In case you were wondering, Johnny Costa was the musical director and pianist for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I told Twyla a while ago that it sounded like Bill Evans primarily because Bill Evans is the only jazz pianist I know. She told me I was crazy. It’s been bugging me for a while so I finally looked it up. She was right of course but it turns out Mr. Costa was an accomplished and well regarded jazz pianist in his own right. All the music for the show was done live by Mr. Costa’s in-studio jazz trio.

Also learned today that Mister Rogers’ middle name was McFeely.

So, there you go, that should fill your useless knowledge quota for today.

The day the music industry died - It’s been dying a slow death for years now; good riddance. As the value these large corporations provide to artists approaches zero, so should their compensation from the consumer. Especially for those of us who haven’t bought a cd in years, if this heralds a new way to fairly reimburse artists, bring it on. Now… off to google “Free Albums Galore!”

MediaMonkey now rules my digital library. Well, *music* library at least. Over the past few months I’ve tried a few different apps for managing my music but finally settled into MediaMonkey with good results.

Favorite features:

• Browse files based on tag properties. It’s similar to the iPod’s menu system listing tracks by artist, album, year, etc.
• Keeps my tags in order with the Auto-Tag from Amazon option ^[1]. This works 90% of the time and occasionally requires some manual intervention but it’s quite handy.

  

• Keeps my filesystem tidy with the Auto-Organize Files option. I love this. It renames files and directories for me using a standard path structure and based on the tag properties.
• No more iTunes! They’ve got a plugin that does a great job of sync’ing my iPod. But… and it’s a big one… it doesn’t handle video ^[2].

I started converting TV shows to mp4’s for the daily commute (more on that later). But the MediaMonkey iPod plugin doesn’t support sync’ing videos. There are a bunch of stand-alone iPod managers out there but what’s worked best so far is Winamp. Yup, Winamp’s iPod plugin handles video with no problem. Just right-click an .mp4 file and select “Send to iPod” ^[3]. Done and done. It’s a pain having to use two different apps but this setup works without too much trouble.

Notes:
1. I’ve played with Picard and like the idea for updating tags but it’s still too finicky for me.
2. The other downside is it only runs on Windows, no Linux support.
3. For some strange reason, Winamp forces you to specify a specific folder on you hard drive for each iPod video category: Movies, Music Videos, etc. Make sure you set this up in Preferences -> General Preferences -> iPod Support -> Audio & Video -> Folders. Otherwise everything will be dumped into the Music Videos category on your iPod.

Update 2-Oct-2007: I forgot to mention that the default mp3 encoder included with MediaMonkey will expire after 30 days so you might as well install the LAME encoder immediately. Download it here then copy lame_enc.dll to the top-level MediaMonkey install directory (for me it’s C:\Program Files\MediaMonkey\).