Yesterday, december 5th 2008, teensy and I got married. We met some two and a half years ago on this website. We mostly discussed music, and even though our tastes at that time had only a very small overlap, I think we recognized and respected in each other the same kind of serious attitude to music that borders on, and sometimes crosses over into snobbery. ;)

The story of how we met is not that special (to anyone but us, anyhow): We exchanged messages and emails for quite a while, and got to know each other a little, neither of…

When m' colleague Sylvain expressed an interest in porting my autoqueue plugin for Quod Libet to itunes, I experimented a little with factoring out all the generic parts, and it turned out the player specific stuff isn't all that much, so I decided to do a little work and see what kind of problems I would run into when porting it to another player. I chose Rhythmbox for my experiment, since it's in my Ubuntu anyway, and it has support for python plugins.

Turns out it was pretty easy. I have a large part of the featureset working in less…

After working on them for a long time, and then procrastinating for at least as long on wrapping them up into releasable shape, I'm sort of proud to announce my plugins for Quod Libet, (the best music player I have yet found):

http://code.google.com/p/thisfred-quodlibet-plugins/downloads/list

There are three plugins in there, in order of increasing complexity and interest:

1. autosearch.py

Very simple plugin, searches for the title of the current song in your library: Good for getting rid of duplicates, and finding possible covers.

2. lastfmtagger.py

Useful only if you have a last.fm account and make use of tags there. This will…

I just thought I'd start a little list here with my picks from the huge number of freely downloadable mp3s on here:

2007-08-24:

HelloHiHey

2007-08-25:

Baby's Romance

2007-08-27:

Wolves

2007-09-05:

The Little Patton

2007-10-03:

Learning the Lie

2007-10-04:

Brain-tag

2007-10-19:

Powers That Be

2007-11-06:

Spring Came, Rain Fell

2007-11-12:

Cake and Discipline

2007-11-19:

Phoney Phranchise

2007-11-23:

Medication

2007-12-15:

Graveyard

2008-01-23:

The Wonder

2008-03-05:

Lift Me Up

2008-03-19:

Sun Lips

Metropolis 2007 (http://www.metropolisfestival.nl) looks like a very interesting edition of the annual free Rotterdam festival.

Check out a metropolis 2007 tag radio station of the line up here:

http://www.last.fm/user/thisfred/tags/metropolis%202007

I've tagged all artists officially confirmed to play Lowlands 2007 as lowlands 2007, and will continue to tag (or untag) them as new information comes in. You can listen to the global tag, but I see there are some artists on there that are not yet confirmed by lowlands. If you want to check out my personal lowlands 2007 tag radio, you can do so here, or through this direct link

I did the same thing last year, and listened to it a *lot* in the months leading up to the festival, resulting in me wanting to see a…

I'm not entirely sure about the order anymore, but this is more or less what I saw at Noorderslag this year:

Ilse DeLange: One of my guilty pleasures. Hadn't seen her live before, and I'm glad I did. Backed by a very professional band. Not exactly adventurous, but hey.

Hasselhoff: In one word: crap. It's all about the gimmick, I get it, but the gimmick doesn't exactly survive a singer who can't sing and the equipment breaking down multiple times.

Malle Pietje and the Bimbos: Music to drive your hummer to. Gezellig.

La Melodia: A very…

Again a very good day at Eurosonic, but quite a bit busier than day 1, which meant we didn't get to see everything we'd liked to.

Anna Ternheim: Couldn't get in.

William White: Went here to wait for Ozark Henry, but that was a mistake: it was a very small room, and the only seats open we're right in front of the stage. Furthermore, the music was a little too laid back for my taste. That, and the after effects of the night before, meant I kept almost falling asleep. To avoid that particular embarrassment, we tried…

The first day of Eurosonic was great. I would call the festival a success even if today and tomorrow are a disappointment, although I hope they aren't. ;)

JohnOssi: They were at the same venue as the band below, for which we were early. Not really my kind of band, so, on to the next one:

The Young Knives: Really really *really* my kind of band. When I get home, I'll have to investigate if there's an album. They vaguely reminded me at times of both The Sultans of Ping (melodic and punky) and Devo (staccato and geeky).…

I've created a combined tag for Eurosonic 2007 and Noorderslag 2007, mainly so I can check out what I want to see, since I hardly know any of the bands. I've added all the bands I could find on last.fm, not just the ones I like. You'll have to do your own banning ;). Also: some of the artist's names are ambiguous, so what you hear may not always be what you'll get…

The global tag is here: eurosonic-noorderslag 2007, though my personal tag seems to work better, so subscribers may want to try here:

http://www.last.fm/user/thisfred/tags/eurosonic-noorderslag%202007

I've already…