I wake up after falling asleep on the sofa sometime around 8pm and it’s now 2 o’clock in the morning. Davis is curled up on the armchair opposite and there’s just the ticking of the clock in the near darkness to keep me company. I’m now not sleepy enough to head upstairs and don’t want to disturb Is by being unable to sleep, so in hopes of tiring myself out, I tippy-tap the following…

Much as I love to check on my Last.FM page (sad, but true), there are a couple of key pieces of data that it appears to fail to capture which has the effect of failing to accurately reflect listening habits. With its focus upon artists and tracks it doesn’t reflect my recent habit of listening to compilations such as the Fonotone Records collection of bluegrass/old-time music or my own iTunes pop mixes. This is because each of these feature a large number of different artists, only a small number of which might appear way down in the lower reaches of my ‘Top Artists - Overall’ list or briefly show in the ‘Weekly Top Artists’. If Last.FM captured album information and published similar charts as it does for Artists and Tracks, it would better reflect what I’m actually listening to and make more accurate recommendations. Similarly, because it fails to register track length, Last.FM promotes my listening to the brief, piano fragments of Prokofiev’s Visions Fugitives or the blink-and-it’s-gone, thrash-core of Naked City at the cost of the drawn-out minimal techno of Fluxion or the frozen tundra-scapes of Thomas Koner. The amount of time I spend listening to the latter may well exceed the former, but the Last.FM methodology favours brevity and quantity.

While I’m on the subject, I tried out Pandora, Last.FM’s human-input counterpart (”Each friend told us their favorite artists and songs, explored the music we suggested, gave us feedback, and we in turn made new suggestions. Everybody started joking that we were now their personal DJs.”). This was a recommendation via the inestimable Dan Hill whose excellent New Music Experiences - which is just my cup of tea, though I’ve yet to finish it. However, I’m not impressed by it so far as, in response to my declared taste for Kraftwerk it suggests Throbbing Gristle, Front 242, David Carretta and Paul Van Dyk. These seem painfully US-centric in their (mis-)interpretation. Then I try creating a new station and entering Erik Satie as my first step, after indicating that he’s an artist rather than a song name I’m asked ‘Did you want the artist Erik Sanko?’. When I respond ‘No, search again’, I’m returned to a blank search box. Third time lucky, I try for Rhythm & Sound, I’m suggested Rhythm Masters… er, no thank you. Same goes for Prokofiev and Sergei Prokofiev. I have better luck with King Tubby, though I don’t like Pandora’s assessment that one of the music’s characteristics was “meandering melodic development”. Ultimately though, I don’t find most recommendations very useful and prefer to rely upon a mixture of intuition and personal research or friends’ recommendations.

[Originally published on A Personal Miscellany]

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That’s a question that’ll quicken the pulse of many a music geek. Am I narrow-minded or open-minded? Am I just right? What is right? Okay, I’ll rein back on the worrying, but I have wondered whether the plethora of music recommendation services will result in more or less homogeneity. Anthony Lieken’s script isn’t going to provide the answer, but - if you have a Last.fm account - it does promise to tell you how eclectic your listening habits are relative other Last.fm subscribers:

The following script takes the 20 top artists in your musical profile from Last.fm, and finds the collection of top 5 similar artists for this top 20. The resulting is a list of artists similar to your preferred artists. As the list is larger (maximum = 100), your musical preference is more diverse.

If this tweaks your curiosity, the author has a number of other online scripts that might be of interest.

Just in case you were wondering (as I was), how eclectic Music Interfaces is - I got a 90 out of 100 (I ascribe that to my love of Barbra Streisand and Bad Brains - er, I’m joking about one of those…)

Links: Anthony Lieken.net, Last.fm,

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To date in my travels in Second Life, I’ve learnt how to adapt my appearance, talk to other avatars and, er, fly. At the end of the last part, I’d opted to leave the Help Island and arrived in Second Life proper. I found myself on a narrow walkway with other noobs flicking into existence all around me. After a little look round the adjacent airport and some rather fantastical constructions, it was time to find a music store.

There appear to be four straightforward ways to move around in Second Life - walking, running, flying and teleporting. To do the latter, you need to know where you want to go. Selecting the Edit menu located at the top of the screen and choosing Search opens up a screen with a number of tabs and options. The fifth tab, Places supplies a pull-down menu with access to a range of activities including discussion, sports, games, education, arts and culture, pageants! and the all-important ’shopping’.

With that option chosen and ‘music’ entered into the search box, a long list of options appeared - The Little Music Store looked promising, I pressed Teleport and found myself standing outside my destination. Taking a look round, this store seemed to sell a fine range of music hardware - everything from sci-fi music boxes to boomboxes, reel-to-reel recorders to oversize loudspeakers. Each was a front end to some streamed music - the range included Smooth Jazz, DJ Trance Channel, Sky FM and so on.

Each of these could be purchased with Linden Dollars and taken back to your Second Life home. As I haven’t mastered how to purchase anything yet or built my own home, I passed on that. I did however click on a card that offered dance scripts and came royally unstuck - I found myself maniacally dancing unable to stop! Of course, another Second Lifer appeared at that moment and proceeded to watch me make a complete idiot of myself. After doing everything I could think of to try to stand still, I eventually gave up and quit the programme. To my great relief, on returning I found I was no longer gyrating like a crazy thing. The moral is - don’t do anything you can’t undo! (which translates in Second Life into don’t let anything run scripts on your avatar).

Back to Search and next I choose ‘MP3 Music Store - Direct Downloads’:

This place contained six booths and a wall of artist images at the back. Clicking on the mock CD player in each booth brought up a list of tracks to play. The music was serviceable. Walking out of a cubicle caused the music to stop, which was nice. I could then have selected an artist from the wall at the back and taken it home - an information card helpfully informed me that “All music is free from our website since we do music promotions for independent artists and djs worldwide, we have a small fee for bandwith and convienience here in secondlife.”

Finally for this post, I chose another option at random and was taken to an island complete with shops and a small number of avatars walking up and down the street:

One of these shops (complete with scantily-clad busker performing outside) offered the chance to listen to a small number of musicians by clicking on images as shown below. As before the music was nothing to write home about.

From these initial impressions, Second Life appears to have a long way to go before it presents anything like a 3-dimensional iTunes Music Store. The music I encountered, in this admittedly limited sampling, wasn’t exactly striking. There wasn’t any clear way of discerning quality without going to literally visiting/teleporting to specific places. Stores would benefit from a user-generated rating system. The number of options available in the Search menu is very limited. Still, there is a sense of (unrealised) potential about music in Second Life, a sense that at some point in the future, it might be possible to and use it as a place to sample and purchase music.

As a significant threat to Second Life’s reign as premiere virtual alternative, this week saw the announcement of Sony’s own virtual enterprise, the Playstation-linked Home. It will be interesting to see how Sony leverage their global media assets in their new world. It’s a safe bet their plans include music sales.

Previously: Part 1: Arrival, Part 2: my first disco

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Peel is an attractively simple program whose primary function is to keep an eye on your favourite MP3 blogs (scroll to the end of this post for an explanation, in case you’re unfamiliar with them). As you can see from the above screenshot, it’s adopted iTunes’ look and feel wholesale. When Peel finds new MP3s posted on any of your bookmarked blogs (saved in the left-hand pane), it lists them on the right. You can choose to play the songs and, optionally, download to your hard drive and import them into iTunes. A nice touch is that Peel provides browser functionality so that you can read MP3 blogs within the program itself:

And that’s about it. You’re reliant upon the tagging efficiency of the blog author - I found quite a few tracks to be lacking in any artist details and, perhaps more importantly, Peel doesn’t give you a lot of guidance on where to find good MP3 blogs past the couple that are already listed. However, a bit of Googling turns a number up.

Recommendation: Useful if you’re both a Mac user (no sign of a PC version) and an MP3 blog enthusiast. As previously stated, it’s currently in beta so is a free download, though the site states that it will be $14.95 when finished. However, when the combined player/browser Songbird (PC, Mac and Linux) has progressed further on its development route it will surely eclipse Peel. Until then, Peel is well worth a try.

Background: MP3 blogs are a relatively recent development. Author/s writing about their favourite music on their blog also post an MP3 in illustration. Typically, the MP3 is posted for a limited period - say a week - together with an invitation to third parties to get in touch if their availability is problematic and a link to a vendor to purchase the CD. Bloggers keen to write about musicians tend to cover less well-known ones, therefore in theory, they serve to promote the artist under discussion without impacting upon sales. This post on the 45RPM blog serves as ample illustration of the two sides of the debate. Examples of popular MP3 blogs include: Poptones, Fluxblog and 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

Download: Peel website

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That’s me, MusicInterfaces Miles, dancing in Second Life. Note to self: get rid of those wings and get some (virtual) sun… and maybe I should take dance lessons too. After sorting myself out with an appearance and learning basic skills on Orientation Island, my next stop - via teleport - was Help Island where I picked up freebies - like those damn wings. I added a couple of free dances to my repertoire and dragged and dropped them onto my avatar once I spotted this outdoor disco:

Initially I danced alone, then was joined by two other noobs (new Second Lifers), one of whom laughed maniacally and danced a lot better than I did. Music-wise, if you squint you might be able to spot the two little boxes at the bottom of the screen, here’s a closeup:

The music tab theoretically provides musical accompaniment. To my horror, when I did activate this (by clicking the play button) a silky-voiced gentleman announced ‘This swinging cut is called Jazzana by Jay Cagneko [at least I think that was the name]. Jay plays live at the Lillypad Lounge on Friday night. Come check him out.’ I hurriedly chose the stop button and turned up some King Tubby in iTunes.

Although I wrote last time that I’d be visiting the Hummingbird Cafe, it’s taken a bit longer to work out how to go about things in Second Life, I promise I’ll get there eventually. Next I intend to take a look at some hopefully rather more atmospheric dance venues.

Previously:  Part 1, Arrival
Link: Second Life

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This looks potentially interesting for those of us yet to own an iPhone:

Jax, a customizable iPod plug-in that adds music management features and delivers Internet content to iPod nanos, minis, and full-size iPods. Jax features configurable visualizers and the ability to manage lyrics and search libraries by specific phrases and words. It also manages album art and lets users research artists. Jax can also download information from the Internet, such as point-to-point directions, current weather forecasts, stock quotes, movie listings and local gas prices. Likewise, it can load news feeds, e-mails and document, as well as video from YouTube, Google Videos, or QuickTime movies.

Looking a little more closely at the product website however, I wonder whether this will amount to anything more than a ragbag assortment of different freeware functionality - the visualizer and music map recommendation engine are available elsewhere. The proliferation of windows in the screenshot above doesn’t look exactly promising. No definite availability date on the website.

Via: Playlist
Link: Product page

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Avvenue allows anyone to access their iTunes library anywhere as long as they store their music on a PC and leave it awake and on:

The Avvenu Music Player™ lets you remotely listen to music you have stored (”ripped”) on your Windows® PC. Simply install the Avvenu Music Player and you can listen to your music using the web browser on any other Internet-connected Windows or Macintosh® personal computer, laptop, or Windows Mobile® 5 Smartphone.

This can be done via mobile phones as simply as via a remote computer. It’s an attractive concept, though I wonder a) what this would do to your phone bill and b) to global warming, it being one more reason to leave your PC on rather than turn it off. Rather attractively, it’s free to download.

(If memory serves, this used to be possible on a Mac, but I may be wrong.)

Link: Avvenu product page
Via: TechCrunch

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This looks potentially interesting for those of us yet to take delivery of our iPhones…

Jax, a customizable iPod plug-in that adds music management features and delivers Internet content to iPod nanos, minis, and full-size iPods.

Jax features configurable visualizers and the ability to manage lyrics and search libraries by specific phrases and words. It also manages album art and lets users research artists.

Jax can also download information from the Internet, such as point-to-point directions, current weather forecasts, stock quotes, movie listings and local gas prices. Likewise, it can load news feeds, e-mails and document, as well as video from YouTube, Google Videos, or QuickTime movies.

Available next month apparently.

Via: Playlist
Link: Product page

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Including at number 9:

‘Allow iTunes Store purchases via Wi-Fi’

The iPhone has 802.11 support, so it can connect to wireless networks. But as far as we know, you won’t be able to use the iPhone to connect to the iTunes Store and download music, movies, and podcasts. Sure, it might not work when you’re in EDGE mode on Cingular’s network (speeds aren’t fast enough), but if you’re on an 802.11 network using a high-speed connection, why not give the iPhone direct access to the iTunes Store?

Link: MacUser article

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I’d feel like Apple was abandoning an opportunity to make this more than a phone, and more that an iPod, and even — let’s be frank about the elephant in the room — much more than a Palm or a Pocket PC. There’s the potential here for some serious George Jetson shit and it would be a pity not to capitalize on that as early as possible.

I can very much sympathise with the wish for at least a relatively open platform for developers. And, yes, the iPhone is a different beast from the iPod, but the iPod has remained securely locked down - apart, that is, from games and Linux hacks. For my part, I’ve used the ? software as a plug-in to liven up iTunes’ sound output. I would love to have this on my iPod as well, but requests by the developer have been entirely ignored. I can’t help but suspect a similar situation will apply to apps for the iPhone (widgets may be different). This is still the honeymoon stage, with the device literally locked behind glass or only held in the hands of company reps, but once it’s out in the wild, there’ll be a blizzard of user feedback and the last thing Apple will want is the messiness of third party software and uncontrollable issues.

Link: 43 Folders: Let OS X developers at the iPhone. Please.

This NYT article: “>Phone shows Apple’s impact on consumer products sheds some light on the situation:

Mr. Jobs is moving in that direction, too, but it appears that he wants to control his device much more closely than his competitors.

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

(…)

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

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