i've noticed..

If you’re obsessive about your iTunes collection, you may never get to this point. I, however, have left my library unattended to for quite some time and have found a few too many albums without artwork for my liking. I’d like to clean it up a bit and, as far as I’m concerned, necessity AND laziness are the mothers of invention.

First, I created a Smart Playlist to find all of the albums that are missing artwork.

That will give us a nice organized playlist.

Which we can do a Cmd+a (Select all) and then right click to “Get Album Artwork” from the iTunes store.

Which will, in all likelihood, clear out a majority of your playlist’s blank album art. You’ll find that a lot of what’s left is either a poorly labeled album or a track without an album. 

Nothing groundbreaking here. Not comprehensive. I’m sure there are even programs that will do most of the work for you. This, however, is quick, easy and already installed on your computer if you are using iTunes… so, why not try it?

Update:

… or this

I was watching the music video for Ted Leo’s “Me & Mia,” when I got curious as to where the video was shot. I had just gotten back from a trip to New York City and my fascination with the immense amount of stories in the city grows every day. The fun part of these stories, however, is to be able to stand somewhere and say… “hey, isn’t this where that thing happened?”. So I started a journey to find the filming location of the video. It was actually pretty easy to find with the help of a little knowledge and Google Street View. If you watch the video, you can clearly see a street sign for Avenue of the Americas. If you’ve ever visited New York or seen a map, you’ll probably remember that name, and maybe even know that it is another name for Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Sixth Avenue runs north through Manhattan, so the next step was finding the cross street.

The main landmark in the video is the pizza shop below the apartment. Oh, a Famous Ray’s pizza in New York City. That certainly won’t be hard to find. In case you don’t pick up on sarcasm in text, there are 46 pizza places named some variation of “Ray’s” in NYC. Luckily, for my Google stalking, only three of those locations were on 6th Avenue. In the blurry YouTube video, you can see the address is something like 586 or 695 or something with 3 digits with a distinct shape. Google Maps “rays pizza on avenue of the americas” and one of the first results you see is World Famous Ray’s Pizza 595 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY.

Unfortunately, there is no longer a Famous Ray’s at 595 6th Avenue, but it did look like I had found the right street. So to confirm I had found the place, I had to use a creative solution. I took a screen shot from the video and lined it up with the building I found with Google Street View. The windows lined up perfectly.

After lining up the images, I felt like I was a part of the team on CSI. Maybe even CSI : Miami, taking orders from the ever so cool Horatio Caine (again, sarcasm). I did kind of ruin the illusion of the music video when I see that Ted Leo was rocking out in a acupuncture office above a T-Mobile store. Not that anything mythical was happening there to begin with, but I was still smacked in the face with a giant T-Mobile logo when I finally found the filming location of the video.

My detective work DID get a cool response out of Ted on Twitter with some … uhh… insider information. So it made it a little more interesting and worth the time it took.

I have an even better Google Stalking post coming up where I found a Pittsburgh house featured on HGTV because I wanted to buy it. That required a lot more effort (I had to pull out Google Earth for this one), so the post will require more effort as well.

This post started out in my drafts as a list of the top 10 songs of 2009. When I tried writing it, I realized how complex it is to determine if one song is better than another. Another thing I realized is the I was giving a lot of attention to albums, because I appreciate a complete album, and felt that there were some excellent albums released this year that needed some sort of recognition on this list.

So here is what I’ll give you. The five best songs and the three best albums of 2009.

The Five Songs of 2009

1. Grizzly Bear - Two Weeks
2. Camera Obscura - French Navy
3. Donora - I Think I Like You
4. Peter Bjorn and John - It Don’t Move Me
5. Tegan and Sara - On Directing

The Three Albums of 2009

1. The XX - XX
2. Tegan and Sara - Sainthood
3. Patrick Wolf - The Bachelor

Stuff that was begrudgingly taken off the songs lists:

• The XX - Crystalised
• Patrick Wolf - Hard Times
• Eels - Fresh Blood
• Donora - Shh
• Donora - Backbeat
• Donora - Photograph

Fun, but not “best” in any sense of the word

• Matt and Kim - Daylight
• Jay Z - Empire State of Mind

Old, but new to me

• The Temptations - I Can’t Get Next To You