June 15th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
The majority of the music I listen to is instrumental, but here I am singing along to Scott Walker’s The Electrician (be glad you can’t hear me!) As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve got hold of a copy of the lyrics and pasted them into the text area of the MP3 file for reference (and caterwauling). However, this isn’t a particularly elegant way to access this information - indeed, it seems rather half-hearted. Perhaps Apple’s developers went this far and then observed the legal threats from record companies against all those lyric sites. If that wasn’t the case, I’m sure Apple could come up with a lovely piece of eye candy: semi-transparent text floating over your screen or similar.
Which leads me to the question posed in the title of this post - are there any ways you’d particularly like to see iTunes improved in terms of interface enhancements or ironing out niggles?
June 13th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
First it was Last.fm with their ‘user-generated club‘, now the iTunes Music Store is throwing its hat into the ring by sponsoring a free, month-long music festival in London. High-profile names including Amy Winehouse, Crowded House and Stereophonics have been announced. Gigs will take place at the ICA, located just off Trafalgar Square (at the other end of the Mall from Buckingham Palace). Tickets will be awarded to iTMS competition winners so check your iTunes for details. To ensure a nice bit of closure, all gigs will be recorded and made available for purchase from the sponsors…
Via: Billboard
Link: iTunes Festival website
June 8th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
June 6th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
+ 
Sheesh, you turn your back for a few days well-deserved r’n'r and suddenly a giant American corporation goes and snaffles your preferred music service. When I read the news on my return, I’ll confess my heart sank a little. Last.fm’s my little secret (that I happen to share with only 20 million other subscribers). Why would they want to go and sell out to CBS? The answer’s obvious and detailed on Last.fm’s recently initiated blog. I hope they’re treated with as much of a hands off approach as Yahoo! have done with del.icio.us. I wish them a hearty best of luck and will now return to daydreaming that I’d had such a brilliant idea. Sigh.
Link: Last.fm blog post
May 27th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
Dear Readers,
Wow, I’ve just realised I’ve been writing this blog for almost 6 months now. I hope you’ve found it interesting so far. I’m happy to be learning about and reporting on all the new developments in this area. One thing I’d really welcome is feedback - is there anything I’m missing out on that I should be covering? (For example, I know I’m not so strong on PC-related products and I’d love to publish someone’s experience of Apple’s iTV in relation to listening to music.) Do you think I could be doing anything better than I am currently? Is there a service or product that’s relevant to Music Interfaces that you have experience of? Is there a product that you wish existed but doesn’t exist at the moment? I’d love for you to write a review or post for this site. If you’re interested, please don’t hesitate to get in touch either in the comments or via: colin - the at sign - musicinterfaces - dot - com. Whether you’re interested in contributing or not, thanks for reading!
All the best, Colin.
PS I won’t be able to update Music Interfaces for the next week, but will be back in touch directly after that.
May 26th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
We7 is a new venture, currently in beta, that offers free, legally downloadable music. The catch is that each track is prefaced with a brief (10 second) audio advertisement. There are currently only a few tracks available, but they’re from relatively well-known artists e.g. Herbie Hancock, Hall and Oates and Coolio. This may well be evidence of the sort of backing for this project (Peter Gabriel is the big name). The music is DRM-free. The We7 website states that relevant ads will be attached to the track on download so that they can be targeted according to user demographics.
When I registered with the website, the technology worked smoothly and I was able to download and play a Herbie Hancock track without a problem. The advertisement consisted of a female voice stating “I’ll pay for a download when I die, until then… We7″. I’d rather not have had to listen to it, but it was brief and pretty painless. The business model is certainly innovative - it will be interesting to see whether it succeeds when it launches properly this summer.
Link: We7
Via: Soundtracking
May 25th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
May 18th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
Last.fm move from the virtual to the real world with the following event. I wonder whether it’s the first of many such moves. I can’t quite decide whether the decision to play tracks from Last.fm subscribing attendees’ recent listening habits is intriguing or a little lame. Ninja Tune lost the plot a few years back, but they’ve a rep for getting involved in interesting things so may be interesting all the same:
Social music network Last.fm has teamed up with seminal label Ninja Tune to create a groundbreaking ‘user-generated’ club night at The Big Chill House on Pentonville Road on June 2nd. All Last.fm users going to the party will help decide the setlist for the upstairs room, DJed by Ninja Tune’s Sparky. They’ll register their intention to attend at the club’s event page on the Last.fm website, and on the night Sparky will play tracks drawn from music listened to by those users in the preceding weeks.
(…) This party is the first time that Last.fm has taken its ‘collaborative filtering’ ethos out into the real world. Sparky’s user-generated set will also be recorded and made available on Last.fm for users unable to attend. (…)
Generous souls that they are, Last.fm will be posting a recording of the event for those unable to attend. Nice.
Link: Last.fm event page
May 16th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
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,
May 14th, 2007 by musicinterfaces
