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’.
