I now have several tips on how not to move an iTunes library from a Windows machine to a Mac. The presmise is simple; firstly request iTunes consolidate the library on the source machine and then move the c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Music\iTunes folder to ~/Music/iTunes on the Mac.

So, what I would reccommend not to do:

• Simply copy the iTunes directory from an NTFS partition to a FAT formatted media. Somewhere between there and OSX I found special and unicode characters in the filenames got lost. Theoretically maybe this should work, but it didn't.
• Attempt to be "unixy" and use a Windows tar utility to a FAT disk. FAT only supports files less than 4GiB.
• Re-format the external media as NTFS and then use a Windows tar utility. Untarring on OSX resulted in even more screwed up filenames.
• Moving via samba/NFS

What I would recommend is using the 7-Zip utility to create an uncompressed archive of the directory on a NTFS formatted disk (for large file sizes) and then unarchiving it on OSX at the other end. This reliably handled all the crazy file names and the migrated library works perfectly.

posted at: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:23 | in /music | permalink | add comment (0 others)

A fantastic site I've stumbled upon lately is the Airmen of Note Archive. You don't get traditional big bands sounding consistently better than them.

They have an extensive audio archive for download with a small fee to support the bandwidth of the site. It seems a typically governmental thing to do to create amazing recordings and leave them to languish, and thankfully this site has dug them all up.

Clicking on the links to download all those MP3's isn't a very Linux user type thing to do. In that vein I've put a directory hierarchy filled with links to the albums and the album cover in airmen-download.tar.gz. Pay on the site for a user name, write a few scripts and you should be ready to go (feel free to mail me if you have no idea what to do). The original Python scripts I used to extract it all are available there too.

If you like Jazz, spend the $20 and get this fantastic collection. Although it's not all my taste, mostly because at times it feels a bit cheesy, it's a mine worth exploring for the fairly fairly frequent nuggets of solid gold.

posted at: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 16:32 | in /music | permalink | add comment (0 others)

My copy of Jack Gale's "12 Jazz Duets" arrived yesterday, ordered from Hickeys (who don't seem to let me link directly to a product). I believe this book is also available for trumpet and maybe even a few other instruments with the same arrangements transposed. I was pleasantly surprised; I was having so much fun I was up till after midnight with the good old Silent Brass!

It includes 12 Duets with a playalong CD; there are two copies of each track, one with both parts, one on the left and one on the right channel, and another copy with just the backing changes. Gale's playing is impeccable and his phrasing and styling are worth trying to emulate. At the tempos on the CD things get pretty hectic, here is a sample of one of the more straight forward blues. The duets move from blues through to rhythm changes, scatting, bop and post bop lines in a variety of normal keys.

It's a great work out for probably an advanced amateur. I think this is a great stepping stone into working on more advanced lines like you would find in a J.J solo transcription book or similar. Personally I think going in cold with those transcriptions is a bridge too far for most people; he wasn't considered a genius because he stuck with the lines and ideas that the aforementioned advanced amateur can keep up with! However, if you could pull off the juicy bits of this book in a few different keys you would be well an truly on your way to making the next step.

posted at: Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:36 | in /music/review | permalink | add comment (0 others)

Jazz Piano Comping for the Beginning Jazz Improvisor - Tom Anderson

I got this book on Amazon.com because I wanted to learn more about how to comp chords, thinking it might give me more of a harmonic framework when soloing.

It's not quite what I wanted ... I think I missed the "beginning jazz improvisor" and thought it was "beginning jazz piano comper". I'm no expert but I know my way around the basics; it starts right at the beginning and goes through chord theory, starting with majors and moving on to sevenths etc. At the end of each chapter is a written out song with voicings of mainly the type of chord the previous chapter talked about (I think they've done the same thing as the Jerry Coker "Improvising Jazz" book where the changes are for common songs but the title and written melody is different to avoid copyright).

That said, if I can find more time to learn the voicings in the chapters and make my way through the book it will be useful. If you do actually fit the title, it's probably to a bad, cheap buy.

posted at: Wed, 02 Feb 2005 17:27 | in /music/review | permalink | add comment (0 others)