Posting brief music bullets
The new Sizzling Keys for iTunes and its redesigned, self-resizing floater window positively rocks.
My only gripe so far is that the pop-up search bezel can't reach into my connected iPod, where all my music really lives. (But, neither can Party Shuffle, Quicksilver, or much of anything else other than iTunes' plain old browser.)
Just had "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" from Wang Chung pop up in my shuffle from one of my various 80's CDs.
I'd never heard this before, but somewhere in the middle of the babbling and ad-lib around 3:21 into the song, someone croons "Can you tell me what a Wang Chung is?"
Cracked me up, it did. Though, I'm sure I'm the last person on the planet not to have heard this.
After running through an all-day playlist, I just realized that the last three Dream Theater albums all link together, with respect to the sound on which one album fades out and the next fades back in.
Scenes from a Memory fades out with the sound of a record having ended and the needle dragging around on the label--and Six Degrees of Inner Turbluence starts with that sound. That album, then, ends with a certain synthesizer chord fading out--which is picked up and faded back in with the first track of Train of Thought.
I love this sort of detail some musicians throw into their work. This is the sort of thing you don't tend to get from collecting and shuffling singles via file-sharing networks or the iTunes Music Store.
Of course, concept albums and rock operas don't lend well to singles-collecting or shuffle mode either.