fuzmeister: Listening Statistics

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Last.fm is a great tool for tracking listening statistics, but, often times, longer albums will naturally carry more weight for a user statistics often skewing statistically what a listener's actual favorite releases by a given artist might be. The concept of "album listens" or "actual favorites" is an attempt to rectify last.fm statistics and actually attempt to break down what a user's favorites might be (not simply what has been played the most).

The concept goes as such:
Overall Listens from Album / Tracks on Album = "Album Listens"

An example below shows two Pink Floyd albums - each has a very different number of tracks (one being a double album and the other having a mere five tracks). While "The Wall" has had significantly more listens due to the sheer scope of the album, "Wish You Were Here" checks out as being the album that was listened to more frequently!


Wish You Were Here
161 / 5 = 32.2

The Wall
547 / 26 = 21.04


I'd like to actually use the last.fm webservice and build a front end that does a comparison of overall plays vs. actual favorites.

Mood: Fatigued
Music: The Stooges - I Wanna Be Your Dog


Tags (beta): music, development, webservices, last.fm

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fuzmeister: The Endless River

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You know - Pink Floyd is definitely one of my favorite groups ever. The music those guys created will forever be deeply ingrained in my consciousness and, as I grew up, I appreciated their music for different reasons. I basically enjoy each era of the band for what it is, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't skeptical when a "new" album built off of twenty year old fragments was announced.

Well, November has come and, after months of anticipation, I've listened to The Endless River several times. First off, the band announced early on that the album would be mostly instrumental and described it as "ambient." This is 100% true and, despite a few lackluster slumps, the album actually flows quite well and remains interesting throughout. There are some excellent guitar solos by David Gilmour here, but it's the late Rick Wright who really shines throughout the release. These may be table scraps, but they are delicious and meaty.

A major gripe I have with the sequencing of the tracks isn't order of them, but how they are divided up into such small pieces. It's pretty obvious listening to this album that each "side" is supposed to be a single piece - fragmenting these into multiple tracks will ruin the album for anyone who might be listening to their music library on shuffle and hears a 1 minute drum solo-centric piece out of context. This is, however, 2014 and I'm sure the music industry frowns on releasing an album containing a mere four tracks (even if each is around 13 minutes long).

I did feel like there was actually room on quite a few of the pieces for vocals; this lost potential makes part of The Endless River feel underdeveloped to me. The closing track "Louder Than Words" is the closest to a traditional song on the record and is a mixed bag for me. While I've never been one of the many who hate the lyricism of post-Waters Pink Floyd, I can't deny there are some terrible lyrics on this cut. The genuine passion in Gilmour's vocal delivery allows the listener to forgive some of the terrible lyrics, but, all in all, "High Hopes" served as a significantly better closing track to their long career.

So what's the final verdict for The Endless River? Well, it's impossible to measure it up against watershed albums like Dark Side of The Moon and Wish You Were Here at this point - partially because of nostalgia and partially because that's just not what The Endless River is intended to be. For what this album is, it's excellent; these guys are all masters of their craft and this album shows anyone still in doubt that they could create excellent music without Roger Waters in the band (seriously, why is this still a debate?). Parts of the album could benefit from even some lyrics (I'm not talking about forcing some verse/chorus/verse thing), but, surprising even to me, these instrumentals are interesting enough to carry you through the record. The Endless River is a fine tribute to Rick Wright and the strong musicianship of Pink Floyd; I only wish those guys had done something sooner while they were all around.

Good night, sweet Pink, and thank you for this extra icing on the sonic cake that's sustained me through the years of my life.

Mood: Introspective
Music: Pink Floyd - Anisina


Tags (beta): music, pink floyd, reviews

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fuzmeister: Unmotivated

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I'm feeling pretty unmotivated lately to work on what I'd call "personal projects."

I've got a slew of weird, new songs on my computer that I should really finish up and release to the public, but I'm really just not feeling it at the moment. These songs are kind of a mixture of styles, but lean towards embracing electronic music rather than rock music: arpeggiators, vocoders, breakbeats.

I love rock and roll and the dynamic from playing with a full band, but I've been doing a lot of recording on my own this year and really felt freed by working without expectations or specific direction. I'm not forcing myself to write traditional songs as much as doing what I'm interested in or being challenged by. I don't know that people will like the end result, but it's been a refreshing way for me to work on things after demo-ing ten or so "rock" songs last year that have yet to be officially recorded/released.

I've kind of been on and off again with game development stuff too. Helibomber SDX was released in April and I really didn't promote it or anything. I think I realized the landscape for the independent developer is incredibly saturated these days. I question the reasoning behind taking on a large project by yourself; yeah, it's usually a labor of love, but the man-hours invested by the end may not be worth it. That being said, I've still worked on and off on the new-ish S&F project which I will say is Trevor-related. No clue when it'll be done, but hopefully someday...

I guess I've just had to take a step back to re-evaluate why I'm doing some things I'm doing in life... It sounds deeper than it is. I might just be being lazy lately.

Mood: Introspective
Music: Nine Inch Nails - Zero-Sum


Tags (beta): motivation

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fuzmeister: Guardians of The Galaxy

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Kate and I caught this one last night. I was on the fence on seeing it in the theater since I'm not super familiar with the source material, but, damn, this was a fun movie!

The whole film captured the essence of Star Wars quite well in some ways. The half-action/half-comedic tone worked really well and I loved the soundtrack. The casting was excellent as well, though I wasn't particularly attached to Zoey Saldana's character.

The infinity stone macguffin was completely forgivable just based on how much fun this movie was. I'm quite excited to see the direction they take the already-announced sequel in. Deeper story, more laughs, more awesome music - do it, Marvel!

Mood: Satisfied


Tags (beta): film, movies, marvel, ooga-chaka

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fuzmeister: The Cover of the New Foo Fighters Record Reminds Me of Sim City 2000!

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Sim City Foo-Thousand

Mood: Intrigued


Tags (beta): music

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