Idle musings on the world around us
Music
All things related to music
Music playlists of tunes you love to match your mood
May 8th
Since I started using Twitter I have been thinking more and more about how to use all the data that these new services gather for us, Facebook, Last.fm, Twitter and Delicious etc. They store all this data and some of the more popular services spark a whole ecosystem of tools and third party sites which visualise or leverage the api to create new services based on other services. This is a fantastic evolution for the web and something that will only expand. Imagine visualising all your links on your desktop using an Adobe Air application which then suggests other links and topics, and automatically categorises links for you!
I’ve always been intrigued by listenening to music based on mood and tempo. After all, sometimes your music will bring back great memories and change your feelings. Media Monkey has the feature of setting moods to music, so that you can have upbeat tracks, party tracks, uplifting, moody, chilled and all that.
I avoided tagging my tracks with Last.fm as it’s always been a bit of a ballache to tag stuff. Now that I’m using the Last.fm client with iTunes (argh) on my work Mac, I’ve started tagging my tracks with mood, tempo and type tags. The stroke of genius comes in that Last.fm allows you to listen to those tags! Check out my tags as an example, http://www.last.fm/user/Neon1024/library/tags. This means if I’m looking for something upbeat I can just listen to my upbeat tag. If I’m wanting a playlist for a party I can hit my party tag. Fantastic!
If anyone knows of tools and third party applications for Delicious, please do link me up in the comments. I think this service has fantastic potential for visualising links, or basing third party tools on the wealth of data. Imagine merging that popular data with Digg, Magnolia and other sites to create a super popular page, which aggregates all that RSS and creates a true “Top 20 links on the Internet today” page!
Music, Games and Headaches
Oct 13th
Bah, had a 48 hours headache and it’s still going strong. Pain in the .. well.. head I suppose.
I really figured I should update my site with a post so that it looks like I actually update it, which I suppose is a hollow ploy considering it’s all date tagged, hmm.
So that’s headache, ah yes, Music. TotallyRadio.com how I love thee. Although I did ask them about RSS notifications form shows and they have ignored me thus far, which is a bit of a shame really. Even though, this site is the Monday site. Great mixes, sets and radio shows from a variety of my favourite labels. Be sure to check out the Tru Thoughts, Solid Steel and The Dugout shows as they are pretty awesome.
Listening to these is a great heads up on the happenings of things, such as the new Roots Manuva album ‘Slime & Reason’ and the new Mr Scruff album ‘Ninjatuner’ ‘Ninja Tuna’, well worth checking out. You can even buy the 320kb/s DRM FREE albums from play.com for under a tenner!
Games eh? My god the runup to christmas is looking tasty; stuff like,
Valkyria Chronicles
Midnight Club: Los Angeles
The Last Remenant
Mirror’s Edge
Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm
Final Fantasy 13
Fallout 3
Diablo 3
To name just a few of the titles. You know it’s bad when your pre-order list hits £275! Where’s that raise I ordered?
Large chunks of time have now been recinded from Eve and meritoriously passed back to fund a revivial of Guild Wars! Woot. Man I’ve missed this game. Jogged through the end of Eye of the North with henchies and heroes, even solo’ed the Great Destroyer! Go go gadget Koss with a Stone Tanker build (Hmm, I can’t find the actual build online, but it’s like 3 axe attacks, then Obsidian Armor, Stone Armor, Dolyak Signet, Watch Yourself), similar to this stone tank.)
TotallyRadio totally rocks!
Jul 7th
Found a link to The Dugout on there, from Zebra Traffic records website. It’s a 2 hour radio show fully on the web for free! Genius! There are all sorts of things on there, but The Dugout and also the Solid Steel are well worth checking out. Which reminded me to update my Solid Steel podcast, I had missed 3! 70,71 and 72 are now out.
My own radio!
Jan 11th
I recently subscribed to Last.fm as a paid user and now have my own personal radio station! You can either check the music page or tune in directly below.
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Aim live!
Nov 13th
Man this gig rocked. The band was ace and produced a superb sound, dogged by a few technical issues but was still a fantastic show.
The venue was The Brook, a live music venue in Southampton. Small but cosy with some good acoustics too. http://www.the-brook.com/dates2007/11.2007.shtml#aim
Visit the website, http://www.aticrecords.com/
SongBird Wins!
Mar 9th
Songbird wins the battle of the media managers. Although there is a late arrival in the shape of http://www.mlipod.com/ which is an iPod plugin for WinAmp’s media manager. Which I am yet to try. The main reason was that iTunes doesn’t allow me to copy my music off my iPod to my computer. This caused it to lose more points than the RSS podcast downloading feature (probably the best thing in itunes) gained.
The next stage is to clean-up my library and perhaps actually swap my iPod over to a SongBird library instead of an itunes one. The application can only get better with time, as development thunders ahead and more extensions are released. So go and give it a try for a while, you’ll not go back to itunes! Try it, http://www.songbirdnest.com/
In a late review of the media libraries, I actually got some time to read the Lifehacker articles mentioned in this post. Which led me to the excellent, if rather ugly looking, Media Monkey. This ace application can tag all your mp3′s using folder names or amazon as a base. After about 4 hours, I finally had all 5,000 odd tracks tagged and named properly along with artwork. The only real drawback is that the information is stored locally in an mdb file so when I arrived at work and plugged the iPod into my work pc, it didn’t quite all work out.
I guess I will have to store the mdb on the iPod and install Media Monkey at work, in order to transfer the database over. I guess Apple didn’t think that people might want to have more than one application and more than one “library” pc, shame on you Steve.
