Currently listening to … Ozarker from Israel Nash 🎶

Listen on Spotify

Currently listening to … In Time by The Emerald Dawn 🎶

I’ve followed this band since seeing them perform at a gig in a friend’s garden last year.

Listen to the single on Spotify or catch the whole album on Bandcamp.

Currently listening to … Status Quo was the first band I saw many decades ago and I’m still listening and enjoying them after all this time, despite there only being Francis Rossi left of the original “Frantic Four.”

This is the new release of a live concert from 2010, with Rick Parfitt. 🎶

Listen on Spotify

Currently listening to the four singles taken from the new album, Carolyn’s Boy from Darius Rucker planned for 6th October. I looking forward to listing to the rest of the album.

“I wanted to name the record Carolyn’s Boy because Mom never got to see any of my success,” Rucker offered in the interview. “She died before any of this happened, so it’s just another homage to the greatest woman I’ve ever known.” When asked why he wanted to put this album out now, Rucker shared, “Years ago, I wasn’t really sure what my place in country music was and I was trying to find it. Now I have found it—I know—and I think it’s time to give that record.” 🎶

Currently listening to … Threnody For A Dead Queen from Comedy of Errors.

🎶

Currently listening to … But Here We Are from Foo Fighters.

I think it’ll need a couple of listens before I make my mind up. Listen on Spotify. 🎶

I enjoyed the first episode of “The Gallows Pole” on the BBC yesterday. It’s the tale of the rise of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners. Set in the moorland hills of 18th Century Yorkshire, the drama follows the enigmatic David Hartley as he assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a revolutionary criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history.

I haven’t read the book, but I suspect it doesn’t end well for the Coiners…

The soundtrack is available on BBC Sounds and on Spotify.

Currently listening to … Mirror to the Sky from Yes.

Really enjoying this album. Listen on Spotify. 🎶

Currently listening to … The Clockwork Saga from Gandalf’s Fist.

This album is available on Bandcamp as a combined 5 act adventure, encompassing all songs from “The Clockwork Fable” (2016) and “The Clockwork Prologue” (2019) Albums in full narrative order. Links open in Spotify.

Currently listening to … First Two Pages of Frankenstein by The National.

This is the first proper album from The National since 2017’s Sleep Well Beast. It’s worth a close listen. Listen on Spotify 🎶

Currently listening to … Fuse by Everything But The Girl.

This is the first album from EBTG in 24 years - it was worth the wait! Listen on Spotify 🎶

Currently listening to … Multitudes from Feist.

Listen on Spotify 🎶

Why invest in Roon when Apple’s Music (the app, not the service) and Spotify are “free?”

I wanted to use Apple Music to bring all my music into one place, consisting of over 2,000 albums I’ve ripped or purchased that sat on a Synology NAS and music from Apple’s streaming service. Unfortunately, this approach didn’t work because Apple struggled to match my albums with the versions on its servers.

After days spent watching Apple Music processing & uploading, I gave up. The workaround was to have two Apple Music libraries, one for digital files and another for streaming music, which wasn’t an elegant or practical solution.

I own a Naim Uniti Atom, which supports Apple’s service via AirPlay, but Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz are better integrated. I’ve used Spotify for many years and still have a free account, but the continued lack of high-res content left me looking for another provider. I tried Tidal but grew tired of the way they push music I don’t like at me. Ultimately, I settled on Qobuz, and bought a 12-month subscription.

I still didn’t have all of my music in one place. After some research during the Christmas break, I signed up for a 14-day trial of Roon.

As a test, I installed Roon on my MacBook Air, pointed it at a subset of my music collection, added my Qobuz subscription, sat back whilst Roon scanned my music and installed the mobile app on my iPhone and iPad.

Roon must always be on and connected to the Internet to work correctly, so using my MacBook as the Roon server wasn’t a long-term solution. I couldn’t use my Synology NAS as it was in storage between houses, and the spec was too low to support Roon.

As an interim solution, I bought a “previously enjoyed” NUC from eBay. I installed Roon ROCK, which is a dedicated operating system and Roon core with the music files located on an external SSD drive. It’s a relatively old i5 model but came with 16Gb RAM. It sits in the kitchen, next to the router and has never missed a beat.

It manages almost 30,000 tracks across my music and what I’ve saved as favourites in Qobuz.

Use this link for a free 30-day trial, but be warned—it’s addictive.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about some of the benefits of using Roon.

Listening to … Dub No Frontiers by Adrian Sherwood

This was recommended by i newspaper’s Ian Dunt, who said:

Really well thought-through collection by British producer Adrian Sherwood, who challenges the male-dominated world of reggae with a female-only album. That’s laudable, but this stuff only works where the content is good. What’s extraordinary here is the delicate balance of diversity and consistency. It’s all elegantly produced, emphasising the vocals, but the vocals veer from Mandarin Chinese to Japanese to Hindi. A really impeccable effort.

I couldn’t agree more.

Listen on Spotify 🎶

One of the things I really appreciate about roon is the discovery tab that surfaces music in your library that you haven’t listened to for a while. This is today’s:

🎶