Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Except for… (another album thread)
While we’re on the album musing mood, which albums in your opinion would have been a listen-straight-through album, were it not for this horrible or obtuse or otherwise misfitting track which you think lets the album down?
You’re playing the whole album, but you can’t even bear to listen to this track – you have to skip it.
It doesn’t belong. It’s not representative. It’s an embarrassment. The album would be far better without it.
Comments
For me it's not usually a bad song that ruins the album so much as an OVERPLAYED song, like if there was one big hit and the rest was ignored.
Eg. Rock the Casbah on The Clash's Combat Rock.
That would be "Waiting for Cousteau". Not one, but three weird calypso tracks that make no damn sense when following those is one of my top 5 favourite ambient masterpieces of all time, the titular 40+ minute piece. It evolves so slowly but so perfectly that you hardly notice the changes without skipping around the track to see what's different.
Then there's BT's "underscore" album, where most of it is great, but there's this one track (I can't remember the name of it offhand) where some pretentious cliched poem is read over the music. Oh my god I hate that so much, because it ruined what was otherwise the perfect modern electronica album. The calypso tracks on "Cousteau" just didn't fit and made no sense, but were inoffensive. However, hearing some idiot poem on the "underscore" album pissed me off.
Guilty as charged......the album Kilimanjaro by The Teardrop Explodes.....the track Reward....I don’t remember the rest of the album because I was always waiting for that track(it’s the horns that do it)...never play it. I am going to try and listen to the album without that track and see what happens.
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ruins an otherwise perfect Abbey Road.
Definitely! Maybe my least favorite post-Beatlemania period song. Too fussy and whimsical. And watching the movie Let It Be on youtube, and seeing John, Ringo, and George painfully try to figure out the strange complexity of the song does not help. Hope Peter Jackson’s planned new version of the movie cuts it out completely. (Sorry Paul... even your brief ditty Why Don’t We Do It In the Road had more real feeling and meaning).
John Lennon’s unlistened-to masterpiece is of course Revolution #9, stuck near the end of the “White Album”. I can appreciate the intention of the song. The album needed a touch of the conceptual. Would rather listen to that than the serial killing Maxwell! 😄
With me, it’s this:
Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) is one of the most genius and well-constructed albums, delicious to listen to, and intellectually tickling too.
Except for the dreadful “Put a Straw Under Baby”. Go back in time, and reconsider, Mr St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno.
…and then it gets followed, if you follow the album’s track order, by one of the most important, influential and excellent songs anywhere by anyone at any time – The True Wheel.
“Jane Says” from Jane’s Addiction’s “Nothing’s Shocking” album.
“I’m in Love With My Car” from Queen’s “A Night at the Opera” album.
+1
Ob la bloody di, ruins the White album for me, the rest is genius.
Carly Rae Jepsen's 'Emotion Side B' is destroyed by the song 'Store'. Whoever let her get away with that has no taste.
LOL! Yeah, that song, while neat in concept, was just lazy writing.
"The Murder Mystery" on The Velvet Underground/Third/Gray Album.
Although, I do like the proto-Eno piano that appears toward the end of the track.
Hah! Is that what you do?
I must admit, I looked through my playlist collection that I’ve been carting about between devices for the past 15 years ever since someone carelessly left so much stuff lying around on usenet back then, and I notice that a considerable amount of the albums I “own” are ‘greatest hits’ or ‘best of’ albums, which is sort of cheating I suppose (had I actually paid for them, that is).
It starts off so promising, another classic-style 80s ballad, then it just turns into a sick joke, both in the musical shift, and in turning what's potentially a sad lyric and a bit of a heartbreaker if treated right (soberly) into an outright party celebration type deal. It could've had an 80's pop via Joni Mitchell vibe but instead went full on 'Who Let The Dogs Out'.
The modern feminism tack was a bit heavy-handed on that album, but would've still been acceptable if that track had been x'ed.
MBV by My Bloody Valentine. Can't remember the song name (or any of them, actually) but it fucks it up every single time.
Queen is Dead - Smiths. Offending song: Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others. I loved it in 1987 but over the years I've come to think of it as Mr. Marr's greatest riff and Morrissey as a petulant twat who couldn't come up with something lyrically to match it and so pooped all over it. Then they recorded the next record entirely separately and then broke up!
Smiths sidebar: it kind of melts my brain to consider that Johnny Marr was only 23 years old when the Smiths ended. And that there was only 4 years between the release of the "Hand in Glove" single and "Strangeways Here We Come". Fan or not, that's a lot of released music and a whole lot of influence for a four year run by bunch of kids.
The Queen Is Dead was a career high point for both Morrissey and Marr, I've bought that album in almost every format in existence (originally on cassette in 87, then Vinyl, then CD, and then download). I actually don't mind Some Girls, it fits right in with the rest of the whimsy on the album (Vicar in a Tutu, Bigmouth, Frankly Mr Shankly etc...).
“Sometimes in Winter” from Blood Sweat and Tears otherwise perfect album. God, do I hate that song.
Corporal Clegg from Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets comes to mind. But I actually like that track now.
Nilsson Schmilsson - Coconut. Just awful.
The title track from Moving Waves by Focus - the rest of the album is superb, but the cringe-making vocals on the track Moving Waves are an instant skip.
Peter Gabriel - SO; Don‘t give up
I like almost everything by Peter Gabriel, and Kate Bush too, but I can‘t stand that song. Don‘t know why.
That‘s why I hate „adult“ Rock and Pop radio stations. I‘m always like „do you guys really think the Beatles have only had two good songs?“ or „did LZ really only record Stairway to Heaven, and nothing else?“
The last track on Workbook by Bob Mould [Whichever Way The Wind Blows] shouldn’t be there. I’ve tried and tried to integrate it into the album ... which is stunning.... but thre’s no way.
The album itself is not typical of Bob Mould so ... WWTWB is more so... maybe it was a nod from the artist that he was ‘still there’.
I have removed it from my experience of the album ... but I can never unhear it! ;-)