EMusic has changed my life. Well...not really. But it certainly has expanded my music collection.

Higgy was kind enough to mention one of my music spasms downloading music from EMusic and include a list of 10 worthy CDs he has downloaded from the same fountain of glorious music.

I already had two in his list of 10 - Holy Modal Rounders and Thelonious Monk. I have written about the Holy Modal Rounders before. The Monk is excellent. As if all Monk isn't excellent.

The top of his list had one I have been wanting but didn't know EMusic had - Tom Waits, Mule Variations. It was worth wanting. I am a big Dan Hicks fan and will be downloading Beatin' The Heat. EMusic has a lot of World Music which I love but I haven't known where to start. Higgy's selection of Henry Kaiser and David Lindsey, The Sweet Sunny North is cosmic. (Kaiser and Lindley also had two other excellent albums - A World Out Of Time and A World Out Of Time Volume 2 recorded in Madagascar.) There was one other that I have been looking at for a while. EMusic has 12 Susannah McCorkle albums. Higgy had downloaded No More Blues so I did too. This the first time I have really listened to McCorkle. What a voice! What a singer! I need more exclamation points! I will be downloading all the rest of Higgy's selections.

There is a lot of press about the various schemes that the music industry is using to sell us music that they still want to control after we buy it. EMusic is selling access to straight MP3s. No strings attached. Download all you want. It's $14.99 a month if you sign up for 3 months and $9.99 a month if you sign up for a year. You won't find the lastest pop shit but that's not a bad thing. This place is full of absolute gems. Higgy first turned me onto EMusic by mentioning their collection (11 albums) of John Fahey which is worth a year's subscription all by itself.

They have been a little weak in classical music but they just started putting up the first of 400 albums from Olympia which has a lot of Soviet Russia and Eastern European artists. Lots of Russian composers. I've been listening a lot to Peter Katin's Chopin: Complete Nocturnes and Impromptus in two discs, from Olympia.

I use Real JukeBox to download from EMusic. I now have over 2,000 tracks. I put it on shuffle and I have a bigger playlist than most radio stations.

If you are going to be listening to music on your computer, I would like to offer a suggestion: get rid of those excuse for speakers that are called computer speakers.

Those are some 60s vintage KLH 17s. The pile of black on the left of the desk consists of tape deck, CD player, Hi-Fi VHS, with the receiver on top. My computer has a Live! Drive which gives me front mounted inputs and outputs to the Soundblaster Platinum sound card (SPDIF in and out, 1/4" in and out, and MIDI in and out). No wrestling with dust bunnies. I put the sound board where the telephone is when I do TestingTesting.

I'm a freelance web developer so I spend a lot of time in front of those speakers. My main speakers are some 70's vintage Speakerlab Super Sevens on the other side of the half wall behind the desk.

Check out some of the other music I have written about.