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RIP Movie Grooves

8:15 PM / Music / 2 Comments

Bad news, people: Movie Grooves, probably the best source for 60s and 70s movie soundtracks, both mainstream and off the beaten track, is closing down. They'll be honouring all outstanding orders but are no longer accepting any new ones.

I don't know about anyone else, but I personally used them a bunch of times. Most of my Argento and giallo soundtracks came from them, and I picked up quite a few other assorted gems, including the OMEN trilogy box set, along the way. They weren't always the cheapest, but they consistently provided a great service and offered a number of titles that I wasn't able to find anywhere else. I for one will definitely miss them.

Music comes out of it

7:58 PM / Music / No Comments

I have a new MP3 player. My old Sony NW-HD5 was still going strong, but it had been subjected to so much abuse, including a disastrous incident in which it plunged down an entire flight of concrete steps, that it was looking a little worse for wear. More problematically, said trip down flight of concrete steps had resulted in the battery compartment becoming damaged, requiring it to be cellotaped shut in order to keep it from falling out. "Enough," I said - "time to pony up and replace the old relic."

So I did. Yesterday, a 32 GB Creative Zen X-Fi arrived for me while it was out at work, and I spent yesterday evening and the bulk of today re-ripping all my CDs and transferring over the contents. (My previous player used Sony's then-proprietary, now-dead ATRAC format, so my existing stash was unusable on the new player.) In doing so, I've been discovering the strengths and kinks of the new system.

For one thing, the 16.7 million colour display is a heck of a lot nicer than the old monochromatic, text-only screen on the HD5, which doesn't ultimately have much of an effect on its use (it is, after all, all about how the music sounds, despite what the manufacturers might want us to believe), but it does make using it something of a more tactile experience. (It's nice to see the cover art of the disc you're currently listening to instead of just a text listing.)

Sound-wise, I couldn't detect any difference between it and the HD5, although I must stress that I haven't done anything that might be considered a scientific test. In any event, I bought the thing so I could have something to listen to on the bus, so it's not as if audiophile nirvana was something I expected or even wanted. (That said, if it had sounded like the iPod, I would definitely have popped it into a jiffy-bag marked "Return to Sender" immediately.) It comes with a bunch of customisation tools including an equaliser and several presets (Classical, Rock, etc.), not to mention Creative's patented X-Fi technologies, Crystalizer and Expand, which promise audio ecstasy but, in my experience, simply toy around with the sound, making it different rather than better. Other touted features include the ability to store and display photos and videos, FM radio, an organiser and the option of interfacing wirelessly with your computer, but to be honest I'm not overly fussed about any of these. I just want something with a high enough capacity to store my music and that plays it back reasonably well, which this player certainly does. Oh, and I wanted it to have proper buttons too, rather than a touch-pad.

Software, however, is another story. Creative are notorious for their bloated and clumsy applications and dodgy drivers, and I'm afraid I've encountered nothing but frustration while using the bundled Centrale program. Unlike the HD5, you can simply drag-and-drop your music natively in Windows Explorer, allowing you to circumvent Centrale entirely, but all the same, a bundled program that continually crashes, spits out random errors while transferring music, randomly doesn't bother to copy tracks to the player, and requires numerous restarts isn't really the best first impression to create.

Flower power

6:27 PM / Music / No Comments

I just picked up Heather Nova's most recent CD, a 2008 release called The Jasmine Flower, which I wasn't even aware existed until I stumbled across it on Amazon a few days ago. I've got a soft spot for her music, and this should tide me over nicely in the "songs by ladies with lilting voices" department until Sharon Corr releases her solo album later this year.