Bob Dylan is my musical hero and I have spent 2016 listening almost solely to rap music, so surely if you put the two together it should be music nirvana?* I thought I had explored hip hop music quite deeply, but it seems there are some things lurking in depths that I hadn’t yet reached.

*It isn’t. It’s horrible. Listen with caution!

New Year 1986 and we’d been out for the day. I stuck Radio 1 on when we got back (for I was a mere teenager back then) and they were playing a Ricky Nelson song. I think It was Hello Mary Lou, but it doesn’t matter, the point was that they were playing one of my favourite artists on Radio 1 who doesn’t usually get played, so I told my mum how pleased I was. Then the song ended and it went straight into It’s Late and I thought balls, he’s dead isn’t he! To this day, when the same person comes up twice in quick succession when we have the iPod on shuffle on car journeys it’s a family law that one of us have to question whether the artist has died.*

So this morning me and the boy are getting his weetabix ready and I stuck the radio on. Radio 2. I can’t remember when I last listened to Radio 1, but it was probably New Year 1986. Anyway, Positively 4th Street was playing so I thought great and told the boy that it was my favourite singer (who he is acquainted with actually, thanks to Must Be » Continue Reading.

So, first my hard drive containing my digital files goes on the blink. Solution, new electric cable, new hard drive to back it all up on, more care taken when saving/backing up/storing iTunes library files.

Then, my 160gb iPod stops working. Solution (as yet unresolved) – sent to the iPod repair place in Brighton for the fitting of a new 256gb SSD, a new battery and, after this failed to get it to work, a new ‘card’, although I have no idea what they are referring to. It’s still not working and has gone into repair mode both times I have tried to fill it. It seems to be okay up to around the 150gb stage, but then goes wrong when I try to fill it above 200gb. Sort of like being sold a car on the strength that it can do 120mph, but when you try to get it past 70mph the wheels fall off. I am having one last try and then it is going back to them for a final time, after which I am asking for my money back and buying a refurbished one on eBay.

So I had this idea of going back a step » Continue Reading.

When did the word ‘second’ get replaced by ‘sophomore’?

So I’m sat by the phone, wait till 10am, ring Sheffield City Hall box office, they answer, I ask for two Kraftwerk tickets, they say it’s not 10am on their system, so I have to ring back. So I hung up, rang straight back, got through at 10:04, all gone!!! But I bet I’ll be able to get some from those dodgy secondary ticket agencies for a few hundred quid! Makes me cross!

Okay, so I posted about my hard drive stopping working last week and how, if I couldn’t repair it, I was dreading having to re-enter 70,000 tracks on to iTunes if I had to use my back-up hard drives. Thankfully, my mate helped me out and talked me through what I needed to do and how to remove the actual hard drive from the casing. He gave me a device to plug it into, but he also lent me the cable from his Seagate hard drive, just on the off chance that this would be all I need. Well, so far, that is all I needed, a new power cable. So far so good.

However, I then plugged my iPod 160gb into my laptop to update it and none of the new songs appeared on it. On checking, the space required for the ‘other’ Section had gone up to 16gb. A quick read on techs message boards led to me doing a full restore of the iPod and this reduced the size of the ‘other’ bit…but now it won’t put any music back on it, giving me error messages. I have spent a couple of hours with technical bods from » Continue Reading.

I have all my music files (around 70,000 tracks) on an external hard drive. I have around 57,000 backed up on two other hard drives. I’ve spent hundreds of hours tidying up the new stuff though, with a view to wiping one of my back up discs and doing an exact copy of my main hard drive once I had finished. I was around 5 days from finishing this exercise when, after having this 2tb hard drive for 3 years, it chooses now to pack up!!! Had it chosen next Friday it wouldn’t have been as much of an issue.

However, I now realise that my main itunes folder was also on that hard drive. So my library file is on there. In other words, unless there is a way to retrieve this, rather than simply having to re-add and match up the last 13,000 tracks I will have to start building my itunes completely from scratch, adding every single track again.

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time tidying up my itunes library. I’ve corrected every track name, added all the correct artwork, created I don’t know how many playlists and tidied up hundreds of rap albums, which » Continue Reading.

I think I might have done something like this a couple of years ago, but let’s do it again anyway. Taking the family as a given, tell us a dozen things that you are passionate about and why. Might be good to find you’re not the only one on here who enjoys stamp collecting, the films of Michael Winner or whatever. Lets try not to be mean to each other though (although I’m sure the usual snarky posters won’t be able to resist!).

So come on, what makes you tick?

Whenever the family Wad goes on a long car journey, we always play our ipod car game. Basically, we have a playlist for the car that has around 5,000 tracks on it and we all take turns in choosing an artist until we have 3 each. We then shove the playlist on shuffle and if one of your artists comes up you get a point and have to replace that artist with a new one. Whoever finishes the journey with the most points wins. If two or more people are level when we get to where we are going it goes to sudden death, where we click forward until of the tied players’ choices comes up and that person then gets to gloat as we lug the suitcases out of the car.

It can get competitive and brings up the same arguments, such as someone trying to claim a point for The Lilac Time when a solo Stephen Duffy song comes up, but it’s much better than i-spy and you can use it to soften the blow when Take That pop up, by choosing them as one of your three. It’s also led to Frank Sinatra being known as Grand » Continue Reading.

This website has 93,078 live shows for audio streaming, although using a programme like vidtoMP3 should enable you to make a copy of the shows in MP3 format. I guess you’d then have to mess about editing it into the different tracks if you don’t want one large file. But have a look at it and be prepared to lose several hours. You have been warned!

http://tela.sugarmegs.org

I trawled through my DVD collection yesterday to see which discs had commentaries on them, as they’ve always been a draw in buying DVDs, even though I rarely ever listen to them. In fact, I think I have only ever got round to listening to the ones on Phoenix Nights, Spinal Tap and Shaun of the Dead.

Anyway, I’ve just listened to the excellent commentary by Marcus Hearn and Jonathan Rigby on the 2012 BFI restoration of Hammer’s Dracula and really enjoyed it, so I wondered if anyone else ever got round to listening to them and if there are any that you’d recommend?

I’m looking forward to listening to the James Bond ones and Christopher Lee does a couple of Hammer ones that should be entertaining. I’m also led to believe the actors commentary on Hot Fuzz and the Robert Downey Jnr/Val Kilmer one on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang are a hoot.

So, what else? And which ones are rubbish?