originally uploaded by jugrote.
Ah Maine, how awesometastic thou art.
Playlist-age
I’ve been excited about a site I recently started using (actually I stumbled across it a while ago, forgot about it, and someone talked me up on it yesterday) called Project Playlist (nice that they have an easy-to-remember URL). It’s a similar concept to a playlisting service called Webjay, which was purchased by Yahoo! in 2006 and then shuttered a few months ago. Essentially you create playlists of media files, namely music, that’s already posted somewhere on the Web. I signed up for Webjay and never used it because I didn’t have an application for it, but that has changed now that I have PP, for a couple reasons off the top of my head:
- The music search engine. Just like Hype Machine has been doing for a while, you can search for an artist and the engine will pull up a bunch of Web-available tracks from that artist and listen to it right there via a Flash button. Comparing it in a search for My Bloody Valentine, first on Hype and then on PP, it’s hard to tell which one is more comprehensive as far as music tracks (Hype definitely wins for comprehensive service, with tour dates and videos thrown in the results page, but sometimes I just want a service to do one thing and one thing well). I do know that on PP I can add a track to any of my playlists — the nature of the service — and on Hype I can favorite/”heart” a track. I don’t think I’d use the latter again because there’s way too much music on the Web and I’d have too many favorites to wade through. I do see the value of separate playlists based on particular moods of music I’m into (or time periods in my life, genres, whatever).
- Keeping track of stuff I like from Other Music. I’ve been a subscriber to the OM weekly email since probably 2001, and I still haven’t found a better way to have the newest and most awesome music curated and described for me every week, with two ~90-second samples accompanying each new release in the email. But until recently OM used *gasp* Real Media to stream files, which means I needed to have the Real player installed on whatever computer I was using to listen to these samples (made it difficult when on the road). They changed that for the better recently, instead sending MP3 samples like most of the modern world has been using since, uh, 2001. SO now I can select tracks from the weekly OM emails that I like (because while I appreciate most of them, I don’t reeeally like them all) and put them into the bestest playlist ever to keep track of them (also because I rarely ever buy music anymore and can’t buy everything I like). You do this in PP by going to “manage playlist songs” and clicking on “Add URL/Link Direct to Playlist”. Bam.
It’s kind of dorky that I get excited about stuff like this, but I just don’t have the patience to search for new music anymore and like it when Web services / social crap of any type actually save me time rather than waste it.
“Paradosaurus Wreck”
**Friday August 15th**
“Parade-o-saurus Wreck” – a WZBC-sponsored event featuring fashions on the catwalk, projections, dance partying, and a rock show featuring:
+ Live musics!
–> The Flaming Fire (insane psychedelic cult rock music from Jersey
City, NJ) – www.myspace.com/flamingfire
–> Deer Tick (smoky Americana from Providence) – www.myspace.com/deertick
–> Andre Obin (electro popshock from Boston) – www.myspace.com/andreobin
+ Local designers! (Stormcloud, Bring Rainbows / Joy Adams / BECKY* /
Julia Ramsey / Karovan)
+ Hot DJ action! (DJ Phil)
@ VFW Dilboy Hall, 371 Summer St. (Davis Square), Somerville MA
= $10 / 9pm / 21+
Eighth Mistake.
Here come the water works.
(This used to link to a video I made – the link is now dead.)
Scotland Phot-ers
They’ve been uploaded, but I’m in still the process of adding the titles and descriptions and such.
I’ve decided to keep the Nikon D60 that George Bush bought me for the trip. Nice camera indeed. I haven’t yet used the stop-motion animation function that initially attracted me to this model, but there are plenty of other features to mess with first. And I already have lens-envy: the 18-55mm kit lens works fine, but I made the mistake of stopping in a camera shop in the Manchester airport on the way home and spotting a 18-200mm lens that would be much finer. Only $850 later (more than the price of the camera + kit lens + 4-year warranty) and it will be mine. George Bush, stimulate my bank account once again!
WFMU’s Music Archiving Project
WFMU is launching a new free music archive featuring royalty free musics recorded at WFMU events along with studio music from friendly labels. Here’s a sampler album of what the archive will offer — download it as a giant ZIP file to save yourself some minutes — with some awesome independent musics to enjoy.
Two Greats Go Down
Tim Russert and George Carlin. Two giant losses for humanity.
Russert was my favorite journalist of the modern day. On Meet the Press he had a direct yet comfortable style; he was born for that job. Across the table he always asked the questions that everyone wanted to ask. I met his son, who has a show on XM with Tim’s colleague James Carville, when I guest-lectured a class at Boston College.
Carlin was a genius, a master wordsmith, one of those comedians who never got stale. It’s wacky that the week before he died Carlin joked with Seinfeld that celebrity deaths come in bunches, and because Russert and Bo Diddley had just kicked it, Carlin would be safe for a while.
My New Spinner
When I’m listening to music for an extended period of time while at work (not all that often anymore because I am usually sampling podcasts on and off), I had been firing up the Last.FM client and starting off a stream of music based on one artist off the top of my head. Before that I spent some years, including my grad school daze, primarily listening to albums (mp3s) or one of the local NPR or college/community stations. But WAY back in the day, while at my first real full-time desk job, I used to listen to Spinner (before it was purchased by Netscape, when I lost track of it and lost interest). It was similar to how I use Last.FM now, streaming content from my desktop. With Spinner, though, you had a bunch of pre-programmed channels by genre. I clicked on a genre and was fed content. Not as empowering as Last.FM, without all the social features, but it got me through the day. If I got bored with a station or didn’t want to listen to an artist, I’d just switch stations.
Lately I’ve been frustrated with Last.FM, mainly because I’m seeing less variety in the artists that come through. I don’t know if CBS has anything to do with that or if it’s in my head, but I’m finding many more dead ends than I was (IE I type in an artist I like and they either don’t know who that artist is or for some reason can’t stream that artist — either way I need to start over). Dead ends are frustrating when you need to work and just want something to play with minimal management.
Today I got a welcome reminder of why I liked Spinner so much in the Accuradio service. Like Spinner you have a bunch of channels to choose from that you just play and let go, and like Spinner they have a limited catalog of music their channels draw from, but it’s extensive enough that I can just choose a new channel each day so I don’t get bored (with some channels on Spinner, like the Old Punk channel, I could only listen to it for four hours or so until I’d start hearing repeats — but that’s the nature of a limited/dated genre). They have a lot more channels (and subchannels) than Spinner ever had, and unlike Spinner they have channels especially for listening to while sitting at a computer doing other stuff, like Office Friendly (Spinner had an ambient channel that was good for working to, but sometimes it made me sleepy). In fact one could say they have a silly number of channels, including a plethora of Christmas music; I didn’t know people liked that much Christmas music in the late spring.
The one area where it’s very different, obviously, is that you instigate your listening via a web page. I like how with Last.FM and formerly with Spinner I could listen from an app on my desktop. So Accuradio is more like Pandora. I don’t know why I like my listening and browsing separate — maybe it’s because I often encounter things that make my browser crash, so I’m often opening and closing browser windows.
Either way, Accuradio is a service I had heard about for years but never looked in to. If you work a desk job and have long uninterrupted stretches that should be filled with musics, the suite of Accuradio channels will give you plenty of listening pleasure.
: uncarbonated : 