GrumpyRocker

Oh dear this is a long way from the Sirenia we know and love.

There are two reasons for this - a turn to a more poppy direction in terms of arrangements (I can live with that). The second reason - the awful vocals from Ailyn. I'm surprised that Morten Veland has given her another run out after the last album The 13th Floor (a slightly better album than this). Ailyn is often flat and even when she's in tune sounds really whiny. She has a good pop voice, but no sense of rock or metal dynamics as you hear from singers such as Epica's Simone Simons.

A big thanks go to Bill Door for his invaluable advice regarding the subject of mp3 player capacity and file sizes.

You see I've been labouring under the misaprehension that the mp3 file format was any good. But it isn't. It's old, flaky and takes up way too much room. There are much better options around.

Both my mp3 players support Microsoft's WMA format. And while the sort of saddo who types M$ instead of MS may scoff, the fact is that it's an excellent format. I've just done a listening test and a 64kbps WMA file sounded just as good on my iRiver Clix 2 as a 192kbps mp3 file. That's the same sound with a file a third of a size.

You can see where I'm going with this can't you?

I've been on a bit of a music kick for a while now. A new guitar and amp (thanks darling) mean I'm basting in creative juices. The side effect of this is that I'm listening to a lot of music now - often listening to an album before going to sleep rather than reading for a while.

And the result of this has left me in a pickle, albeit a small one. Or two small ones even.

The first is pretty simple. I've decided I want to rip my entire CD collection to hard disk. That's not a major problem. We have a fast desktop PC with plenty of room to spare. The major issue here is putting in the effort to do it. My solution is likely to be taking a small pile of CDs to the study every time I work in there and rip while I work.

The more pressing issue is that I've no room on my mp3 players for all the music I'd want to carry around. This isn't a problem I've come up against before, I've always said that no-one needs to take more than 4GB of music with them because you just don't have that many favourites.