Treasure Island Music Festival

Along with about 10,000 other people, I went to the inaugural Treasure Island Music Festival this weekend. I only went on Saturday for the (mostly) electronica day. We got there towards the beginning of the M.I.A. set, which ended up being a lot cooler than I thought it’d be. I had her first album, and given how produced it was I wasn’t sure how her live show would be, but it was pretty good.

After M.I.A. was the DJ Shadow/Cut Chemist doing 8 turntables and 4 mixers for their “Hard Sell” album. Pretty cool to see. I haven’t seen Cut Chemist since last I saw Jurassic 5 and I expected something quite a bit more hip-hop-y, but the set was a lot more of old school funk and other stuff that I hardly recognized.

Gotan Project (a group until Saturday I’d never heard of before) was nothing short of astounding. Tango + electronica + breaks. It was phenomenal. They came on stage with a full orchestra, including an accordionist, DJs, strings, horns, etc. I’ve been listening to their two CDs all morning. They had great stage presence as well.

The headliner was Thievery Corporation. I only had The Cosmic Game, and based on that I expected a super down tempo set. Au contraire, they delivered an jamming, rocking, hard hitting show with three or four singers, drums, DJs, and sitar in tow. I still think Gotan stole the show but the Thievery set was a lot more fun to listen to than I’d expected.

New Music: Common and Talib Kweli

Over the weekend I picked up two new albums: Common’s Finding Forever and and Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum. Finding Forever feels like a lot of the same stuff I loved from Be, and overall it continues to hold strong on Common’s delivery plus Kanye West’s beats. There’s a lot of sampling going on that flows together well, much like some old Jurassic 5. This album is the one I’ve got on repeat in the car.

The Talib album disappoints though. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten in to any Talib albums ever since Quality. The Beautiful Struggle had some great tracks on it (Black Girl Pain stands out), but Ear Drum seems to be in the same vein. I love the track with Jean Grae, but I still compare all of his work to Quality and Black Star, which is why I think I’ll probably never be impressed with what comes next.

Fixing Total Tracks and Removing Album Artist in iTunes

iTunes seems to have a bug if you edit the album artists on an album, it blows away the total number of tracks for a song. I had a bunch of songs that had album artists for half the tracks in the album but not the others, which cased all sorts of havoc when trying to play an album since iTunes can’t figure out the order to play them in any more.

I wrote up a little script to remove the Album Arist and also to fix up any places where the total number of tracks for a song is incorrect. It looks at the other tracks for the album to find what the correct total should be, so it’s only useful if at least one track in the album has the correct total.

I put the script up on Pastie, http://pastie.caboo.se/72537, and also below. It’s not the fastest thing, but it works (for me). Use at your own risk, I’m not responsible, yadda yadda yadda.

var   iTunesApp = WScript.CreateObject("iTunes.Application");
var   mainLibrary = iTunesApp.LibraryPlaylist;
var   tracks = mainLibrary.Tracks;
var   i;
var allAlbumsToArtist = new Array();
var allAlbumsToTrackCount = new Array();
 

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{

        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        allAlbumsToArtist[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.Artist;

        if(currTrack.TrackCount > 0)
        {
                allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album] = currTrack.TrackCount;
        }

}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        WScript.Echo ("removing album aritst for  " + currTrack.Name);
        currTrack.AlbumArtist = "";
}

for (i = 1; i <= tracks.Count; i++)
{
        var   currTrack = tracks.Item(i);
        if(!(currTrack.TrackCount > 0))
        {
                var totalTracks = allAlbumsToTrackCount[currTrack.Album];
                if(totalTracks > 0)
                {
                        WScript.Echo ("changing  " + currTrack.Name + " to total tracks " + totalTracks);                
                        currTrack.TrackCount = totalTracks;
                }
        }
}