Thursday, September 14, 2006

MOC and Music That Still Moves Me

I've never been one to obsess over my music. My digitized collection has always been what you might call a 'dogs breakfast'. I've ripped my own CD's as required but never made any concerted effort to digitize my entire collection. What music I do have on my hard drive is neither sorted nor categorized, neither rated, nor tagged. But I do enjoy it just the same.

Over the last few years I've imported my music into a few different applications such as Windows Media Player, ITunes, and more recently Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Listen. All of these applications are great, each has their own specific approach to playing my music, and many times this involves building a catalogue of all my music. But to be honest, they've all been a little over the top for me. Enter MOC (Music on Console)...


MOC is a console-based music application for Linux. I've been using it for a little over a week now and I'm loving it. Here are some reasons why:

1. It's lightweight in terms of system overhead.
2. It's configurable, keyboard controlled, and simple to use.
3. It doesn't attempt to catalog my music.
4. You can create playlists and store them.
5. It can easily be set to run unobtrusively in the background.
6. All the standard player functionality like shuffle, repeat, skip, etc.. is only a keystroke away.
7. It's open source.


While playing around with it I've been running into some songs I haven't listened to in quite a while. My musical tastes (like all my other interests) have varied over time. For instance, right now I'm going through your typical late 30's male skate-punk wannabe pseudo-diluted mid-life crisis phase where I find myself listening to Blink182 and Our Lady Peace - good grief!

But in the course of re-exploring my music collection I've come across several songs where I've thought: "Hey.. I can see (or hear) why I used to love that song!" They're from varying genres, but they all strike a nerve and either get me weepy or playing air-guitar. Here are a few of them and, like my music collection, they are in no particular order:

1. Charlie Sexton - Impressed
2. Three Dog Night - Shambala
3. David Lee Roth - Goin' Crazy
4. Howard Jones - Like to Get To Know You Well
5. Jim Croce - Time in a Bottle
6. Neil Diamond - I Am I Said (!)
7. Styx - Come Sail Away
8. Squeeze - Goodbye Girl
9. Van Morrison - Brown Eyed Girl
10. The Box - L'Affair Du Moutier
11. Van Halen - 5150
12. Louis Armstrong - La Vie en Rose
13. The Fabulous Thunderbirds - Wrap It Up
14. Jimi Hendrix - Stone Free
15. Tracy Chapman - The Promise

What are some of those songs that used to (and still) move you?

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