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Last.fm: Not Just A Tchotchke; CD Baby

Posted February 8th, 2008 at 2:18PM

I’ve been a member of last.fm for two years now, and am still discovering more things to like about it every day. Originally I signed up because a few friends had, and I wanted to record the music I listened to, as I love pretty charts and graphs. I’ve never been a huge listener of any type of online radio, aside from a podcast here or there. (The quality is usually poor, I have music that I know I like already on my laptop, and the lack of DJs on most sites makes for a real lacking of personality or human touch.) I would occasionally listen to the online feed of an actual station (WICB Ithaca College, WSPN Skidmore, or WEQX), but the quality was still poor.

Recently, however, I transfered all of my music to an exterior hard drive. This means I’m without anything to listen to when I go roaming in search of free wifi. Enter last.fm.

I load up the last.fm program and select from any of their channels – particularly “my neighborhood,” which pulls music that I don’t currently listen to, but which is similar to the music I do, which is always “scrobbled” and collected by the website. It works very well, giving me unknown artists and some I’ve heard of but haven’t investigated. The quality is also great, considering its streaming full-length mp3 tracks.

So problem solved, I have good music to listen to while away from my iTunes playlist. Check out last.fm if you haven’t already, and add me to your friends list.

And because I’m feeling charitable, here’s another website you should definitely check out: CD Baby. It’s a very intuitive and well put together site highlighting tons of independent musicians. I recently watched The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai in the 8th Dimension (one of my top favorite movies), and heard some really great, textured electronica in one of the special features. With a little searching, I found the album: En-Trance by Brothers Price Music, a digital-only release. While I was at it, I added one of the more than 400 albums associated with Massive Attack and trip-hop, via CD Baby’s “Sounds Like” page. I’ve been looking for more trip-hop other than Massive Attack and Tricky, but it’s hard to stay up-to-date in upstate NY. Problem solved. Very cool.

Tags: , , , , , , , | Category: Alt, Tech
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Pyramid Mall

Posted January 11th, 2007 at 7:25PM

So I’m sitting outside of Borders, using the wireless internet, listening to TV on the Radio blaring out of some BS preppy store. How sad is that? I feel like torching the place. I think it’s American Eagle Outfitters.

Access to the interweb is limited with the campus completely shut down. My sleeping habits have taken a turn for the worse: I usually go to sleep at 4-5am, and wake up around 2pm. This means I’m getting maybe two hours of daylight each day. Been doing a lot of reading, and watching a fair amount of movies. Notables lately include Snakes on a Plane and Only Human. Rented them the same night, and both were entertaining (for very different reasons).

Sometime soon I want to update the site, and add a MINI section. Right now, I’m pretty much just waiting for iTunes to update. Upgraded to 7.0 finally, and updating a few tracks. ho hum.

Tags: , , , | Category: Life
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Euro Trash!

Posted October 30th, 2005 at 6:29PM

Today I tested out iTunes a bit more. Yes, I turned to the dark side three or four months ago, but I still learn new things everyday about the Mac.

The music video feature? Not worth using unless I either bought the music videos from the online Apple store, or if I had an iPod that could play music videos. As it is, keeping everything in a folder, and playing them with Quicktime, works much better.

The continuous radio feeds? Where have you been all my life! For being someone who is almost always on the computer, hacking at codes, surfing the interweb, and all this other crap, I’m woefully behind in some areas. I chalk it up to the fact that back home, I’m on dial-up and can’t experience half of all of this. But Wi-Fi throughout my flat totally owns.

Anyways, so I discovered that streaming radio doesn’t suck anymore. I use to try it every once in awhile, using RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player. It sucked. But using iTunes, streaming mp3 files, it rocks.

I’m using entirely too much slang on the blog these days. Ah well.

So I googled for some streams, after setting up an essential: WAMC, the local NPR station back home. I forget what I searched for, but ended up with a bunch of cheesy synth, electronica, trip-hop, drum and bass, jazz, house, jungle, ambient, and god knows what else. Even a bitching punk stream. Check out TastyCast.com for some of the streams I subscribed to.

Some have been better than others. Some have been rotten. And some have totally rocked. Currently I’ve been listening to Proton Radio for three hours.

I wish iTunes had a feature that could track how much time you’ve logged on each stream. The ‘play count’ will have to substitute as a rough estimation.

Tags: , , , | Category: Oddities
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