I'm back at school. The food is still reasonably good. The summer weather is still a touch too humid. The state of Maine has yet to entice the folks at Design Within Reach to put an outlet within its borders.

Classes don't begin until Wednesday, leaving me with little to do but work on my Rails application and trawl through other people's shared iTunes libraries. It is the latter boredom-buster that is the subject of this post.

In browsing a few dozen different libraries, I have discovered that real people really do buy those weird "100 Most Relaxing Classical Songs" CDs peddled by home spa companies and questionable music labels. I find their existence troubling.

First and foremost, the recordings on these CDs are terrible. If these "Best of Bach" compilation discs are the only exposure people have to classical music, I can hardly blame them for not liking it more. One recording of Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto I sampled must have been played by a group of musicians on mood stabilizers. It was the most lifeless recording I've ever listened to.

More bizarrely still, none of the compilation albums I sampled bothered to include a single work in its entirety. I suppose this might be a benevolent omission, given how awful the recordings are. But it still seems like an insult to only include the first movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. Of course, this particular defect in the albums's compositions might have more to do with our collective short attention span than bad taste on the part of the person putting the CDs together. (If people have trouble reaching the end of a four minute tune by Justin Timberlake, it's not too much of a stretch to assume they'll never make it through all 22 minutes of the Sixth Symphony.)

If you own one of these albums, please delete the music from your hard drive and buy a good album by a good artist. I'd highly recommend Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble's recording of Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony, or Hilary Hahn and Natalie Zhu's recording of Mozart's Piano-Violin sonatas K. 301, 204, 376 & 526 as good places to start.