RobotSkirts » Music

Music label subscriptions

eliot — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 20:18:29 +0000

Lately, I’ve been stumbling across quite a few awesome musicians and then discovering they’re part of the record label Ninja Tune. (For example, Edwin linked to a Blockhead video today.) I quipped on Twitter that Ninja Tune should just offer a subscription service and send me all of their new music. Jo told me that such a thing isn’t completely far-fetched. She gave Ghostly as an example. As part of the Ghostly Music Service, you pay $15 a month and they send you a weekly update with all new releases, random back catalog selections, 15% of store items, and access to the previous 60 days of releases. You can gift the subscription too: $85 for 6 months or $150 for 12. It’s always a good idea to build systems where your real fans, the people that really want to give you money, can.

Blip.fm adds badges

eliot — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:28:56 +0000

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.

Streaming audio from one Mac to another

eliot — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:05:28 +0000

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.

The problem crops up when I’m changing locations a lot. I want to hear audio in the bedroom and also in my living room where the speakers are WAY better. In the past I used MPD so I would have one player with multiple controlling clients. I didn’t want to get rid of iTunes though. I discovered the Enlightened Sound Daemon around the same time as MPD because I wanted to stream the MPD audio back to the client computer. Luckily, someone had written instructions for how to use it on a Mac. I didn’t want such a low level solution though and continued looking.

The simplest solution would be to purchase an AirPort Express and use AirTunes to send music to it from my MacBook. I didn’t want to spend the money though since I already have a perfectly good machine plugged into the stereo. Rogue Amoeba makes a $25 piece of software called Airfoil to send any audio to an AirPort Express. It can also send audio to any computer using Airfoil Speakers. This was what I needed but I didn’t like the price since I’m just sending it to one device. I continued looking.

I finally found an excellent post by Adam Knight about Playing Live Audio on Another Mac. To do this you need to install Soundflower to capture audio destined for the computer’s output. The magic is using AU Lab to create a bonjour audio stream. AU Lab is a program that’s part of Apple’s free developer tools. The Mac mini in the living room has AU Lab listening all the time so whenever I switch the output on my Macbook to Soundflower, it immediately starts broadcasting audio to the other room. Perfect.

If you follow Adam’s guide, the audio on your host machine will be muted. You just need to start up Soundflowerbed and select the output to turn it back on. I also installed the free SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba so I could easily switch outputs without having to open a preference pane.

The big win of this over AirTunes is that it works with ALL audio not just iTunes; I can listen to Blip, Pandora, or Radio 1 if I want.

Kenna

eliot — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 22:11:20 +0000

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.

Mashuptown

eliot — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 20:40:49 +0000

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

Monome plays life

eliot — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:25:03 +0000

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.

MP3 search bookmarklet

eliot — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:45:38 +0000

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” .

Kasabian

eliot — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:15:48 +0000

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.

SXSW torrents

eliot — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 05:59:00 +0000

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.

Samplé vu

eliot — Thu, 23 Jun 2005 01:32:28 +0000

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.