I can hear music

Recent versions of Apple's iTunes allow one to associate a JPEG file of "album covers" with each song, so that one can gaze longingly at a CD cover while listening to music without actually having to have the CD nearby. iTunes requires human intervention in getting the pictures, which I spent some time Sunday doing for my music collection, with the assistance of the All-Music Guide.

I also have a shareware program called Synergy that works with iTunes; among other things, every time a new song comes up, it pops up a window with title and artist information...and, in the new version of Synergy, the album cover shows up in the window, too. Now, if there's no album cover in iTunes, Synergy goes out on its own and tries to find it on the Internet, apparently at amazon.com.

Now, I have a lot of songs where there's no album listed, which is kind of how I differentiate between a song being from a CD I own and, um, an audio recording I'm not in the physical possession of, if you get my drift. For these, Synergy seems to pick the first album by that artist containing a song of that title, and it can be interesting to see what it comes up with. (Seems to be greatest hits collections more often than not, if the artist in question has such a thing.)

But Synergy seems to have some kind of bizarre "fuzzy logic" spell-check built in, and here's how I can tell: in addition to actual songs, I have a bunch of radio and TV station jingles, as well as some commercial jingles, all of which have no album listed and the radio/TV call letters or the advertised product as the "artist."

For example, for all my WCBS-FM jingles, the image it's coming up with is a CD from the "WCBS-FM Presents the History of Rock 'n' Roll" series, which is the best match Synergy's come up with. It's also pulling the same picture for another radio station with similar call letters, WGBS. WLS is resulting in a CD by a band called The Owls. Best of all, a jingle that I titled "Great Memories" from a radio station called KRNT resulted in an Amy Grant CD, I guess on the premise that "great," "KRNT," and "Grant" have a lot of letters in common between them.

Obviously, my next step is to try to find the various radio station logos and put them into iTunes, but so far, I'm having fun seeing how Synergy is dealing with them.