What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)  Inspired by Stephanie.

I rarely listen to my iPod on shuffle. Usually, I queue up several albums and just let them play, or create a specific playlist of songs I'd like to hear right now. The exception is when I'm driving a long distance, occasionally I like to break the monotony with the unexpected juxtapositions that a random playlist offers.

After putting my music player on shuffle, here are the first ten songs to play:

Mountain Goats: "Chinese Rifle Song" from Yam, the King of Crops

Julie Doiron: "Shivers + Crickets" from Heart and Crime

Morrissey: "Ouija Board, Ouija Board" from Bona Drag

Architecture in Helsinki: "City Calm Down" from Fingers Crossed

Jens Lekman: "Too Happy" from spelar i Kalmar 17/12

CocoRosie: "Terrible Angels" from Le Maison de Mon Reve

Josephine Foster: "The Way Is Sweetly Mown" from Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You

Johnny Cash: "What Do I Care" from The Essential Johnny Cash

Devendra Banhart: "Korean Dogwood" from Cripple Crow

Casey Dienel: "Embroidery" from Wind-Up Canary

I am a fan of singer-songwriters, who would have known?

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What are your three favorite album covers of all-time? Any honorable mentions?

Question submitted by Tamara.

While there aren't my favorite three album covers of all time, they're all gorgeous and memorable in their own ways.

Spelled in Bones

Something beautiful by the inimitable Jay Ryan of the Bird Machine. I love the colors, the wavy  air lines, the way the typography flows,  and the tiny bits of character that pop up in his work. The attention to detail is amazing.  He's also done a ton of show posters for Chicago area events, a series of drawings for the last Andrew Bird album, and has a book out, which I highly recommend.

Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See

This is the cover of Okkervil River's second album, as done by William Schaff. Schaff will forever be associated with Okkervil River and Will Sheff to me, since that is how I was first exposed to his lovely artwork. Schaff has done pretty much every single Okkervil release since, and taken as a body of work, it's really impressive. His figures tend to be dark, heartbreakin, poignant, and oftentimes frightening; this is one of his more lighthearted drawings. I love the tiny stitched heart on the chest of the shirt, and the broken guitar on the musician's back.

And lastly, Neko Case.

Furnace Room Lullaby

While Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is probably her best work, this album cover is incredibly evocative in the way she's fallen on her hands, her mouth is slightly open, the way her hair falls on her face.

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Fewer Moving Parts

As I finalized my half-year list of 2006 favorite books and music, I was listening to Fewer Moving Parts (which incidentally made the list), the new solo  EP from Pedro the Lion frontman David Bazan.

The EP is unique, in that Bazan offers five songs, then the stripped-down demos of the same songs (in the same order). Surprisingly, I love both the studio and demo versions. Where the studio songs excel musically, the demos bring Bazan's songwriting to the forefront.

This track, made available by Bazan, is a rough mix of the studio version, so it falls somewhere between the studio and acoustic version.

David Bazan - Backwoods Nation (Speeding the Collapse) (rough mix)

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Like many people, I follow a few mp3 blogs. Well, okay, that's an understatement. I probably subscribe to 15-20 mp3blogs, downloading songs a few at a time using the DownloadThemAll Firefox extension into an mp3blogs folder on my hard drive. I'm guessing this is a problem for a lot of people...the painful process of sitting down and going through that incoming mp3s folder of all of the stuff you've downloaded in the last week.

For a while now, I've been adding songs in batches when I've built up a few, and listening to them in one sitting. But that makes iTunes really messy, particularly because I use a smart playlist for the most recently added tracks. Most of my library is full albums so having a bunch of singlets really sticks out.

What I really want is to tell iTunes to make a smart playlist based upon file folder location -- tell it to make a playlist from all of the files in a particular folder. Or even just to say "make a list with all the files that have 'mp3blogs' in their filename" so I can easily tell what random non-full-album songs I've added to the library recently, but there doesn't seem to be an option to do that in iTunes. I tried getting this "Link playlist to folder" script to work, but no dice. When I run it, nothing happens. And when I try to compile, I get an access permissions that I can't grok. I'm not an l33r AppleScript hax0r so that doesn't help either.

One kink in my is that I turned off the "Copy files to iTunes Music Library" and "Keep my music folder organized" options since they were driving me nuts due to two things. First off, there's a shitload of bad ID3 tags in a lot of stuff I download. And secondly, I, um, often acquire items via BitTorrent on a laptop with limited hard drive space so it doesn't make sense to copy the files to iTunes' music library. Luckily, my main music collection lives in a separate, happy media server that is 95% well-organized and tagged.

I guess this wouldn't be such a big problem if all mp3 blogs had their mp3s as enclosures in their RSS feeds (most don't) or put their info in the ID3 tag somewhere (kludgy but Said the Gramophone does this.)

Anybody have a solution or suggestion to fix this problem? Suggestions as to a better/easier workflow are also encouraged.

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