Boredom-Fueled Blog

I am now the owner of every Beatles album officially released (which I consider to be every album on this page). From Please Please Me to Love and everything in between – it’s all on my iPod.
Two-hundred-twenty-one songs were released by the Beatles between the years 1962-70, 1995-96. While scrolling through the list of venerable songs, one word seems to summarize the prevalent idea that the Beatles were trying to get across: love. Interestingly, the first word of their first single (“Love Me Do”) and the last word of their last single (“Real Love”) is “love.” “All you need is love”… “have you heard the word is love?”

Statistics:
Amount of songs released by the Beatles on every album, including post-breakup: 588
Amount of songs released by the Beatles on every album, not including post-breakup: 221
Amount of GBs every Beatles song will take up on your iPod: 1.95
Amount of time it would take to listen to every song: 1 day, 2 hours, 23 minutes, 43 seconds
Album most likely to show up in “Shuffle”: Live at the BBC (69 songs)
Album least likely to show up in “Shuffle”: Let It Be (12 songs)
Song most likely to show up in “Shuffle”: “Get Back” with seven different copies/versions
Number of songs featuring Lennon on lead vocals: 133
Number of songs featuring McCartney on lead vocals: 124
Number of songs featuring Harrison on lead vocals: 48
Number of songs featuring Starr on lead vocals: 14
Number of songs credited to Lennon/McCartney: 161
Number of songs credited to Harrison: 23
Number of songs credited to Starkey: 2
Number of songs credited to Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starkey: 5
Number of cover songs released: 24

You’re probably thinking, “Who cares? What a waste of precious megabytes.” If you’re thinking that, you are so right. Who needs seven different versions of “Get Back” or five “Eight Days A Week”s or even three “Kansas City/Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey”s? Well, I don’t know who needs those things, but if I ever meet ‘em, I’ll have it all in my pocket.

Music iPod Touch, iTunes, The Beatles

I hit an iPod landmark today when my order of the Beatles’s Anthology 3 arrived in the mail. My iPod Touch now holds a solid day of music… if I wanted to, and had nothing else going on, I could listen to music for twenty-four hours non-stop (plus an extra eleven minutes, to boot).
I have 449 songs that take up a mere 1.73 GB of my 8 GB total.
Here is a break-down of the amounts of different musical groups I have on my iPod currently:

Some notes on the graph:
- I have other songs, but I chose not to include them here because I had only one song per artist.
- When tallying individual artists I do not include in their total any band they were in. (Cream is separate from Eric Clapton/The Beatles is separate from it’s members.)

Music iPod Touch, The Beatles

This is the account of a true story involving me, eBay, Beatles vinyls, and a computer. Before reading this, you need to know my reasoning and little obsessive foibles: yes, of course, I could just buy the CDs, but that’s simply not the same to me… and no, you don’t need to have album artwork on your iPod- it’s not required, but it would seem unfinished if I didn’t have the album artwork. I’m just kind of weird like that…
So recently I have been buying Beatles LPs off eBay. I enjoy listening to them on a turntable, but that’s not very convenient for long car trips or jogging, so I decided to convert the songs to .aiff files so I could play them on my iPod.
August 21: For my first attempt I decided to use “Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits.” Things seemed fine. I put my personal favorites from the album onto my iPod, added the album art work, and everything seemed fine.
August 27: As luck would have it, several days later the computer developed a “malicious virus” and had to go to the computer ER. When I got it back, the image program I primarily used, Picture It! 9, was no more!…
September 1: Then I recorded the “Let It Be” album. Sound quality seemed fine to me, but I could not figure out how to add album artwork without Picture It! 9… Oh, well, I guess, but then the real problem occurrs… read on…
sometime in Mid-September: Eventually, I got around to recording “Sgt. Pepper” and the main vocal track of the title song was missing. For a moment, I feared that I had accidentally purchased the karaoke version of the album (and even thought that I could make a lot of money on such a rare item). Soon I realized that it was because I was recording a stereo track in mono… but the me of two months ago didn’t own an RCA stereo mini (or even know what one was).
So let’s recap: where does this leave me? No album artwork, worthless sound quality.
Early October: Time to fight back. First off, album artwork. After many failed ideas and a time-wasting call to iTunes support (“Yes, we have determined we can not solve your Apple iTunes problem”), I figured out what to do…
So, I put the songs from the record to a computer, from the computer to a CD, from the CD to a different computer, and from the different computer to my iPod. Yes, it’s a lot of work for album artwork… but I still have to worry about the sound quality problems.

Mid-October: I buy an RCA stereo mini cord… it works. Sound quality still sounds a bit fuzzy and a click once in a blue moon, but that’s to be expected when you’re using a cheap program and old records.
November 2: I have decided that the next time I come upon spare cash, I’ll be buying the Beatles CDs… just so that I’m not bothered by those clicks and fuzzy background effects. The way I figure, this way works the best – I get the old school vinyls (which I prefer), and I get the new age hipster CDs, which offer better sound quality… so pretty much, this whole thing could’ve been avoided.

Music ebay, iPod Touch, The Beatles