Archive for the 'Music' Category

Why bother downloading music?

Published on August 5, 2009 in Internet and Music. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Who still bothers with risking a law suit from the RIAA by downloading music these days when there’s so much on offer which is just streamed directly to your PC?

Grooveshark – http://www.grooveshark.com/

grooveshark

Type in the name of a song there on the homepage and you’re away. Not so sure on the “autoplay” feature which occasionally queues up some really random stuff but aside from that it’s a brilliant site for listening to the odd track here and there or creating playlists and letting them go.

Grooveshark offer great integration to Facebook with their Sharesong app and Wordpress with their plugin. They also offer a URL shortening service specifically for music over at tinysong.com (e.g. tinysong.com/37GX)

Last.fm - http://last.fm/

It’s the closest we can get to Pandora in the UK these days. Streaming custom radio stations tailored to your exact music tastes is something only the web can offer. You ask for an artist and it’ll use it’s vast collection of data to create a custom playlist full of artists similar based on what other users of the site listen to.

Unlike Spotify, Last.fm have opened their API allowing developers to make their own third party apps which can access content, Mobbler being a prime example. Many an evening I’ve plugged my speakers into my phone and let Last.fm be the DJ..

The Hype Machine – http://hypem.com/

Scouring the so-called blogosphere for tracks posted on music blogs, the Hype Machine is a great place to find countless remixes of your favourite artists. You can create watchlists containing recently posted material from only the artists you’re interested in or you can dive straight in and see what’s being talked about the most across the Internet.

The site will continue to play tracks even if you carry on navigating around the site. However it will only play music as it comes in the order of search results, there doesn’t seem to be a proper way of creating custom playlists.

HypeM is integrated nicely with Twitter and Last.fm allowing you to tweet your recently “loved” tracks and scrobble the tracks you’re listening to your Last.fm profile.

Spotify – http://www.spotify.com/

This ad-supported service with it’s own stand alone client is expanding it’s huge music library with thousands of tracks added each week. Some artists have taken to pre-releasing albums to premium subscribers and their mobile client offering the ability to download entire playlists to your device *almost* makes it worth the £10/month fee.. but that’s still a rip off if you ask me.

I went to a party a little while ago, the host had paid for the much more reasonable £0.99 one-off “day pass” 24hour subscription to Spotify and left it open on his laptop the whole night so that anyone could jump on and queue up a tune. It was the world’s best jukebox, no listening to the same crappy party mix CDs on repeat, no dead air when switching CDs..

Spotify also supports scrobbling tracks to Last.fm from a setting in the preferences.

The YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/

I hate to even mention this one but there’s definitely a lot of music uploaded there, usually with a static image or slideshow of the artist where the video should be. I just find something really wrong with using a video site to listen to music, the quality is usually terrible but it’s probably by miles the most popular in this list.. Music videos on YouTube recently took a massive hit when the record companies objected to their material being uploaded resulting in over 100,000 videos being removed from the site.

Moof – http://moof.com/

Music, online, on-demand, for free… is a spin off of YouTube giving the user an iTunes-like web interface to search and playlist videos from YouTube. It’s not a bad idea but I’ve already mentioned my reservations about getting music from the YouTube.

In conclusion, perhaps there is still a place for listening to an albums worth of mp3s but I don’t find myself doing it that much any more.. And remember these are a just a choice few, new sites are innovating all the time – keep your eyes open for the next big thing.

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Mobbler

Published on May 10, 2009 in Music and Nokia. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Mobbler is god’s gift to users of Last.fm and Symbian S60 devices.

Only a short while ago it was just an app which sat in the background and collected tracks played on the built-in Music Player of Symbian phones like my Nokia N95 8gb. It would queue up and scrobble the tracks to your Last.fm profile when you told it to. Even then, it was much better than other Last.fm scrobbling apps for Symbian becaMobbler V.3use they all worked off their own players but personally, I don’t find anything wrong with the default Nokia player. So I was chuffed to find an app which would scrobble tracks I listened to on my phone. Useful, pretty cool but not worth writing home about… Till now.

After being offline for a while last month I was pleased to see news there’d be a few updates to Mobbler, currently at version 0.4.5 – always preferring to be up to date (even when it lands me in the shit, but that’s another story!) I installed the new version to find it now does so much more.

You can see data from your account on the phone such as your shoutbox, friends, playlists etc, you can listen to any Last.fm radio station you want (but I wouldn’t listen unless it’s on a wifi connection..) and it’s got a sleep timer which switches itself to offline mode after a set amount of time. For example, I usually put the “sleep” tag radio station on for half an hour when I go to bed.

So if you’ve got a Symbian S60 device and a Last.fm account – definitely check this out, have a play with it and see what you think. Top marks from me though.

The sound of GTA IV

Published on May 1, 2008 in Games and Music. 2 Comments Tags: , .
Grand Theft Auto IVGTA IV – Can’t wait to play it!

Because I don’t have a PS3 or 360 (yet), I haven’t had the chance to play GTA IV but I’ve heard a lot about in the media recently and I have had the chance to listen to a promo CD of the music featured in the game.

The GTA series as a whole is renowned for having consistently good tailor-made soundtracks and by the sounds of this promo, the fourth in the collection is no exception. My favourite has still got to be the theme tune from the original GTA! I even played it on my radio show a while back.. (after bleeping the swear words out obviously)

Just listening back to it now makes me want to play the classic original. Good thing it’s available for free ;)

The style in the fourth seems to be a lot more hip hop oriented featuring artists like Busta Rhymes and Mobb Depp which isn’t usually my thing but I’ll make an exception because they’ve picked some decent tunes. But it’s not all hip hop! Remember in the original when you hopped in a pick-up truck, the radio would be country music. There’s bound to be a wide selection, surely something to suit everyone. My favourite track on the promo is Qadir – Nickname

Of course, everyone who is playing it will be too busy playing it to care about what music is playing in the background as they speed away from the cops..

Another game series with a notable soundtrack is the Need for Speed collection. Definitely get a copy of the Most Wanted soundtrack, it’s brilliant – especially for driving music!! ;)

Muxtape Recorded

Published on April 6, 2008 in Internet and Music. 1 Comment Tags: .

I’ve made a mixtape, over at muxtape.com – inspired by just copied the idea from Glenn. Heh…

Muxtaped

Check it out at http://sionide.muxtape.com/ – it’s a mixture of a few tunes I like, quite a mixture of genres. I hope you find something on there you like.

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