Surprised that lack of PPI is not bothering me. Maybe that stuff just works after a while, and you don’t actually have to take it anymore. In the past I drowned the acid reflux with beer and vodka, but none of that tonight. Not for this suddenly conscientious keeper of his inner sphincter.
Listening to TuneIn Radio Pro earlier, the classical stations. They must use the ancient Winamp or Icecast, because if you tune in to a track after it has already started you are offered no clue as to what you are hearing. This was a bug with both those streaming media servers, as I recall — though it has been a while since I used either. I tuned in to one of those pieces so famous I never listen to it, recognizable but unnameable. I am thinking it was Scheherazade but no interest enough to figure it out.
Spotify is equally ridiculous at times, but for different reasons. If you listen to much classical music on Spotify you may have noticed at times how hard it can be to figure out what you are listening to. Sometimes you’ll get nothing more than something like “IV: Lento”, meaning that this is movement 4 of something and that its tempo indication is Lento. But what is it? Who is the composer?
One approach is to figure out who the performer is. Sometimes that info is missing or inaccurate, as I have noticed happens most often in compilations, where the only performer credits offered are “Various performers.”.
Once you figure out the performer I guess you go to that Internet thing and see if there is a match between the performer and “IV: Lento.” If there is then you now might possibly know what you were listening to.
It is like the old days of calling the FM radio disc jockey after a song or piece of music ended and you were unable to catch or perhaps understand the name of the composer or the piece of music. In those days it was part of the broadcaster’s job to field such calls. Today, not so much. Algorithms don’t take calls.
I remember my mother talking for weeks about a lengthy phone conversation she had with an announcer at one of the classical stations in Tampa. I don’t think it was WUSF but that other one from Safety Harbor. Whatever it was the music of Franz Liszt’s Fantasy on Themes from Bellini’s Norma started the moment she sat in the car and started the engine, and ended right as she parked the car in the parking lot of the office building where she worked. She called the announcer just to report the beautiful synchronicity of the timing, and possibly to ask who the pianist was. Whatever her reasons for calling the two talked for a good long time about what a magnificent piece they thought that “Norma” Fantasy was.
You don’t get that interpersonal backup today, with everything algorithmicized and botted up.
When Spotify first entered my world I made a point of reporting the inaccurate or nonsensical information associated with so many of their classical tracks. I refuse to call them “songs” even as that is the term the music industry insists on using. Calling a 40 minute uninterrupted symphonic movement a “song” the same as you do a 2½ minute Miley Cyrus tune is the music industry’s perhaps unintended attempt to short-change classical recording artists as much as they can. A 40-minute “song” gets the same airplay royalties as a 2½ minute pop tune.
My attempts at remedying Spotify’s seemingly bottomless supply of spelling errors and factual inaccuracies did not seem to be Spotify’s problem.They sent the comments to the record labels who were, in turn, expected to make the corrections. It is not clear to me who is to blame, here. Classical metadata can, if I remember from looking at it a while back, be somewhat confusing compared to pop or other genres. But that is no excuse. It should all still fill the proper XML vessels and be accurately parsed.
A classically educated editor would go a long way toward making Spotify not look like such a joke as it does sometimes to certain of its classical listeners.
I guess I could back this mini-screed up with examples, which I had started collecting a couple of years ago, but who has time? I have funerary laborers and phony genealogies to research and write about.
