I've been giving a lot of thought to my media blog lately. It is definitely my least popular blog. I think that in some sense this makes me hesitate to post in it more often. At the end of the day though, this is the subject that most interests me and in theory, this should be my most enjoyable blogging experience. I have decided that this really is going to be a labour of love and this is one blog that I am not going to do for an audience but just for my own blogging pleasure. This is the kind of blog that is most like a scrapbook where I can go back time after time and reminisce about all the films, books, music, theatre and television I have consumed and enjoyed in the past.
One thing which needs to change almost immediately is my music blogging. That kind of stalled because Last FM turned into the Great Evil Of The West (trademark pending). The other thing is that I was uploading mini-playlists but they are stored on my server and while I have tried to embed them in a player that prevents listener downloads, I know that I can get past that kind of player and so can other people. Essentially, if I cannot prevent users from downloading the music, then it is not really legal for me to store the files on my server and I most certainly don't want to be shut down. It also takes in excess of one hour to upload each of those posts and this is a problem. I blog as often as I can on my Emm In London blog (which naturally all goes into my Livejournal too) and I did kind of promise to update my Livejournal on a daily basis with all of my normal day to day thoughts. The whole media blog was also meant to be more ad hoc thus allowing for frequent posting. However, if a post is going to take at least one hour out of every week it starts to reduce the time that I can dedicate to that blog. Therefore, I am going to continue the playlists (when I can - see below)but I think I am going to try use Imeem playlists. Hopefully, that will be quicker, easier and more legal.
We got home last night and I plugged in iMandy (my 80gb video iPod) as I do every night and my PC said that it had lost the iTunes library. It very politely asked if I wanted to wipe iMandy clean and I even more politely declined. Damn. I have lost all of my playlists, ratings and play count history and not for the first time either. iMandy was a gift from Stephen for my birthday last year so she is here to stay but I definitely think I need to find a permanent alternative to iTunes and the iPod firmware too. Last year I used MediaMonkey when experiencing similar problems but at the time it did not help. (I had two sources for my library back then - one on a HDD andone on my c: drive. Eventually I had to give up and combine both drives). Chris says I must use Rockbox to replace my iPod firmware and that would help because I find the very, big video iPod screen gives you very little information on your music (such as genre and year). I'm a bit scared of getting rid of the iPod firmware and not being able to get it back. I often find all of these other applications too fluffy. Ideally, I would like to be able to use Windows Media Player to manage iMandy and I would like iMandy to look like WMP too.
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