Surf rock covers and fixing mp3s for iTunes

In the April Fools day show of Coverville, Brian Ibbott claimed that Blondie's "Call Me" was a cover, originally done as a surf rock instrumental by a group called The Original Onions. While that was a fun gag (and the whole show had some other great psuedo-original versions), I liked the surf rock sound. The mp3s from the now-defunct Original Onions are available for free download under a creative commons license at archive.org.

The trouble I had was that iTunes wouldn't load the mp3s and it wouldn't even tell me what was wrong. After a few futile attemps at fixing ID3 tags and attempting on both windows and mac, I searched the support forums at apple.com and found this thread which pointed me to VBRfix, a tool for repairing mp3 files. I barely skimmed the docs, pointed the tool at my directory of Onions mp3 files and it magically Just Worked. The Original Onions' album "Grill Skills" is now in iTunes and will shortly be on my iPod as well.

Tags: itunes, mp3, repair, coverville