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So I could say that I don’t normally do these things – after all that’s what I said last time. I don’t know how many more times I can not normally do these things before it starts to look a bit of a hollow statement. A little longer, I should think. Ho hum.

Anyway, I have been passed the musical baton by Phil (and I think probably also by Leonard a while back, although I didn’t act upon it). This musical baton thing is – in a nutshell – a few questions that you answer and then pass on to some other poor unsuspecting victim. It’s like a happy chain-letter of musical love. They were kind of huge about four years ago in the LiveJournal community and it looks like they’re now starting to do a second pass. Except this time, the questions are a bit less dumb. And with that glowing endorsement, here I go:

Total volume of music on my computer? These figures are going to be a bit deformed by the number of podcasts I’ve been downloading recently either via the BBC or from Odeo. I have 9,684 tracks on my computer at the moment. This takes up 42.49Gb of hard disk space and would take twenty-seven days, thirteen hours and forty minutes to listen to if I started right now.

The last CD I bought? Actually I did a real ‘fifty quid bloke’ thing about two days ago and bought four CDs at the same time. Collective cost: pretty much exactly £50. I’m such a cliché. As usual I’d been carousing around metacritic looking for stuff with really good reviews that I hadn’t heard of. After a little online sampling of various albums, I decided to buy a mix of more and less risky stuff: Martha Wainwright, Lost and Safe by The Books, Frank Black Francis and Funeral by The Arcade Fire.

I kind of knew I’d like Funeral, because I’d listened to a few of its tracks over and over until my ears bled – but I’m surprised by how much I’m liking The Books’ album. It’s perfect to work to. I don’t know how well it’ll sit on my iPod though, all chopped up and disaggregated. The Wainwright album is pretty cool too. The one real anomaly is the Frank Black Francis album – it comprises two CDs, one with some very early acoustic demos of Pixies songs on it, the other with Frank Black and some guys with string instruments doing new versions of classic Pixies tracks. Many of the ‘re-imaginings’ are pretty way-out and I’m not sure are terribly good. Some are interesting. Not sure what I think of it, all things considered.

Song playing right now? It’s called Don’t Let Me Explode by The Hold Steady. My playcount tells me that I’ve listened to it once before ever. It may not be any good at all for all I know. Don’t take this as an endorsement. I have no idea. I don’t even really know why it’s on my computer. It’s kind of growing on me, actually. Hm. I wonder what the rest of the album is like.

Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me? Hmm. Bastard question. I wave my fist at thee. I’m doing it right now. Er. Impromptu plan – look at iTunes ‘Most Played’, and scrub off the ones I’ve got bored of. Maybe then add in a couple that have a particular importance to me for some reason? Hm. Or maybe I’ll just cheat and start off by doing songs that have a lot of emotional significance (don’t listen to these, they’re all depressing or cheesy) and then do the good ones in a moment:

• Somewhere in My Heart by Aztec Camera. I was strawberry-picking one summer school-holiday in a field near Tunstead in Norfolk. I’d wear my Walkman and when I got bored of all the bending over, I’d cash in my strawberries and walk to Roys of Wroxham and brag the latest “Now That’s What I Call Music” collection. Then I’d listen to it over and over again for weeks. This song represents that sticky, bright, strawberry-flavoured summer for me. (Close-run runner up from that summer – The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll by Prefab Sprout)
• Morning Theft by Jeff Buckley. There was this relationship that I nearly had that pretty much destroyed me and this song somehow expressed really strongly how much I wanted things between us to work out well. Rest of the story in a nutshell: it didn’t. (Close run major relationship soundtrack goes to: Everyloving by Moby which I should frankly be ashamed of)
• Something So Right by Paul Simon. When I was a kid I could play this on the piano. It’s not a great song. It’s really sappy. But it was either that or Slip Slidin’ Away which I wrote off a car to.
• Following by The Bangles. This might be the most melancholy and self-deceiving song I’ve ever heard and I adored it when I was a teenager.
• If It Be Your Will by Leonard Cohen. This is the song I want played at my funeral. I think it’s stunning and beautiful and devastating and I think could easily be rescued from its apparent theism and reinterpreted as a proper humanist hymn. (Close run second and third place Leonard Cohen tracks: Everybody Knows & The Future)

Here are the songs that I listen to because they’re just good. These I would thoroughly recommend that you get you filthy mitts upon:

• Subbacultcha by Pixies. So I was cruising the clubs one night and I saw a lot of fine ass that I was hoping to get in the sack. I was kind of looking handsome… It’s a whole story really. Anyway, many years later, I heard this song and thought ‘that’s about me’ or something. Best song ever… (Close-run second place Pixies track: Wave of Mutiliation (UK Surf))
• Combat Baby by Metric. I have heard no other songs by Metric. I have no idea if they’re terrible or not. But this song has been playing over and over on my iPod for the last year or so and is a wonderful paean to being a stroppy bastard.
• Utopia by Goldfrapp. This has to be the most beautiful song ever constructed that contains the word ‘Fascist’. I listen to it all the time. It generates a weird aesthetic perfectionism in me and is perfect for doing design work.
• Lonesome Tears by Beck. It’s probably my second favourite song ever and contains this enormous bank of rising chords at the end that just goes on and on and just won’t quit. It’s definitely the most-played song from my iTunes playlist.
• Heard it Through the Grapevine by The Slits. The only cover that you can’t live without. Best drums, best beats, fun howling ladies – it’s somewhere between disco and new wave and tribal dancing, but with a sense of humour and no top on.
• Walking in the Dark by Throwing Muses. Weird, bouncy, creepy, spidering, awesome. Listen to it about a dozen times and then try to stop yourself feeling like dancing whenever it comes on the stereo. Proper weird art-guitar-dance with some nutty woman barking over the top. Sorted.

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton: Gawd that’s a tricky one. As usual I’d like to see what Matt Webb would come up with, but I don’t think he’d participate. Also Matt Biddulph’s music taste intrigues me. After hearing stories about her teenage encouters with Michael Hutchence, I really want to know if there’s any INXS in Fiona Romeo’s dark past. Also Cal Henderson is a bit of a music consuming monster. And I think I’ll end up with Alice Taylor who’s kind of intriguing and mysterious…

A few weeks ago I talked about the upcoming BBC Download and Podcast trial and everyone got terribly excited even though it hadn’t started yet. But now it has! Actually it started last Monday, but I’ve been pretty distracted with all the other guff going on to really go into any detail about it.

First off, you can read all about it at the Download and Podcast trial page on BBC Radio’s site. One of the BBC’s major missions is to get people up to speed with these new technologies as they emerge, so a large number of people have put in a substantial amount of work to try and really explain downloading and podcasting in ways that will even make sense to people who don’t spend all day on the internet. I think they’ve done pretty well, but I’m sure people out there might have comments. There’s a feedback box at the bottom of the page if you want to make any suggestions or have any problems.

The Programmes that you can currently subscribe to include: TX Documentaries from 1Xtra, From Our Own Correspondent, In Business, In Our Time, The Today Programme’s 8.10am interview, Mark Kermode’s Film Reviews and Litir do Luchd-Ionnsachaidh with more to come.

I genuinely can’t recommend In Our Time enough, by the way. I’ve written about it before, but it bears repeating – where else each week can you hear some of the greatest experts on any given subject talking about The Roman Republic or the development of the Alphabet or Cryptography or Modernist Utopias. This is ultimate geek (radio) programming – exposing listeners to people working from an enormous range of perspectives. Absolutely stunning, and I can heartily recommend it for anyone who is stuck with some kind of tedious commute every day. Life-saving. (And if you’re particularly interested there’s a slightly cheesy Greatest Philosopher Smackdown going on as well.)

The other thing I’d like to talk about while I have your attention is some of the design work around the delivery of podcasts. At the moment, the whole experience of podcasting is unfortunately fairly clunky and forbidding for people who aren’t terribly technical. Having spent some considerable time playing with a beta of Odeo, I think I can say that this is going to change dramatically in the near future. But in the meantime, the work that the Radio and Music team have done with the presentation of the podcast URLs is really sweet.

This move towards ‘three ways of listening’ really excited me and I love the fact that the XML button is clickable and you have a form input box where you can select and copy the URL without accidentally clicking on the XML link and getting a page full of mark-up. I’m not totally convinced that this is a use of input boxes that everyone will get, but it’s certainly the most elegant solution I’ve seen so far.