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User Accounts October 6, 2008 at 11:38pm |
| For any wondering, I removed the user section of the site, I decided that maintaining user accounts was a little overkill. Your comments are still there, and you can still comment, the creation of a profile just has been removed, if you have any thoughts, let me know. |
| Battle of the Internet Radios August 04, 2008 12:52am in tech |
I talked about Pandora Radio a couple of days ago and what it brought to the scene, so I thought today I'd compare Pandora to the better known Last.FM service. Last.FM is a social internet radio station where you can interact your friends and share what you've listened on Last.FM. The choices in your station are often generated by what others deem similar to the band you inputted to start the station. Users can tag the songs noting styles and similar bands to help generate the station you want to listen to. The one thing that Last.FM has over Pandora is the desktop client and the ability to tie in programs like iTunes into your recently listened to list. Last.FM is also better for learning about and hearing new unsigned bands. Last.FM allows for bands to upgrade to an artist account to post their songs on the service for others to listen to. Because of this its a great service for new bands to get their music out there for the masses to hear. Pandora, while having some social aspects to it, doesn't yet match the full social experience that Last.FM gives, but thats fine, it brings a lot to the table on other fronts. First, Pandora bases your station on similar sounding artists from your choices rather than what other user's are suggesting. This provides a more accurate playlist when compared to user tagging which could be completely off from what you want on your station. Pandora also allows you to put multiple artists into your stations for the algorithm to create your playlist, and it even allows you to do mixes from multiple stations if you want a little more variety. This differs from Last.FM where as far as I know you can really only choose only one band to base the playback on. Both stations are great services and provide a good selection of songs and artists. I don't think either station is dramatically better than the other. Both have their strenghts and weaknesses, and both have their advantages over the other. So right now I would have to call the battle a draw with both being the winner. Both have iPhone apps for users to stream the music from the cell data network. Both have a pretty extensive library, and both generate pretty good stations. So, which is your preferred internet radio station? Is it Pandora? Is it Last.FM, or is it one not mentioned here? |
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| Enter Pandora Radio July 29, 2008 1:11pm in thoughts |
A couple of months ago, I finally gave Last.FM a try after hearing some good things about it and finally running out of excuses to try it. I was impressed by it. I found a bunch of new bands with a lot of good music. I liked the social aspect, although I never got around to using it. The idea behind it seemed pretty solid and had a pretty good variety of bands and music. Fast forward to yesterday. Last.FM now has a big competitor in the form of Pandora. (yes Pandora has been out for much longer, but I just decided to try it out yesterday) Pandora is similar in many ways to Last.FM but in several key ways its different. You can create seperate radio stations adding different artists to "pool" from, in other words, Pandora with the help of the Music Genome Project finds artists similar to the ones you select. Also, if you want you can do a QuickMix which allows you to listen to music found from whatever stations you select as if they were all combined into one. I could go on and on about how good Pandora is, but suffice it to say I'm quite impressed. There is a lot of music in their library and it is a great way to hear and discover new bands. On a side note, to any Pandora user who happens to own an iPhone. If you haven't already done so, download the Pandora App from the App Store. It's free and provides access to your stations while out and about. And if you have the first gen iPhone, don't worry, its been streaming for me just fine over EDGE. |
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| Leopard VS. Tiger: Front Row December 27, 2007 6:59am in tech |
So I've been using Leopard now for about 2 months and so far I'm really liking it. There is however one little feature I do miss. The new Macs come with a feature called Front Row that pretty much turn your Mac into a giant iPod. (Imagine your entire screen becoming that of an iPod...it's a full screen dashboard with music, video, photo, and podcast playback) With your little remote you can skip songs, play, pause etc. It's a really nice feature and since I like listening to music while I fall asleep, it's great...I can control the playback while lying down. The one thing that I miss with Leopard is the seemingly seamless integration between Front Row and iTunes. In Tiger, I could open up iTunes and start playing a playlist. Ten minutes later, I'm done working on the computer and I just want to bring up the playback with Front Row. I would bring up Front Row, go into the Music menu and click "Now Playing". The screen would then go to the song I was playing and never miss a beat. Playback was constant. The same would go for if I left Front Row and went back to my desktop. This however is not the case in Leopard. Front Row and iTunes seem to be two separate applications with the only linking between them being the shared iTunes music library and playlist. If I start playing in iTunes and then try to switch to Front Row or vice versa, playback stops. I would then have to navigate to the playlist in Front Row, or open iTunes and select my playlist to start playing music again, pretty much starting from scratch. This may not seem like that big of a deal, and in all reality it's really not, but with how well Apple integrates the various programs in OS X, you'd kinda think that doing this wouldn't be that hard, especially since they did it in Tiger. I also have 2 other small issues with Front Row, unless you select "Shuffle All Songs" at the beginning, it will play the songs in order. With my relatively large music collection, I like to keep my playlists on random just to get a variety of playback. I can't just select the first song I want to listen to and have it randomly go from there. If I select an individual song to start with, it will play that song and play the remainder of the playlist in order. The second small issue is that there's no option to turn repeat on from Front Row, so when it reaches the end of a playlist, it just stops. These things aren't dealbreakers by any means as the rest of Leopard to me is amazing, including the important stuff like basic functionality. But these are just things that I wish Apple would have done. |
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| NIN Leaves Label October 10, 2007 2:47pm in thoughts |
 As mentioned many places over the internet, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have left their record label and are now as they put it, "free agents". They follow other big bands like Radiohead to be without a record label. NIN is a pretty well-known band and for them to break away from the record label and make it known as to why, here's a link to an interview a little while back with Trent Reznor. Interview with Trent Reznor Reznor makes a valid point. Record labels are greedy SOBs. Charging an extra $10 for the changing CD ink that costs an extra 83 cents? PLEASE. And it's not like the money is going to Nine Inch Nails. Nope, its going to the record labels who want more money. Trent is completely against that and wants his fans to be able to afford his music. The prices the labels charge today is making that harder and harder for the majority of people. So where does this leave the record companies. Their insistance on DRM and ripping off fans is putting them in a position I don't think they have yet realized. Some record companies are giving in to removing DRM, others are too stubborn to look at the bigger picture. But if this keeps up, you almost wonder how many more bands are going to speak up against the record labels. Their tactics against the P2P companies and users are only giving them more bad publicity and some bands have gone so far as to say "steal our music". And don't even get me started about the iTunes store. I support NIN and any band that stands up to these musical oppressors and hope that the record labels find some way to embrace the digital age or else NIN and Radiohead leaving might be the least of their concerns. |
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