Finally. You’ll see it at the upper-left of this promo scan.
Found at I Love Music.
49 posts with category “Music”
last.fm friends ticker
last.fm is great, and it gets better every single day. Part of its appeal is voyeurism. I love being able to see what my friends are listening to, but that usually requires going to the “What are my friends listening to?” page, which is still too much effort; I’m not that curious. But still, if somebody I know starts listening to something, I’d like to be alerted with a totally passive system.
There are, of course, RSS feeds for all kinds of things from last.fm. But there is no feed consisting of all your friends’ recent tracks, which is surprising because it’s such an intuitive idea. So implementing the ones that are available is ostensibly possible, but nevertheless tricky. I mean, logging into Bloglines or Google’s new reader still requires an active request for this information. And while there are some web services that will merge multiple feeds into a single one for you, I don’t like relying on a third party like that, one that may go down any day and that might insert advertisements into my feed.
It seems to me that there should be a very, very small program that sits in your system tray, checking multiple feeds regularly, then popping up a native Windows balloon with a link to the “article” every time there’s an update. This would be ideal for watching your last.fm friends. There are programs that do this, but they’re all full applications that only have this as an auxiliary feature. I can’t afford the memory.
So, finally, I found infoRSS. It’s a Firefox extension that adds a little ticker to the statusbar. Initially I wasn’t hopeful, as its default presentation is ugly and therefore indicative of poor programming:
The writer of this extension isn’t a native speaker of English, and there’s very little help available anyway. I spent a long time studying its many confusing features, confident that it could be made to do what I want. The result (shown at the top of this post) isn’t perfect, but is better than I had expected or hoped. There’s a nice little Audioscrobbler logo on the left; each entry is marked with the user’s avatar, which is far more efficient than if their name were displayed; and the listening status of everyone is constantly on display for me. Here’s how to do this:
GEMM
GEMM is an online music store I came across somehow. They specialize in rare music, or at the very least they boast that they can get it for you. I’m assuming they just have a list of sources they can scan with a search, which looks pretty thorough. Destroyer’s Thief was going for $75 the other day on vinyl. Sheesh. But I haven’t seen it anywhere else. Makes me wonder how valuable my vinyl City of Daughters is. Eight bucks at Reckless Records. Still to find: vinyl copies of Streethawk, Reveille, and Finally We Are No One.
75 Minutes
Some folks from indietorrents have started a 75-minute, Sundaily podcast called 75 Minutes. Having spent a lot of time lately on the elitist, invite-only torrent community, I can tell you these people know their shit. The show is DJed by two live humans who introduce and outroduce each set with plenty of information about the showcased bands, and aggressively invite listener feedback. If you want to hear a broad and informed overview of what’s happening in indie music this week, listen to this show.
The show is offered in both mp3 and aac formats, the latter of which now supports chapter divisions, album art, and hyperlinks with iTunes 4.9.
The New last.fm
Audioscrobbler has now been subsumed by its cousin last.fm. Aside from the bold new colors, there are a lot of additional features that are really easy to get sucked into. Each user is provided a blog, whose posts appear on that user’s profile page and can contain links to artists, albums, or tracks that are relevant to the post. Arists, albums, and tracks can all be tagged with keywords such as “noise” or “indie pop,” and these tags can then be tuned into using the last.fm player. The player has seen a redesign too; rather than being controlled with a web interface and streamed as an .m3u, a stand-alone program is required. This isn’t going over well, but I much prefer it; it’s cleaner, less buggy, and contains a few nice features such as a channel history to see what you’ve listened to previously. And maybe most importantly, charts are updating almost daily now.
There are many other small improvements that I’m not mentioning, but basically I think the whole site is just way, way better. The new interface takes some getting used to, and there are some obvious improvements that could be made and that I’m sure will. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should. I’m looking forward to their further integration with MusicBrainz.
Charles and Henry
Today I bought Her Majesty The Decemberists on vinyl, and although it wasn’t one of the 500 or so red copies that were pressed, it did come with a story absent from the CD’s liner notes:
Streethawk: A Seduction lyrics
An illegal copy of Destroyer’s Streethawk: A Seduction has occupied slot 3 of my car’s 6-disc changer going on seven months now. In that time it has probably become my most listened-to album ever. Because the album compels me to sing, and because Dan Bejar’s voice isn’t always so intelligible, I was looking forward to the lyric sheet I expected to come with the real copy I ordered from Merge a few weeks ago. And because his lyrics are sometimes a little embarrassing, I was also worried that I might end up wishing I had never learned them.
The liner notes lacked lyrics entirely, but fortunately someone answered my desperate plea on the Merge forum. Also fortunate: rather than sucking, they’re pretty awesome.
A Flat Hierarchy for Subjective mp3 Tags
I’ve always been anal about the way my mp3s are tagged. Before the iPod, Audioscrobbler, and foobar2000, it was an irrational obsession, since I keep my music well-sorted on my hard drive. But there’s something so “official” about mp3 tags that I find appealing.
A few years ago this fixation extended to a program called MoodLogic, which applies a user-maintained database of really specific information about songs to construct playlists to match particular moods. In the end it proved more work than it was worth for me, so I abandoned it, but I’ve always wished for a similarly intuitive method of music browsing and playlist creation (come on, alphabetically?).
The genre tag has always been the most elusive. The subjective if not totally baseless distinctions between “Pop/Rock,” “Rock,” and “Pop” are enough to aggravate even the mildest case of OCD. I never bothered with this kind of categorization until recently when I realized that foobar2000 can handle multiple values for one tag field. Interesting…