Music gizmos
Here are a few internet music toys that I have found useful. Please share others.
Seeqpod: A search engine for mp3′s stored across teh interwebs. Useful if you want to quickly hear a track. Only illegal if you download said tracks… Great for sharing songs via flash:
http://www.seeqpod.com/cache/seeqpodSlimlineEmbed.swf
Last.fm: I like it in principle — social music plus personalised radio and concert info — but I rarely go to the site even though I have a scrobbler running that marks all the tracks I play in iTunes. (BTW, iTunes sucks, but I don’t like Winamp either. Any other good iPod compatible players?)
Pandora: Big daddy of free internet radio, but now unavailable outside of the US.
iLike: I don’t much like Facebook (no, I don’t want to fight Jedi vs. Sith, get lost!) but I do like iLike. I’ve got an iLike doodah docked to iTunes which offers internet radio based on my library plus free mp3′s and band info. Of course, it means that someone, somewhere is watching me, spam at the ready. Luckily (hello NSA!), I do not listen to jihadi training camp music.
Posted on January 29, 2008, in Music, Web/Tech. Bookmark the permalink. 20 Comments.
Steve Evans
RJH
Scott B.
John C.
Susan M
Aaron Brown
ninemoons
arandomjohn
kulturblogadmin
Kyle M
Brad
KulturBlogGuest
MCQ
Wm
Rebecca
Ivan
Geoff J
btdgreg
Clark Goble
Aaron R.
Tim J
Let me second last.fm. It’s great, and the selection is wonderful.
I wonder if jihadi training camp music is Metallica and Iron Maiden. You know, in case they get captured and tortured by us.
Try the Hype Machine: http://hypem.com/
Well if you have a Mac XTorrent is pretty sweet.
I don’t mean to get an “apple” debate going or anything, but, man, I love iTunes. I love practically everything about it. I was just surprised to hear you say you hate it.
Jeremy,
It’s stodgy and slow.
yeah, I hate it too, but it’s a necessary evil.
Wow. I’m surprised at all you haters. I’ve tried most of the others including Amarok, WinAmp, and more. I always come back to iTunes as it just works so well. Especially for Podcasts. Yes there is all the video and iTunes store cruft. But if you don’t use them they don’t really do anything.
If anything iTunes gets faster. Certainly it’s database has improved although I suppose for the folks with ridiculous amounts of music it isn’t good enough. But slow? Slow at what?
To add the one complaint some have about iTunes is codec availability. But there are plenty of plugins to handle Ogg, WMP, and most other formats.
Clark, that’s my beef — for large amounts of music it is just too slow. Plus locating and maintaining a library in one location is a pain, and heaven help you if you want to change computers — you’ll risk losing all your playlists and star ratings.
beemp3.com – probably similar to your first entry. massive search engine.
Boy, I miss the old Napster. You could find anything on it.
Two songs I have not been able to find anywhere:
Kaw-Liga by Ronnie Milsap (old nostalgic for me) BeeMP3 found the Hank Williams version. I might be able to get it on vinyl. =P
A song by the “Vicious Pigs” – my buddy tells me they played it on X96 in Utah in the early 80s, but I haven’t even found anything to suggest they ever existed.
Any pointers? =)
Also, I use Winamp exclusively. I think it’s fine, except for that odd bug where it “guesses” the song length to be some absurd time. Makes it harder to judge how many songs will fit on a mix CD.
Vicious Pigs? Hmmm. That’s a new one on me! Maybe he’s crossing Vicious Pink & Big Pig together….Ha!
My iTunes folder is 40 gig. So you must have a pretty big library to have more problems than me. Moving libraries is pretty easy too. I actually keep mine on an external drive and also sync it with my laptop’s external drive. (At that size it’s just too big to justify putting it on the internal drive)
I’ve never had any troubles. All my smart playlists and doing filtering seem instantaneous.
Are you on a Mac or a PC?
I hate iTunes as well. For limited purposes, the Windows Media Player isn’t actually all that bad (obviously, I don’t own a Mac). I use Burrn for burning CDs with much success.
I don’t mind iTunes. The whole changing computers and losing playlists is a pain, though. I have well over 40GB of music and it is rather slow—shutting it down takes awhile. But I like the interface and all the different ways to view and sort things.
To change computers you just copy the iTunes directory. I don’t quite see what the problem is. All your playlists, podcasts and so forth are maintained.
Clark, no — it’s not that simple. Trust me, as I had to completely reconstruct my library and wipe my ipod.
Yeah, it is. I just did it two days ago.
you sound like a power user.
Nah. I just do my downloads and so forth on this computer at home. I have two other computers at work (a laptop and an iMac) and it’s just easiest to every so often bring the hard drive from home and copy it over.
The one poweruser thing I do though is related. I put a symbolic link in my wife’s home directory to the iTunes directory so that she and I share the same directory with the same playlists and so forth.
The only problem I’ve had is that in my Bootcamp partition I can share the iTunes files but not the database/playlists since Windows has a different path. I kind of wish Apple would standardize the two versions of iTunes more. But it’s probably good enough. I just need to reload all the tunes into iTunes on Windows. I don’t have the playlists though which is a bit of a pain. (I like to listen to podcasts as I play Age of Empires III)
As for Vicious Pig, perhaps you are thinking of just PIG?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIG_(band)