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14 hours ago, Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame said:

Okay, I thought this was amusing.

For Donnie Iris' video for "Ah Leah", for the solo break, they showed him playing...the *rhythm* part.

 

On the other hand, both Love is Like a Rock and Ah Leah have pretty heavy rhythm parts.  I approve of that, at least.

I love that song!  I've tried to get it on the set list in many a band I've been in, always unsuccessfully.  I'm catching a little Eugene Levy vibe from Donnie in the video.

Back on topic - I use Spotify out of convenience working at home sometimes, but its main value to me is to check out things I don't know.  I end up buying the CDs if I REALLY like something.  For example, I never listened to Rainbow AT ALL growing up but after I listened to them on Spotify I ended up getting almost their entire catalog.  There are at least 5 other bands I can say the same about.  I hope CDs eventually make the comeback that vinyl did.  I will really miss the CD player when I get a new car.

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5 minutes ago, tommy p said:

I love that song!  I've tried to get it on the set list in many a band I've been in, always unsuccessfully.  I'm catching a little Eugene Levy vibe from Donnie in the video.

Back on topic - I use Spotify out of convenience working at home sometimes, but its main value to me is to check out things I don't know.  I end up buying the CDs if I REALLY like something.  For example, I never listened to Rainbow AT ALL growing up but after I listened to them on Spotify I ended up getting almost their entire catalog.  There are at least 5 other bands I can say the same about.  I hope CDs eventually make the comeback that vinyl did.  I will really miss the CD player when I get a new car.

I actually like the usb port for music better than the old CD player.  No need to change discs when I want to change bands or genres or even languages. I can set up different folders.  Or even different USB sticks, since changing out takes 3 seconds, and you don't have to fumble with finding the right disc, putting it back in the CD wallet. 

I've found 4GB seems to be the magic amount for me.  8GB is too much.

But 4GB means I can have ALL my favorite chinese songs.  Or ALL my favorite 80s hair metal and hard rock. Or ALL my favorite fingerstyle and jazz guitar.  or ALL my favorite classic rock.  So I have 4 USB drives I keep in my car.  I can listen to one thumbdrive for several months of commutes and not get tired of it, because it has enough songs that the space between hearing them is big enough I don't miss it. 

Or if there's a song I want to figure out a lick or some lyrics or just something I think is cool, I can put it on repeat and listen to it a dozen times in a row.  Or if I'm in the mood for, say, Survivor, I can put one folder on repeat.

Same thing with my phone.  32GB of music storage gets me those 4 main music areas.  But the phone has even easier options with playlists.  I guess I could do playlists for my car, too, but I haven't looked into whether different systems need different playlists, and it's harder to build a playlist on the fly in my car like i can with my phone.

So there are also plenty of times I use my phone to stream to the car's system via bluetooth. I thought the quality would be too low, but it is actually acceptable.

So between my phone and USB drives, I'm happier than I ever was with any streaming system.  I actually even stopped listening to the radio at all when I got my first cassette system back in the early 90s.

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I was disappointed when my newest vehicle didn't have a CD player, but it means I use my iPod Touch for playing music/podcasts when I'm not listening to satellite radio.  The big advantage is any music that's on the Touch is available, and for longer trips, I make playlists.  One issue is that different players can be touchy - my iPod classic doesn't always work well with the radio.

As for Amazon Music, I have what I get through Prime.  The big advantage is the Auto-Rip MP3s they provide with a lot (maybe most) CD purchases.  When I pre-ordered the Zappa soundtrack CD in December, the MP3s were available immediately, even though the CD didn't release until February.  I always have access to the MP3s before the CDs (sometimes by days now).  It allows me to check out some CDs before I purchase them, but I'll always take physical product over downloads when I can, and I won't do streaming.  The way streaming screws artists makes the old days of the record labels seem heavenly.

And Donnie Iris is a Pittsburgh legend.  In 2019, he sold out 3 shows for his 70th birthday celebration.  If memory serves, he did all of the harmonies on "Ah! Leah".

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To be clear, I don't have any issues with "Ah, Leah".  It's the fact that Pandora tried to cram 15 to 20 other mostly forgettable Donnie Iris songs down my throat at intervals that defied logic.

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1 hour ago, gtrdaddy said:

You poor bastard.

I know!

I'm from a tiny podunk 100 miles from anywhere and had no "big city" radio station to get exposure to cool new music.  I also never heard Scorpions until Blackout, Rush until Moving Pictures, Journey until Escape, or bands like UFO and the Babys at all growing up.  There are tons of others but I corrected those deficiencies as an adult.

I can't help but imagine that not hearing certain stuff when it was new affects how I feel about it.  Some big examples are UFO's Strangers in the Night, Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous, and Motorhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith.  I'm 56 and never heard any of those until I was in my 40's.  Not one of them made any kind of impression on me at all and those are some of my favorite bands from their studio work.  You might conclude that I don't like live albums much but I love If You Want Blood and Double Live Gonzo so I guess you "had to be there".

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4 hours ago, tommy p said:

I know!

I'm from a tiny podunk 100 miles from anywhere and had no "big city" radio station to get exposure to cool new music.  I also never heard Scorpions until Blackout, Rush until Moving Pictures, Journey until Escape, or bands like UFO and the Babys at all growing up.  There are tons of others but I corrected those deficiencies as an adult.

I can't help but imagine that not hearing certain stuff when it was new affects how I feel about it.  Some big examples are UFO's Strangers in the Night, Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous, and Motorhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith.  I'm 56 and never heard any of those until I was in my 40's.  Not one of them made any kind of impression on me at all and those are some of my favorite bands from their studio work.  You might conclude that I don't like live albums much but I love If You Want Blood and Double Live Gonzo so I guess you "had to be there".

I'll take most live over most studio any day. Maybe it's because I loved Made in Japan at a very young age along with Cheap Thrills (5th grade) and the other double live Janis that I can't remember the name of. Other early live was Kiss, Nazareth, Strangers in the Night, Oh, and who didn't like Unleashed in the East? Scorpions Tokyo Tapes with Uli. Those were my formative years.

When you say, "Rainbow," you mean Ritchie Blackmore, correct?

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21 hours ago, tommy p said:

I know!

I'm from a tiny podunk 100 miles from anywhere and had no "big city" radio station to get exposure to cool new music.  I also never heard Scorpions until Blackout, Rush until Moving Pictures, Journey until Escape, or bands like UFO and the Babys at all growing up.  There are tons of others but I corrected those deficiencies as an adult.

I can't help but imagine that not hearing certain stuff when it was new affects how I feel about it.  Some big examples are UFO's Strangers in the Night, Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous, and Motorhead's No Sleep 'til Hammersmith.  I'm 56 and never heard any of those until I was in my 40's.  Not one of them made any kind of impression on me at all and those are some of my favorite bands from their studio work.  You might conclude that I don't like live albums much but I love If You Want Blood and Double Live Gonzo so I guess you "had to be there".

EXACTLY my upbringing.  The only albums in the house were the entire Elvis RCA catalog, Credence Clearwater Revival "Credence Gold," the Shaft soundtrack and a Jimmy Reed album from the 60's that was ruined on one side.  It was AM radio all the way until high school, then it was eight-track tapes of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger and 38 Special (still can't listen to any of those).  I missed almost all new music save my weekly viewing of "Midnight Special" and "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert."

If you tried the free version of Spotify, you didn't try Spotify.  The pay version is cheap and most everything is available commercial free and you can absolutely dictate order and specifically what to listen to. 

It is incredible to me to be able to pull up anything I'm reading about or anyone mentions so I can immediately understand what's being discussed.  Tons of suggestions from this board have been explored.  Massive back catalogs have been gone through because I am allowed to stream at work (right now I'm listening to Richie Kotzen's "Electric Joy" from 1991, as David Brewster mentioned it on a (YouTube) Late Night Lesson I watched last night.

As far as fidelity goes, it's fine for me.  Generally it's through PC speakers, but I likely couldn't hear the difference through high dollar reference monitors.

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17 hours ago, Ting Ho Dung said:

When you say, "Rainbow," you mean Ritchie Blackmore, correct?

Yes, that Rainbow.  I failed to mention in my first post I had never heard a Cheap Trick song until Live at Budokan either, so there's another live album I do like.  I bought Dream Police when it came out and was able to sort of follow them through the 80's after leaving Podunk for college but I still didn't have the first three studio albums until sometime in the mid-90's.  I loved discovering what I had missed out on, and then the 1997 album REALLY got me back into them and I filled in all the gaps and bought everything since right as it was released.

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I went to college in the Fall of 1982.  New Wave, and Metal (to name it, Priest and Scorps) were all getting cranked up as Punk was on the wane (though it fascinated me and still does).  MTV was in its second year.  With my breadth of my musical universe running only from Kiss to Skynyrd, it was wonderfully bewildering, but also overwhelming - so much new stuff that I missed major pieces of it.  

Spotify has really helped fill in the gaps.   

 

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1 hour ago, velorush said:

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger and 38 Special (still can't listen to any of those). 

I detested the Southern Rock movement mostly because of Polk County Fat Fuck Rednecks and their trucks flying their Confederate Flags while blaring the crap. Now it's kind of nostalgic for me but Bob Seger still makes me cringe. 

47 minutes ago, tommy p said:

Live at Budokan either, so there's another live album I do like. 

I failed to list this one above. I loved, "Big Eyes," I think it was called. I still remember the first time I heard it in the HS parking lot. My GF was giving me a ride home 'cause I got suspended off the bus for the year on the first day of school. There were a bunch of kids in the back seat making a racket and I yelled at them all to shut up so I could hear the song. I had no idea who it was even though I had the first 3 studio albums. That song was so much heavier than anything I had heard them play on those albums. I ran out and bought Budokan because of Big Eyes. 

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28 minutes ago, Ting Ho Dung said:

cause I got suspended off the bus for the year on the first day of school

Bwahahaha :lol:

I got kicked off the bus the first day of school in 7th grade. After three days off the bus I wound up with an assigned seat for the year, right behind the bus driver. She kept a broom behind her seat against the wall of the bus, On the last day of school that year, I broke off a bunch of straws from it and slid them into the curls on her gigantic wig. They were poking out everywhere, probably fifty or so! Everyone was laughing their asses off while I was gently sliding them through the curls. Got off the bus and never saw her again.

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3 hours ago, gtrdaddy said:

Bwahahaha :lol:

I got kicked off the bus the first day of school in 7th grade. After three days off the bus I wound up with an assigned seat for the year, right behind the bus driver. She kept a broom behind her seat against the wall of the bus, On the last day of school that year, I broke off a bunch of straws from it and slid them into the curls on her gigantic wig. They were poking out everywhere, probably fifty or so! Everyone was laughing their asses off while I was gently sliding them through the curls. Got off the bus and never saw her again.

I, too, had an assigned front row seat on the bus when I was in junior high. To this day, I still don’t know what I did...

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18 hours ago, gtrdaddy said:

Bwahahaha :lol:

I got kicked off the bus the first day of school in 7th grade. After three days off the bus I wound up with an assigned seat for the year, right behind the bus driver. She kept a broom behind her seat against the wall of the bus, On the last day of school that year, I broke off a bunch of straws from it and slid them into the curls on her gigantic wig. They were poking out everywhere, probably fifty or so! Everyone was laughing their asses off while I was gently sliding them through the curls. Got off the bus and never saw her again.

 

15 hours ago, Travis said:

I, too, had an assigned front row seat on the bus when I was in junior high. To this day, I still don’t know what I did...

Yeah, they didn't give me that option.

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On 3/4/2021 at 8:32 AM, tommy p said:

Yes, that Rainbow.  I failed to mention in my first post I had never heard a Cheap Trick song until Live at Budokan either, so there's another live album I do like.  I bought Dream Police when it came out and was able to sort of follow them through the 80's after leaving Podunk for college but I still didn't have the first three studio albums until sometime in the mid-90's.  I loved discovering what I had missed out on, and then the 1997 album REALLY got me back into them and I filled in all the gaps and bought everything since right as it was released.

Blackmore was my first guitar hero and even though Rainbow always had a rotating cast of band members they always put out some quality stuff! The Dio years are phenomenal.

 

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On 3/2/2021 at 5:03 AM, Ting Ho Dung said:

Have any of you tried Amazon Music? They're offering 3 months free to try it. I signed up and was annoyed that I had to download an "app" for my PC. These things used to be called programs, but whatever. I just don't like to install proprietary things when it can be streamed through a browser. I searched for some live music I often listen to on YouTube and they didn't have most of them. I was mostly interested in this offer because Amazon claims it's the best sounding streaming music experience. I finally found a few tunes I knew pretty well and own on CD on both YouTube and Amazon. There was a difference but I found that YouTube sounded better but the volume level on Amazon was louder. 

Another thing that annoys me is Amazon plays song by song instead of being album oriented. I guess you can take the time to make a playlist but I'm not really into that either. After maybe thirty-minutes I kind of feel it's not worth the $12.95 per month. What's your experience? I kind of feel YouTube fits me better. Also, I don't use Pandora or any other music services.

Have you picked one yet?

I have Amazon Fire TV which links up to the Amazon Music app so I'm leaning that way,,, 

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1 hour ago, LordsoftheJungle said:

Blackmore was my first guitar hero and even though Rainbow always had a rotating cast of band members they always put out some quality stuff! The Dio years are phenomenal.

 

I didn't realize that was the same band. That was a long time ago though.

1 hour ago, LordsoftheJungle said:

Have you picked one yet?

I have Amazon Fire TV which links up to the Amazon Music app so I'm leaning that way,,, 

I'm just sticking with YouTube. Seems like I can find any ting I'm looking for there from gardening to guitar lessons to bands I like when I want to listen to that. Thanks though. 

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Okay, well I rebooted my PC for the first time in about a week and the only time after installing Amazon Music and guess what? It hijacked my startup. I hate that shit. Seems like Spotify did that too which is why I uninstalled it, now that my memory has been jogged. Yea, I can go in the registry and remove the startup script but these things just annoy me. Amazon music has been deleted from my subscription and now my PC. PC stands for, "Personal Computer." Not, "Please hijack my computer." 

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