As a student I worked in HMV at Meadowhall in Sheffield and bought a prodigious amount of CDs. When I did my MA in Modern History I sold many of them to fund my living expenses, but still many remained. I hadn’t ripped them all to MP3 but still had around 100GB of my 250GB taken up with MP3s. I deleted all of that today, leaving only my downloaded podcasts:

After my week of divesting the only CDs that aren’t in boxes ready to be sent off to Music Magpie or Amazon customers are those (nine) that I’ve decided to keep as artwork.** I signed up for a Spotify Premium account the day after their iPhone app became available. It costs £9.99 per month to upgrade from the Free account. For that you get, amongst other things, the usage of their iPhone app (which doesn’t work with a Free account), a higher streaming bitrate and no advertisements.

That’s not to say that Spotify features every album and every piece of music that I’ve ever listened to. But I reckon that they’ve got about 90% of the stuff I search for. That’s good enough for me, especially given my eclectic, ever-changing taste in music and the fact they add thousands more track to their library every week – check out their blog!

The streaming model makes sense. Now that a decently-fast internet connection is available to me pretty much everywhere I go, there’s no need for me to manually sync and carry around with me a partial collection of music I like. Much better to have access to a much bigger collection everywhere I am.

Of course, there are times when your internet connection isn’t so good (or even non-existent). It’s for these times that Spotify has made playlists that you create available offline. Up to 3,333 tracks can be cached for offline play at any one time. That’s certainly enough for me!

Finally, then, there’s the problem of making Spotify’s vast library user-friendly. A start has been made via SpotifiTunes (see my library here) which takes your iTunes XML file and creates a list of Spotify links. Wanting an up-to-date version of this, I’ve created a workspace on my wiki dedicated to this. To access this, click on the ‘Music’ link at the top of this blog or click here!

What do YOU think about Spotify and the like? Will you be signing up any time soon?

* I recommend you read Lifehacker’s The Best Sounds for Getting Work Done

** See CD wall tiles @ IWOOT)

Hannah and I came back from spending a couple of Ben-free days in Cornwall yesterday. We left young Benjamin with his grandparents and had a relaxing time, staying at perhaps the world’s nicest and most friendly B&B. One place we went is Falmouth where I found a second-hand music store. I don’t bother too much with these nowadays, partly because Hannah groans whenever I sight one, and partly because I purchase 99% of my music on MP3. On this occasion, I was very pleased I took a look inside…

I used to love promos when I worked at HMV as a student. You get to hear things before other people, and some can end up being quite valuable. This particular music store had a promos section, the less popular of which had been vastly reduced – to £1 in fact. I found three absolute gems in the rough:

Crydamoure – Waves II (2003)

A compilation of French house on Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s (one half of Daft Punk) own label. I bought the original when it came out on import for a whopping  £16.99! Hannah doesn’t like it, but it’s great driving/running/workout music…

Daniel Wylie – Ramshackle Beauty (2004)

Formerly lead singer of Cosmic Rough Riders, one of my favourite bands at uni, this is one of his solo albums. Very summery. My favourite line from the Cosmic’s album Enjoy The Melodic Sunshine is “he’s a vegetarian and you can’t trust them.” Wylie’s got a wry sense of humour, oh yes.

Hush – A Lifetime (2005)

I was unsure as to whether to buy this or not. I thought I remembered it being reviewed well a few years back. Turns out it’s a fabulous album by a Danish band. Vaguely Katie Melua-esque (but don’t let that put you off…) Hush have released a new album entitled For All The Right Reasons. It’s a lot more pop-inclined and, to be honest, not as good as this one.

Alec Couros tagged me, so I’d better respond. I’m doing it here rather than on my teaching blog because I feel this is a more appropriate home.

1. Post these rules before you give your facts
2. List 8 random facts about yourself
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4. Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

Here goes (without, of course, me mentioning anything about how impossible it is for human beings to do anything truly random…)

1. My first pet was a fish called Banjo that spent more time swimming backwards than forwards.
2. I was brought up in Ashington, at one time the largest mining village in the world.
3. I bite my fingernails.
4. My political views swing wildly from fairly right-wing to quasi-communism.
5. I know every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
6. I get really bad migraines from the colour annatto (and related orangey food colours), which can be found in Coca-Cola, coloured cheeses, etc.
7. As an undergraduate student I worked in HMV and developed quite an eclectic taste in music.
8. To my shame, my wife Hannah beats me at almost every game under the sun. Except cards.

Like Alec, I’m not going to bother commenting on the following people’s blogs to let them know they’ve been ‘tagged’. Instead I’ll leave it to the power of WordPress and Technorati! I’ll just go with those in my ‘edublogs – must reads’ folder in Google Reader:

• Chris Sessums
• Doug Noon
• Karyn Romeis has already posted hers
• Wes Fryer has already posted his
• George Siemens
• Clarence Fisher
• Karl Fisch
• Jeff Utecht
• Will Richardson