tecosystems

Miscellaneous Music Updates

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A couple of music related updates for those of you that are curious and/or interested in such things.

Backup

While I was at Lotusphere a week ago, my backup of my entire music collection to Amazon’s S3 completed. It took a week, but I can’t tell you how much better it feels to know that responsibility for the collection now rests with someone else. Unlike on hicks, I used Jungle Disk to do the backup, and it’s set to mirror the directory up there every Sunday night at midnight.

CD’s

Because I’m no longer buying music through Apple’s iTunes store (with the exception of one Christmas giftcard which I used to buy new albums from Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins and The Oohlas), it was more or less inevitable that I’d be buying CD’s. So it was yesterday, when I visitied Denver’s Twist and Shout to pick up the the new Beck, the new Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the new Shins discs. These are probably the first physical CD’s I’ve bought since Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. It’s amazing how irritating the medium is still, with it’s difficult to remove plastic wrapping and that damn sticker at the top. At least they came without DRM like those awful Sony discs. All three albums are good, incidentally.

emusic.com

Remains my first preference for buying music, and I was very pleased to see in the recent NY Times piece that they’re actually the second most popular store behind iTunes – albeit by a large margin. Making my emusic experience even simpler has been the plugin for Songbird; it’s not without issues, but basically I browse emusic in Songbird, click download and everything shows up in my library. Very nice.

The Hype Machine

If you didn’t believe me when I first told you about cool The Hype Machine was, didn’t pay attention when they were named the best mashup of Mashup Camp 3, maybe Jason Calacanis’ description of it as Napster 3.0 will grab you. Oh, and for the Yubnub users in the audience, The Hype Machine is in there. Command is ‘hype’.

6 comments

  1. I’ve started using finetune.com for listening at home. On the wii. Pandora and last.fm still don’t work quite right on the wii, but finetune.com actually has a wii-specific web facing. Not much of a community, so the cross-pollination effects haven’t kicked in, and getting favorites / tags, etc set up is … wonky. But it’s easier than connecting the old iBook to the stereo, bring up iTunes, and going to radioparadise or woxy.

  2. thx, Patrick. will give finetune.com a whirl – i assume it’s not wii-only?

  3. I just started playing with Songbird, and I like it… but so far I can’t get it to work right with last.fm, so I’m mainly using it for the really neat “download all the free MP3s from this webpage” feature, and still using iTunes for the playback 🙁

  4. finetune is not ONLY for the wii, but I don’t think I’d use it anywhere BUT the wii. Because without much of a community, there’s not much cross-pollination going on with tags and what not. I use it on the wii, because it’s the ONLY one that seems to work on the wii.

    The nice thing for me, as long as our wii is connected to the downstairs a/v system, is that I’m just a few remote control button clicks away from reasonable music, compared to having to hook the computer up to the stereo … but this is mainly me being a cheap-ass. I could listen to my beloved radioparadise easier if I just bought an airport express and hooked that up to the a/v system …

  5. Glad you like my eMusic plug in for Songbird. I’ve just posted a Hype Machine plug in for Songbird (http://addons.songbirdnest.com/extensions/detail/33).

    What eMusic plug in issues do you have? I might be able to fix them.

  6. Thanks so much for The Hype Machine plugin, Erik, I’m a big fan. It rules.

    As for the eMusic plugin, it’s mainly just speed. I don’t know if it’s the plugin or Songbird generally, but browsing eMusic is very slow. I usually click on a page and then head elsewhere, letting it load in the background.

    Still a hugely useful bit of software though.

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