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Now here’s nifty app worth spending $20 on. If you have an iTunes library like mine, you’ve probably got tons of tracks that are duplicates, or have inconsistent artist names and song or album title. It’s a pain to even begin sorting this mess out but Lairware’s Song Sergeant fixes all this and more – like finding those “orphaned” MP3 files you know are in your library but aren’t showing up in iTunes. I can’t praise this app high enough for bringing order to my playlists.
The next killer app for the iPhone? My bet is the Spotify music streaming service. It’s already available for the iPhone in Europe and will likely be part of Spotify’s rollout in the US later this year. I’m already a big fan of the service which basically gives you fast and great-sounding access to tons of music “in the cloud”. You can’t buy or download the music but as long as you have a net connection, a huge jukebox is available for you to choose from. In Europe you can use it for free (and put up with ads) or pay about $15 a month for the premium ad-free service [you can access the free version from here by using a VPN service like My Private Network]. If it saves you two impulse buys of dodgy albums a month on iTunes, then it pays for itself pretty quickly. As more leading artists put up material on Spotify, it could very well threaten iTunes as the leading digital music delivery system. Having a global jukebox available on the fly on the iPhone will be pretty damn cool.
Punk band 999 at Friars in 1979 (Photo by Chris Gibbons)
Bit of indulgent nostalgia, this. When I were a lad, some of the best times – and certainly some of the best gigs I ever went to – were at a small club in Aylesbury, Bucks called Friars. It was run mainly by a wizard promoter, Dave Stopps, who had an uncanny knack of booking acts just before they broke nationally (Bowie, Queen to name but two). The club closed in the mid-80s but recently a site has been created to mark the club’s 40th anniversary. For what it’s worth, I posted some reminisces on the site and you can read some of my hazy memories here.
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