To Whom It May Concern

Music To Dance By When Sand Is Infiltrating Your Crack

Back in the middle of August of 2005, our unit spent about a week back in Wayne at the armory getting equipment loaded, personnel issues settled, etc, before our trip to the mobilization site at Ft. Riley, Kansas. If you lived within 30 miles of Wayne, you were allowed to go home and be with your family. The rest of us, well, they put us up in a motel.

So what does this have to do with my journal, nearly a year later? Well, for that 4 or 5 days I was in that motel, I holed myself up every night using Audiograbber to rip all 220 or so of my CD’s from wave file into mp3 files. Pop in one cd, as it would rip into mp3’s I would type out the names of the songs onto the files inside the folder, over and over AND OVER AND yah, well, you get the picture.

I was getting so pissed off though, because about 4 or 5 cd’s in I realized that the fucking files were not staying in track order, they would go to alphabetical or some other goofed up order, much to my irritation. So I ended up adding 01 and 02 etc to every file just to keep them in order.

So it took me pretty much ALL of my free time every night to get that done, while everyone else would be out drinking and partying, because I really wanted to have my music here in the Sand Box. FINALLY I was done, and then the first time I opened up Windows Media Player to listen to a cd, WMP connected to the internet and started renaming my tracks on the cd, in this case some Japanese classical composer. Of course, a few **(@*#ING **@#** &G spewed forth, because this was a shitload of work I did to put that many cd’s together and WMP was dicking up my work and I didn’t know why.

Thankfully belly told me about a beautiful little program called Winamp, which I immediately downloaded and it worked fabulously, except… none of the names of the songs would come up, they would list as just no name tracks. Again, frustration, and despite searching all over to find out how I could name them correctly I was unable to remedy the situation.

Yes, well, turns out I completely wasted my time naming all of these files just in the folder, I discovered a couple days ago that I should have been highlighting the songs in the folder, going to Properties, then Summary, and I could have added in a whole bunch of information, such as artist, song name, year, track number, even lyrics, genre, and other information. Even Windows Media Player has the ability to do that, although it’s not as in depth as adding in the information in the file properties while in the folder. Oh, and the kicker? Yah, it would have named each file individually in the folder, I wouldn’t have had to do it myself OR add in that stupid “01 02 03” in front of the files, because the track order can be added in too!!!

How did I miss this, you might ask? I’m certain that most of you are shaking your head thinking I’m a complete idiot for not knowing this, but when you do open Properties and go to Summary for a file, if you click right next to the Artist or Album Title, etc, it won’t open up to let you change the text, oh but if you move the cursor over just a little bit to the right, you can. THAT LITTLE F’ING OVERSIGHT IS WHY I HAD ALL THIS TROUBLE!! But then, I look on the bright side, I would likely not be using Winamp, which I really prefer over Windows Media Player. Winamp isn’t all tied into every Windows application like WMP seems to be. One problem, every time pop up blocker beeps or some other application makes a beep or ding, it screws up the sound on Winamp, and I haven’t found out how to keep that from happening, just short of shutting off sound altogether on my other applications, which would be ridiculous.

So now that I know how to correctly name my mp3 files so that they are compatible with all of the different musical applications out there, I will be redoing a few thousand file names. And of course, I’m very anal about my music, so I’m adding in as much information as I can. This includes my time off yesterday, spent perusing the net looking for what year every one of my albums was released in. Particularly troublesome: classical composers. I have about half a dozen cd’s of Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, etc, and unfortunately they are typically obscure titles that no one seems to have information about on the internet.

Now if I was at home, I would just look on the cd itself to see when it was released, but here I do not have that luxury. I’m thinking instead, I’ll just go back and put in the year the composer died. That would be better anyway, wouldn’t you agree?

Something I really don’t have a lot of in my music collection are obscure artists. Yah, I have a few, like Bass 305, an album consisting pretty much entirely of earth shattering low frequency tones to induce maximum performance from one’s subwoofers. Then there is my Days Of Thunder Soundtrack. Got that for Christmas one year from one of my sisters. Why the hell did I hold onto that??? Then there are 4 or 5 ‘freebie’ cd’s that I got when I bought different cd players over the years. Kept those too. Yah, that’s me, I’m anal about my music, I tend to keep it forever.

Something I have a LOT of is big hair guitar rock, and guitar rock in general. If it was in the 80’s and it had big hair, leather pants, screaming high vocals, and power ballads, there’s probably a 90% chance that I’ve got it. Is this sad??? Hell no it isn’t, if you can’t appreciate the bridge in Def Leppard’s ‘Armageddon It’ or you aren’t impressed by Slash’s 2 guitar solos in Guns N’ Roses ‘Estranged’, then you really don’t know what you are missing out on. If Quiet Riot’s “Cum On Feel The Noize” is just NOISE to you, or if “Epic” by Faith No More has you saying “WHAT IS IT?” for real, you really don’t understand or appreciate the music of that era, and well, you are dumb, yah I said it, DUMB!

There are NO concerts today that even come close to what the guitar bands of the late 80’s and early 90’s did, and I mean that, no one comes close. Loud, crazy, hot women everywhere, it was just one gigantic party where 50,000 people all had one thing on their mind, seeing one of their favorite bands up on stage tearing it up. Well, two things, I guess thoughts of the opposite sex were evident. The outfits, the hair, the pyrotechnics, the crazy behavior, today’s bands are preschool by comparison. Would I ever blame grunge alternative rock for the demise of the ‘Big Hair’ era? Nah, not really. It’s the progression of music.

Even alternative and grunge ended up fading away, more due to the blending of so many musical types that there was no clear alternative music anymore than any other reason. But I will always miss the rhythmic guitar of bands like Skid Row, Firehouse, and Van Halen. And while some of them are still making music, it’s not nearly as good or ‘fresh’ as it was back then. I consider myself lucky to have grown up in that era, music nowadays mostly f’ing stinks. At least now I can name my White Lion tracks correctly for all to enjoy!

Current Lyrical Ramblings

Full of sorrow, your eyes are too wide and too new
Though I know these feelings I get when you're near
Even I...I can't give you love without fear
You're too young, I don't know what's keeping me here

Wait For You - Bonham