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June 18, 2005
New Music
I like finding new music but I'm not a music geek. I used to commute with one but we've long since gone to work for different companies. I used to listen to the radio but I just can't deal with it anymore - anything new is overplayed so much that I start to dislike it, and I like listening to DJs and commercials even less.
Lately I've been playing with a few online music services; I'm still figuring out what works for me but so far I'm encouraged. Audioscrobbler tracks what I play (compatible music with compatible formats, at least) and after quite a bit of lag produces a list of similar music and people with similar tastes. liveplasma provides a search tool for music artists (and movies) which offers an interesting visualization with links to similar artists. Yahoo Music provides access to a large music library along with search and recommendation tools, and sells music for $0.99/track ($0.79 for subscribers.) If you subscribe to Yahoo Music you can download most anything in their library to play when you like, although they use Windows WMA format which is not universally supported - of particular annoyance is that the iPod cannot currently play this format and I'd really like to buy one.
While none of these services does it all, I find that using the three together has made it much easier for me to discover artists and buy what I like. I very much like that Yahoo's service allows full access to the library rather than just 30-second samples, but I'm currently stuck without a portable music player because of the WMA format problem. The iPod makes the most sense for a variety of reasons but I have yet to find word on whether that will ever work - to be fair, this problem could also be solved by Yahoo using an iPod-compatible format instead of or in addition to WMA.
For now, I've got a way to find new music and at least listen to it in the car by burning what I like to CD.
Posted by nickh at June 18, 2005 12:05 AM
Comments
Nick, Here is the link I was telling you about last night: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/entertainment/download-of-the-day-ml_ipod-104711.php
Posted by: Bonnie at June 30, 2005 10:08 AM