April 22, 2008

Sony acquires Gracenote ...finally

It was inevitable that someone would acquire Gracenote...particularly once Macrovision snatched up AMG. The big surprise, of course, was that it was Sony. Sony's digital music forays have often been closed environments (a la iPod) that failed.There's a ton of hate for Gracenote out there (still...as can be seen on the comments of this article) and Sony after the rootkit fiasco also has garnered its fair share of detractors. After the announcemnent hit, I read through comments on many blogs such as techcrunch, I was amazed at how many people were worried about Sony/Gracenote "spying" on them...seems so strange in the era of last.fm, MOG and ilike where playcount tracking is part of everyday life...where people put up badges of the cool stuff their currently listening to on all their social networking sites...

This aspect of the acquisition doesn't bother me in the least. I just find it odd that such a consumer brand would acquire a b-to-b service...sure Sony has other divisions that sell to business but i think this is the first b-to-b service from Sony.

On the other hand, it is not like Sony had anything going in the digital music space...as of late, their ATRAC format was a doozer, Sony Connect was shut down, the PSP has low sales compared to DS, their MP3 players are non-existant in US. Acquistion is the only route for them, really....

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February 7, 2008

Yahoo! Media Player with HTML playlist

With the release of the Yahoo! Media Player there is a bit on an evolution of the XSPF playlist format into pure HTML...I wonder if this means that XSPF is abandoned by users and developers...Not that it was actively used anyway...sure Yahoo! and a few other websites like MusicDNS use it but the big music players like iTunes, WMP, Winamp still use m3u or their proprietary formats.

Camilo Sesto - Melina

Still, it is an elegant implementation as I just drop in a little javascript from Yahoo and then add anchor tag poining to a song...like Camilo's old ditty...( a little buggy as it produces some drawing issues with Movable Type 4 as you can see on the bottom of this page).

Posted by raza at 11:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 28, 2007

songza

Songza is a very interesting music site...or would you consider it a playback application? This is as clean an interface as you could want...it lets you search for band or song and it gives an amazing number of results ...clicking on each result, gives the user various options (playback, embed, email ,etc.)...

ultimately, nothing more than a toy...

not bad but I have to think too much...in other words, i have to think of what I want to hear (no hints from looking at my collection)...and the system doesn't give me recommendations a la Pandora on subsequent songs...

a little more investigation leads me to believe it is a YouTube de-videofier...i can't tell if ALL results come from there but there are strong indications it is...the Shitty Shitty Band Band video I posted a while back shows up as the lone result for this band which is way less than what shows up on Google...

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May 30, 2007

IODA's Promonet

no discipline when it comes to writing here. not that there is a shortage of things to say or things happening in my professional life...just no discipline. I have been playing with IODA Promonet. It is a cool start but is a service just crying for some sort of API. You can browse and preview music from independent artists and labels and then blog about them... here is a plug for Sonny...

Let's see if this works:

This Is My Story, This Is My Song

Download "Way To Go" (mp3)
from "This Is My Story, This Is My Song"
by Sonny Smith
Jackpine Social Club



More On This Album

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February 26, 2006

Lyrics Legal Frontier

Lyrics are proving to be the next legal frontier facing the music industry. Back in the days of physical distribution, I'd estimate that 50 to 70% of LPs and CDs came with lyrics. Rare were the occasions where the consumer was asked to pay additional money for lyrics. Back in 1978, I sent a check for $0.50 and a SASE to Setauket, LI as requested on the back of Blue Oyster Cult's Spectres album and a few weeks later received photocopies of a computer (UNIVAC) printout of all of BOC's lyrics wherein I was able to decipher such nuggets as "I plot your rubric scarab." In today's music download world, lyrics are not part of the equation.

There is no doubt that there is monetary value in supplying lyrics to consumers for all their digital music files. Some MP3 players have menu options to display song lyrics. Even back to the mid to late 90s, site such as Lyrics.ch offered lyrics but, after legal wrangling, search results only offer links to dodgier sites. Recent rumblings in the news have centered around the PearLyrics and Warner-Chappell dispute (PearLyrics is no longer avialable though the dispute seems to have been resolved amicably) and other potentially legal arrangements (LyricsFind.com and Ted Cohen's words).

As is often the case with these features, the big question is "who pays?" Consumers had been conditioned to getting lyrics for free most of the time. Online sites with user-submitted interpretations of lyrics (REM and Cocteau Twins are always good tests on these sites) are often incorrect but suitable. Either way, the opportunity exists for a service to offer an end-to-end service parallel to what WMP does for album cover art when transfering to a PMC -- ie, ensure the lyrics are available on all the devices along the way.

Posted by raza at 11:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 25, 2005

On Choosing a Digital Media (Music) Adapter

These devices stream your media files from a centralized storage over the home network to the player (also called Streaming Media Adapter or Wireless Media Player). They are available from a plethora of companies from the networking side (Linksys, Netgear, D-link), consumer electronics side (Philips, Sony) and the PC/peripheral side (HP, Creative, Turtle Beach). The devices use an underlying device discovery and communication standard called UPnP AV.

I have been storing all my music (and photos though this rant is all about music) on a linux file server at home for about six years now. It is great to be able to access my personal media from all the PCs throughout the house. For the music, it would be great to have a small, simple device to put in smaller rooms, say my bedroom or bathroom, that could access and playback the music. Twonky Vision's TwonkyVision Media Server (gotta tell them to come up with a better name) is a Linux-based UPnP media server that is available for free but the device player side of things is seriously lacking. The only device that comes close from a feature standpoing (though not quality) is the Linksys WMLS11B Digital Media Streamer...which seems to have been silently end-of-lifed. It no longer shows up on the Linksys site through the standard user interface (only through a search). The only thing right was the feature list and price. The speaker quality was terrible producing a tiny sound and the UPnP implementation was so basic it made browsing painful.

The rest of the products on the market either must be attached via RCA (or optical) jacks to a stereo system or are very bulky (read: expensive) such as the Philips Streamium boombox. My biggest complaint with the traditional music streaming adapters is the size of display -- 2 or 3 lines of an LCD. It is so time consuming to scroll through 200GB of compressed audio on 2 lines of a display. The only usefulness of such a product is with content that is programmed elsewhere like the great Pandora or Internet radio stations. It doesn't help that the devices don't have any Flash memory to store the remote list of music and its metadata but has to retrieve it each time. Perhaps this is a limitation of UPnP. The Creative Labs' product overcomes the display size issue by putting the UI on the RF remote control and they give you about ten lines. Unfortunately, it only attaches to an existing stereo system.

I still haven't come across the ideal product that offers all-in-one (wireless, audio amplification and speakers), quality sound, a good and quick UI ...oh, and all a decent price. If you find one, please comment.

Posted by raza at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)

September 6, 2005

Pandora

I played with Pandora a bit last week...it is certainly great to have such a simple way to enjoy music..and that should be the basis of their product positioning and any and all marketing campaigns. The bottom line for me is that it is probably better at music discovery than playlist...Also, entering a band works a bit better than entering a song.

my tests were relatively straightforward -- create a "station" based on what I consider to be the perfect non-Beatles pop ditty...so I created channels with these songs:

1. Have You Seen Here Face? - The Byrds -- this was super disappointing. I love the punchy guitar lick and though the results had some poppy numbers none had punchy guitar licks...it also included a Christopher Cross song which immediately killed the channel for me.

2. Tell Me To My Face - The Hollies -- for this it gave me a Dan Fogelberg song by the same name and started playing Takin' Care of Business by BTO. I actually have a soft spot for BTO as the second LP I ever bought (after Deep Purple's Stormbringer) was BTO's Not Fragile back when I was 10 years old...however, not what I was looking for so I had to resort to:

3. Bus Stop - The Hollies -- this resulted in a bit of hippy drippy songs and not as much pop perfection as I wanted...low on the music discovery count (ie, bands I didn't know)

4. Picture Book - The Kinks -- pretty much the same as 3 but more bands I didn’t know than 3

5. Care of Cell 44 - The Zombies...this was actually the most enjoyable mix but it moved into more poppy prog rock ...i guess Rod Argent's keyboards were too prominent in the tune maybe his later noodlings with Argent moved things in this direction? I had a fair amount of Roxy Music circa Siren coming in...I'm a prog rock fiend so I dug it but it wasn't really what I was looking for.

6. Phantasmagoria in Two - Tim Buckley - this is a great pop tune but it is mid-tempo and in a minor key ...so thought I'd try something different...decent results...some bands I had never heard of which is very encouraging.

7. From the wacky test dept -- I am not a big reggae fan though I always want to be...I really dig when the Bad Brains go totally reggae as in the song "I and I Survive" because it gives Reggae a bit of an edge...search ended up with a song of the same name by "Burning Spear" which was a bit lame...bummer...

For Band tests - I tend to like deep, brooding baritone voices on top of moody music that can on occasion totally rock...things like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tindersticks, early Leonard Cohen...this is tricky music because they use a lot of strings, background vocalists, slow tempos...but it is challenging music to listen to...Out of the three, testing Nick Cave worked the best...

at times it seems to be that if there are too many parameters, then there is no way for the system to understand which are the parameters that are MOST important to me...Tindersticks channel brings in a lot of music with background strings...very, very trickty because if it is not brooding and moody then it is probably really sappy...Of course, there is the "Guide Me" button with which one can fine tune a station...but it seems too many clicks away...which brings me so some UI issues which are a bummer including the aforementioned negative result on a song name...need a quicker way to exit as its creating a channel you don't want...and, as an avid LP man, I always get upset because when they show cover art it is so often the greatest hits album...A big drag of the solution and perhaps the killer for me is not being able to skip songs...that Christopher Cross was painful.

Posted by raza at 9:02 AM | Comments (0)