I should be studying right now...ha! I'm so horrible. I think in about an hour I'm going to go work out and then I might be motivated to study the rest of the evening. My husband is still in California so my only distraction is the internet...
Instead of studying I'm playing with music things. I've been interested in a few music services for some time. I know I've posted about them, but I think that was before I moved to MT and I can't figure out how to import my many years of old posts (grrr).
I mentioned before that all of the music services are different so it's hard for me to actually choose one, well now I have 3 plugins on my iTunes (yeesh).
I started out with Last.fm, which I like but I've decided today that I may stop using that one. Last.fm also tracks the podcasts that I listen to and I actually wish it wouldn't do that. I tried to utilize the RSS feeds for recently played tracks but the feed wouldn't work right. I've also found their profile and tag editor harder to use.
I discovered MusicStrands some time ago and had a bad initial experience with it. Too bad I can't link to the post I wrote about it but I decided to uninstall it...I also sent them an email stating what was wrong with it on my computer. What I didn't expect was them to email me back (probably about a month later) with an invitation to try out another version they were working on for Windows XP. I did try it and it's working beautifully! It turns out that MusicStrands is developing into a great music community. Their site has grown since I first joined and I like the features they offer. I also like that their "plugin" is a stand alone client which runs alongside iTunes so I don't have to login to their website to get recommendations and things like that.
I then discovered Audiobaba last week (I think via TechCrunch). Audiobaba is not a feature rich music community like MusicStrands but it does offer an iTunes plugin with music recommendations. My favorite feature of Audiobaba is the AutoGJ. AutoGJ is a playlist that runs in iTunes that is constantly updating based on what you're listening to at the moment. The recommendation technology is a little smarter than MusicStrands, I think it's more comparable to Pandora. Audiobaba analyzes the patterns of the music instead of basing it completely on user recommendations (they call it acoustic recommendations). This is something that a music person, such as myself, can respect. Audiobaba also learns the music that you listen to most often, so there's some degree of artificial intelligence involved. My only gripe about Audiobaba at the moment is that when you close the client software you close the program (instead of it minimizing to the system tray like MusicStrands does). I would rather not have the application open in my task bar...I think there's a Windows utility I can install to minimize it to the system tray, but I wish the software would do it automatically.
Along with trying out all of these new things I created a new tool for my blog in the music sidebar. One problem with having a million interests is trying to organize those interests in blog form without throwing all of these tools and plugins on the home page of my site. My solution to this is incorporating them into the relevant categories on my blog. I've done a couple but some are still incomplete (I've added a default "links" sidebar to incomplete categories to keep from having a blank sidebar on those pages). I used the MChart tool in MusicStrands so anything I play through my computer is recorded to my site (it's completely customizable, and it looks pretty nice). You can't see it unless you click directly on the post or the music category (one reason why I just love MovableType...it's so easy to set up conditional categories). I hope to start working on a sidebar for my travel section soon, another interest is geo tagging and map services so stay tuned, I'm sure you'll be hearing about my experiences with those services soon.
technorati tags: music, music_tools, web_2.0, last.fm, music_strands, audiobaba, techcrunch, pandora, blog, sidebar, mchart
