When I first got an iPod in December 2003 I found a cool feature. You can actually rate your songs as your listening to them. I thought this would be fun to do as I listened to music and I would eventually have all my songs rated. Well, here we are, 6 years later and I finally finished. I have rated all 4,457 of my iTunes songs, one by one on my iPod. I thought I would share some info on my ratings. First, I should point out that I am a tough rater. You have to earn those stars. I find I rate lower than my friends and wife. Here is my scale:
For the bored and interested, I have compiled some statistics about my ratings. 4,457 Songs Total 5-Star: 213 songs (4%) (Made up of 100 Artists) 4-Star: 598 songs (13%) 3-Star: 1245 songs (28%) 2-Star: 1629 songs (37%) 1-Star: 787 songs (18%) Most Played (and Highest Rated) Song: Mike Doughty - The King of Carrot Flowers (Neutral Milk Hotel Cover) Albums With the Most 5-Star Ratings: 1) Mike Doughty - Haughty Melodic (7 tracks) 2) Neutral Milk Hotel - The Aeroplane Over the Sea (5 tracks) 3) Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness 3) Ben Folds - Rockin' the Suburbs 3) Ben Folds - Songs for Silverman Artists With the Most 5-star (and incidently, the most 4-star) Ratings: 1) Ben Folds (18 5-star tracks, 31 4-star tracks) 2) Mike Doughty (16 5-star tracks, 24 4-star tracks) Artists With the Most 3-star Ratings (thought this was interesting): 1) Ben Folds (59) 2) Green Day (54) 3) Mountain Goats (53) 4) Smashing Pumpkins (50) 5) Mike Doughty (41) 6) Decemberists (31) Most 1-Star Tracks on an Album: Beastie Boys - Check Your Head (19 of 20 are 1-star rated) [Disclaimer] Live - The Distance to Here (11 of 13 are 1-star rated) [Aaaand.. that's when I stopped buying Live's albums] Note: if you want to look at some more diverse music listening, check out my last.fm listening statistics page. Labels: music
I loved launchCAST radio. I haven't been able to use it in a year or so because it's Windows only (even though you listen to it through a browser). It was Yahoo!'s personalized internet radio. It played you songs based on how you rated other songs/artists. It was brilliant. It was like my awesome music friend who would tell me about great bands. launchCAST is solely responsible for introducing me to some of my favorite bands:
Well today Yahoo! announced they are killing off the service. Awesome. Their blog post talks about how they're transferring all their pre-programmed and auto-populated stations they used to offered to CBS Radio, but that in my opinion wasn't a very interesting part of the service. The killer feature was the ratings and recommendations (the personalized radio) which they say "was never a money maker" even though they limited it to Windows Users using Internet Explorer and never tried to make it any better or any more accessible to users. Over the years I have rated 752 Artists, 755 Albums, and 2,288 Songs on the service. The worst part about putting all that time and effort into rating is that there was no way to export those ratings for use elsewhere (like iTunes or last.fm). Even their own Music Player which let you write plug-ins didn't give you access to the ratings because they considered it a proprietary, differentiating feature they didn't want people to have access too. Now they are simply deleting the data for good. So I'm sad to see the service go. It introduced me to a lot of great bands. It's just to bad it is being killed off in a manner that leaves it's most loyal users with nothing. Labels: music, technology
With apologies to Mark Reeder, my first attempt at using the Napster store wasn't a pleasant one. I went to buy the new Islands album from Napster and was presented with this message: Sorry, at the copyright owners' request, the following [2] track(s) are not currently available for purchase. Click "Continue" to view available tracks and proceed with your purchase.Yeah, I really dont want to buy 10/12ths of an album. To Mark's and Napster's credit, the homepage is way better than when I reviewed it (it no longer looks like a gigantic banner ad) and the UI of the web application has tightened up quite a bit. I also heard you can't view available tracks without an account and can't use Safari at all on it, both of which aren't good features. The album I bought this morning from Amazon Mp3 was $8 and Napster had it for $10 (with all tracks included this time). For now I will still be using the Amazon Mp3 store as my first destination, iTunes Plus tracks as my second and then I will check Napster. Labels: music, musicsearch
So, over the past few months I have been looking for a good way of listening and discovering music on the mac. I said that what I wanted in a service was to:
"Why doesn't Last.fm just charge a few bucks more a month to let you listen to music on-demand? That would be ideal."Well that's what they are going to do, so I couldn't have asked for anything better. The also already have a great personalized radio service, plus a native OS X client (which they say will be updated to support this new service) that doesn't crash if your browser crashes like the other "online services" do. Last.fm also has been keeping track of all the music I have listened to for the past 3 or so years and has an interesting (albeit unexplored by me) social networking aspect to the site. Also, if you didn't read it, they now allow anyone to listen to any song or any album on their website for free up to 3 times. This is awesome. This means you can decide if a new album you are interested in is worth spending the money on by listening to the whole thing first. Not much more to say other than I am extremely excited for what last.fm has in store in the near future, and instead of waiting around for Yahoo's cryptic hints to pan out, I am fully getting behind last.fm, I just hope they get a big enough backlog and low enough price to make it all worth it. Labels: mac, music, musicsearch, software
A few months ago I was talking to my cousins at my other cousin's wedding and we started talking about music. After a while, they asked me if I liked a band called Breaking Benjamin. I looked at them confused. They asked if I really didn't know who Breaking Benjamin was and I told them that I didn't. Since then I have heard two songs from this band and made my judgment pretty quickly that I didn't like them at all, but I'm sure to my cousins everyone else at the table, it looked like I was totally out of the music loop and that I was pretty unaware of current music. It's been four years since I've listened to music on the radio, but in that four years I have probably listened to more music than any other time in my life. Last week I left my iPod in the house (it's usually in my pocket) and I had to listen to the radio to and from work and while doing other normal driving. I wouldn't have thought so before last week, but I am completly dependant on my iPod and the music that I like. It was a bad few days. It was like being stuck in the back of your parents car in high school while they have their station on. It did have one really good advantage though. I now know the names of several popular bands that, when brought up in conversation, I can say with confidence that I don't like. Seems like it would be a good thing for me to do a few times a year. Labels: music
So in searching for a good music service on OS X, I decided to give Napster a try. Napster just released a new version of their service that includes a full web interface which works cross-browser and cross-platform. I signed up for a 30 day trial and liked it, but not enough to keep and pay for the service. Fist, the interface is actually petty nice. It's well laid out and works pretty much how I would expect it to. The only 2 things that seem strange visually are the status bar at the top (shouldn't it be at the bottom of the app?) and the search box has electric blue text nad looks very strange and out of place. I am torn because while I love that it is a full-fledged web app (something I have wanted for a while), the more I used it, the more I sort of wished it was its own application. One reason this is bad for me especially is because I am a web developer so I clear my cache a couple hundred times a day and crash my browser upwards of a dozen times a day which isn't good for trying to listen to music that plays in the browser. A nice compromise to this might be something like running Npaster in Mozilla's Prism so it can be it's own app. I wish it would handle search a little better. I accidentally had it on "song search" or something but thought I was on "artist search" and searched for a band. All it said was "No Results". It would have been nice had it said "No Results in Songs for 'Mates of State' but there was 1 Artist Match" with a link to the artist or artist search results. What disappointed me most was the lack of a good "Personalized Radio Station" like Yahoo's LaunchCast or Pandora. I tried to use Napster's "Auto Playlists" but they were, for the most part, really bad recommendations for similar artists. The other problem with the "Auto Playlist" Idea is that the kinds of bands I like vary quite a bit which I think that can be said for most people. Ben Folds is nothing like Clap Your Hands Say Yeah who is nothing like The Streets but I love them all. I would try to listen to the auto-playlists but their recommendations were always pretty bad, even in the same genre. Maybe to get the most out of Napster I need to treat it a little differently, like build up my own music library and listen to that on shuffle, but I can already do that with my iPod. What I want is to listen to music I like as well as music that I might like, recommendations mixed in to stuff that I know I like. I can't really get that with Napster, at least, not that I found. Also, I really think Napster needs a better homepage. Napster.com looks like a banner ad. It is way off-putting. Look at some other product pages from around the web: Apple product pages, Firefox, Delicious Library, etc are well done. I would never even want to try Napster just by visiting the homepage. How about screenshots? Also, there are so many old pages lying around the web for old features and out of date features for Napster. Reading these pages I really thought there was a radio player in Napster Online. Took me an hour googling to find out that is is maybe only a feature for the desktop software and even at that, maybe this feature doesn't exist anymore. I wouldn't know. Didn't say anything in the help either. So I might try it again in the future, but for now I will move on and continue my search for a great music program on the mac. I just hope they start a personalized internet radio feature based on user ratings. That would get me to become a paying customer. Overall though like I said, it's not for me. Labels: mac, music, musicsearch, review, software
It looks like Apple is dropping the price of it's DRM-free mp3's on iTunes (called "iTunes Plus" tracks) from $1.29 to 99 cents. When the iTunes plus tracks came out, I was pretty excited about them. I ended up "upgrading" a track I own and buying 6 more. Yes, I know I was an early adopter of the iTunes Plus tracks, but come on, I bought those tracks only a little over 4 months ago. I didn't think that they would lower the price by nearly 25%. That is ridiculous. If Apple doesn't give me a $2.10 store credit, I might just file a class-action law suit. That will teach them to lower their prices. Assholes.
I learned about launchCast radio three years ago from my brother, and I have to say it completely changed how I listen to music. It automatically plays music it thinks you might like based on telling it the bands and songs you do like. I paid for their "plus" service so I could avoid commercials and skip songs. I have been introduced to countless bands and bought tons of CD's as a result of the service. The Perfect ThingA couple years later, Yahoo! came out with the Yahoo! Music Engine which was a desktop application for Windows that was a Music Player for your audio files and listen to your LaunchCast Radio. It also had a paid subscription service that let's you listen to any song or album that Yahoo has whenever you want through the player. I happily pay for this service too, I even bought a 2 year subscription.The ProblemHere's the problem. Yahoo! Music Jukebox is Windows only. At my new job, I work on an Intel Mac all day. I also have a Power PC Mac as my home PC so right now the only way to listen to Yahoo! Music Jukebox is at work through VMWare, and lately it has been more and more annoying to keep open a VM eating up CPU and memory just to listen to music.The HuntSo I am on the hunt for a new solution. The 3 main things I want are to
Rhapsody: Initial ThoughtsSo far this is looking like a difficult task. Rhapsody is where I am starting the hunt because I know they have a Firefox plug-in that works on Mac (and Linux) for their on-demand listening service, but I cannot find an "personalized radio" service on there yet. They have "auto-generated playlists" but I don't quite grasp those yet (how many songs does it auto-generate? Does it auto-generate more songs once the playlist is done?) but might try them to see how things work. I just went to their website to look to sign up for a free trial but they don't offer one. That seems like a bad choice on their part considering how unique these services are.FeedbackSo, I will try to keep this site up to date with my progress and experiences, and gladly welcome any comments feedback and suggestions in the comments.Labels: mac, music, musicsearch
 The Reminder from 70's influenced indie rocker Feist is the first album in recent memory that lived up to my expectations. Musically it isn't much different than her last album, but that is by no means a criticism. It is full of both energetic and smooth songs throughout the album, many of which are already Feist favorites of mine. I can't help but feel a little old when listening to this album, that is to say I don't think this is the music all the kids are listening to these days, but that really doesn't matter when the music is this good.
What is wrong with people? This morning I stopped into Target and the lady in front of me was buying Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The only reason for doing this obviously was because she saw them win the Grammy for best rock album of the year (note that the nominees in this category were a joke). No one likes that album. It's just sad to see people be so influenced by being told what they should like instead of figuring it out for themselves. Oh, disheveled stay-at-home-mom trying to find your Target card, I would tell you to stop, but you just wouldn't listen, would you?
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