Category: Music

Songs, tunes, and other stuff that keeps you moving.

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Music Technology Web Links

Last.fm integration for streaming radio sites

I was in a mood today to make my music listening habits a bit more social, but I found that my two current music services, Pandora and Slacker, don’t naively support sending data to Last.fm.  No problem, I thought, some enterprising hacker out there has solved this problem already.  Right I was, and now you too can have the scrobble ability if you use these two services AND also use Firefox with them:

So long as Firefox continues to be friendly with these plug-ins I’ll be using them to share the music.  That said, I’ll be impressed if this integration works for more than 6 months.  Time will tell.

Last.fm Pandora Slacker Firefox Greasemonkey

Categories
Music Technology

Multi-room audio coolness

After a little searching around (OK, a lot of searching) I’ve found a solution to help kick music around throughout the homestead with only a little fussing.  The equation works like this:

Roku SoundBridge + SlimServer 6.2.1 + SoftSqueeze PC client + MP3s = whole house synchronized* audio

I have to put the * caveat in because the Roku really doesn’t handle sync terrifically.  But it does it well enough to walk around the house and hear the same song everywhere at nearly the same time.  Considering the extra cash outlay was zero, its not a bad solution.

Now, when am I going to get some more of these devices?

Categories
Music Technology Work

Smart Playlists, Voting, and Discovery

An interesting phenomenon is occurring in my music library and I wonder if I’m alone in this behavior. I find that if I make smart playlists in my music and media player of the moment, then vote on the songs that appear in that playlist, then begin to weed out the songs I don’t really like all that much, that I am in fact listening to only about 10% or so of my total music library.

This gets me wondering: is the majority of music that I (and others) have actually crap or is there just no good way to relate the songs I like to the ones I haven’t heard or found yet? I am working on a project dealing with this very issue at work at the moment, but I am fiddling around with my library on my own time. I wonder if others have the same sorts of experience with their libraries?