RobotSkirts

Social music service Blip.fm just added a new feature. Like Foursquare and other services, users now earn ‘badges’ for activity on the site. They aren’t applied retroactively though; I had to blip at least one track to make sure they were working. Interestingly, quite a few badges are earned through the actions of others: people reblipping your tracks and giving props. Some appear very hard to earn: ‘Top 10′ for ranking in the top 10 most listened to DJs in a month. A few of the badges also feature levels. Level 1 seems pretty easy but level 3 looks impossible. It’ll be interesting to see how these play out and I like how the game is structured (direct and indirect badges).

I like using Blip when I want to share a single track on Twitter (which I had been using Songza for). I’ve never really used it as a starting point to discover music. Unfortunately, Blip’s reliance on outside sources for music makes link-rot (blip-rot?) in playlists extremely high which is always disappointing when I review my old shares. You can find my profile on Blip here.

The problem of streaming audio from one computer to another has cropped up a few times over the years in different forms. I had to solve this again recently, but this time around I really like the solution.

I use two computers in my apartment. My black MacBook is attached to a 24″ Dell monitor in the bedroom. I also have a 2006 Mac mini plugged into my projector and home theater in the living room. My Drobo is attached to the mini and holds my music collection. I do most of my work on the machine in the bedroom and use iTunes to mount the library over the network. If I want to listen to music in the living room, I close iTunes and then connect to the mini using VNC and reopen it. This lets me maintain a consistent library and manage my music from whatever machine I’m using.

(more…)

I just saw Kenna featured in a new PSP ad. It’s great to hear another album coming out. I bought Kenna’s first album after seeing the video above on Cartoon Network (YouTube, friend of the long tail). It’s not the first album I bought based just on an animated video either. You’ll find Kid Koala’s Fender Bender after the break. (more…)

I am in love with Mashuptown. It’s a frequently updated mashup podcast. Here are some of my recent favorites:

• DJ Schmolli – What’s This Name For
• Aggro1 – The Streets of Hotel California
• DJ Max Entropy – Short Skirt London Bridge

monome40h is a really interesting music controller. This video shows it wired to several hardware sensors and doing many things other than playing music i.e. Conway’s Game of Life. I’ve been curious about this device ever since watching the first demo video. It looks like they’ve got another video now. I actually met the team behind this and got to play with one at MakerFaire.

I had been using the Google hack Lifehacker recently reposted to search for MP3s in open directories. I was thinking “hey this is useful enough, I wish it was a bookmarklet“. So I grabbed a search google bookmarklet and slapped the search string into the Javascript. (which coincidentally is how the majority of the code I’ve written is constructed) Here it is: MP3 search. Maybe if I hadn’t dove in head first I would have noticed i-hacked’s search box which does the same thing or even that far superior bookmarklet someone else wrote (probably correctly too).

This wasn’t the method I used to get Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback though. If you visit his site (don’t it’s loud), the flash player will drop the whole MP3 right into your browser cache. I kid you not, its ID3 tag is “Weird Al’s – Don’t Download This Song” .

I haven’t heard a lot of Kasabian, but I certainly enjoy animation. Here’s a link to a big version [via Antville]. Whenever I see something obviously rotoscoped my brain spends a large amount of energy reconstructing what the scene would look like in real life. I think that’s one of the downfalls of the technique.

The South by Southwest Fesitvals have have provided sample tracks from many of their artists for the second year in a row. The two torrent files contain over 3GB of some of the best music in the country. It’s completely free and legal. I discovered some great bands last year thanks to these torrents and I hope for more of the same this year.

About a year ago I downloaded the highly controversial Grey Album by DJ Dangermouse. It is a mix of The Beatle’s White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. I enjoyed the mix so much that I went out and bought Jay-Z’s album; see, illegal sampling promotes sales. I’ve heard a lot of Beatles, but not much of the White Album. I was listening to KRNU last week during “It’s the Beatles” and got this weird feeling. After a while I figured out that I was remembering samples that were pulled from the White Album. It was really interesting to hear them put back into context.

Right now I’m listening to The Kleptones, a band that samples so heavily it would be impossible to clear the rights. Right now it’s on a mash-up of Beastie Boys – Super Disco Breakin’ and Queen – I want to break free. Awesome.

BoingBoing has been posting hilarious phone messages recently. The latest recalls a This American Life segment about “The Greatest Phone Message in the World”. I suggest you listen to the full story as it is far greater than the message alone and no, I’m not going to make a new category for this.