The rules -

Make an album cover out of sheer internet randomness! Show me your creative side!

1 - click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Please only use images that are licensed under Creative Commons.

4 - use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

And here is mine:

Making playlists is easy right? Well I don't know about you but I always seem to end up listening to the same old things when creating playlists the old fashioned way i.e. dragging and dropping songs from your library into a new list. So recently I've been looking for new and interesting ways to group my music. I'm no good with genres as I can never decide whether a song falls into one genre or another. So I've started using Smart Playlists in itunes to mix things up a bit.

I stumbled upon them while looking for new and interesting ways to group my songs. The best thing about them is the ability to listen to a varied group of songs that have nothing in common in terms of style or genre except the theme that you have used to group them together. Often it’s a complete mystery what is coming next and even better is trying to work out why on earth a song has ended up on a particular list.
 
To make a smart playlist you need first to decide on a theme e.g. colours. Next you need to make a list of keywords that match this theme, i.e. for the colours playlist you would choose the names of some colours. Next you search for these keywords in your iTunes library and add the theme of the playlist to the comments field in the song’s information section. Finally select the ‘New Smart Playlist’ option in the File menu and under ‘Match the following rule’ select Comment contains theme name.
 
Here are the smart playlists I've made recently:

Anatomy
Keywords: head, heart, hand, leg, arm, eye, finger, toe, knee
 
Colours
Keywords: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, black, white, silver, gold, gray
 
Numbers
Keywords: 1-9, plus written one to ten
NB. Some searches come up with parts of words e.g. stone
 
Time
Keywords: minute, hour, second, day, week, month, year
 
Travel
Keywords: car, train, bike, plane, boat, walk, road, drive, ship

It may take you some time to set these up but I hope you'll find it's well worth it.

Stay tuned for a future post on Genius, another cool iTunes tool.

The introduction of this new format for the whole iTunes catalogue comes with the news that single tracks will no longer be sold at the standard price of £0.79. Pricing will now be variable with singles priced at either £0.59, £0.79 or £0.99. There is also the option to convert your existing purchases to iTunes Plus for a charge of £0.20 per song.

I'm not sure what impact this is going to have on my music purchasing habits. I've had no real problem with the restrictions imposed by DRM. I buy pretty much all of my new music from iTunes which I play on my laptop and iPod. With the option to authorize up to 5 other computers there's scope for me to expand this as I've still got some flexibility there. As I don't buy music that often I think for me it's worth waiting to see where it goes from here before I jump in and upgrade my account to iTunes Plus. I'll reassess next time I'm looking to buy something.

For more info on iTunes Plus see the iTunes Plus FAQ

For more info on DRM see the BBC's DRM Q&A