How I listen to, manage and get my music

Posted on December 12th, 2009 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, justgeek, Music.

Over the past year, I have started to notice I tend to use alot of the different musical services/bits. In this blog entry, I'll try and outline the different ones I use and the main motivation I use them. By the way, I am based in the UK so all you American's, I am a bit jealous you have Pandora!

I have an Ipod 160gb classic and Iphone on me pretty much everytime I'm moving around. My main machine is running Win XP and keep itunes synched to my Apple hardware.

last.fm - I started using last.fm a couple of years ago to try figure out what I actually listen to as it builds a whole bunch of statistics on the music you are listening to. It does this by having a "scrobbler" software that sits in your desktop and tracks the music you play on your then sends it to last.fm. The fun part of this is that once you get some of your data up there, you can then start comparing musical tastes to other people through looking at your "neighbours" who based on their scrobbling, you may have a common interest then go on a bit of a peek on what they listen to. This actually works surprisingly well and it allows you to explore people with some potential quirky tastes! Along with that there's the usual groups, web 2.0 chiat and wot not.

Itunes - Ok, not exactly revolutionary I know but I have been using itunes since I got my ipod a few years ago. It's my main hub for my music and I synch the whole contents to my Ipod. I lost all my music once and oh boy, once you loose your music, you get paranoid about loosing it again!

With recent updates to Itunes, you can now build a genius mix based on a single tune plus it even automatically builds Genius lists based on genre, at this exact moment I am listening to a dance mix playing Xpaner, Sasha Works really well when I can't be arsed to decide what to listen to from my library and go into "radio-play-something-to-me" mode.

The Godfather - Not related to the Mafia film but a very cool music tagging piece of kit. Before Itunes, I didn't cared about placing decent ID2 tags on my music but as Itunes is kinda naff if you don't, having a good piece of kit to do it is VERY important. The Itunes tagging kinda sucks as it cant do things like query other sites for data to put into your albums. Highly recommended for people with large aounts of untagged music.

Spotify - If you haven't heard of Spotify then get it now! Essentially, imagine having an Itunes style interface with a library of a millions of songs which is streamed (and some sometimes allowed to be stored), that's Spotify. But that's not the only selling point, another great selling point is the playlists you can build, share and collaborate on. If you wish to share your playlist, you can instantly get a web address that in another spotify, it will open and see it as a new playlist. Genius (even more so then the Itunes offering)! It is a brilliant system and I'm glad the record industry are waking up to this model. Spotify fund this by either interjecting your listening with ads or you pay a monthly £10 subscription, which incidentally also allows you access to the Iphone App that gives you ability to download playlists to plat offline. WOW!!! I'm not too far from getting a subscription!

7digital - I thought I would include my fave online digital store as well. One of the reasons is that they offer free music to download (legally) from their website in a regular subscribed email plus they offer the downloads as Mp3 in 320kbps with a nifty desktop app to manage downloads. The prices are very competitive compared to Itunes and I am all for some further competition to push the music stores on. I was thinking at looking at the Amazon offering, but meh, why try fix it if its not broken!

So peeps, how about you? What do you use? Listen

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Wifi homebrew on the DS

Posted on February 21st, 2008 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, justgeek, Nintendo DS.

I was wondering about the the wifi Ds and found some interesting progress in this forum after a getting interested in ebooks from The Moon Books Project.

Anyways, just reading through it quickly I saw some real cool stuff:

• Google maps on your DS!
• War driving App
• Chance of DS to DS library?

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Little tool to try and get things done regularly

Posted on February 14th, 2008 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Gadgets, productivity.

Holy heck, it's February and it seems to be like I haven't been doing as much as I should be with regards to my regular tasks. Anyways, I decided time to do more stuff and to learn some more programming and cool web stuff. I thought to myself how best to motivate myself and stumbled upon this article in Life Hacker. The brilliance is in its simplicity! Keep a diary and every time you do the regular thing enough, cross it off. Sort of reminds me of Brain Training. The aim is that you keep a chain of regularity and aim to ultimately to keep it going for as long as possible without breaking it.

So here it is, the badly fitting table on the right hand side. Lets see if I actually keep it up!

1 comment.

Google take over pt231 -> Google maps + GPS styleeee!

Posted on December 19th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Gadgets, Palm,PDA's and other smartphones.

Read a nice piece from The Register which describes Google's latest Google Maps being able to use the cellID to figure out where you are when you download maps from them.

It does'nt seem to be available for the Treo but I downloaded the google maps for treo anyways, bloody heck! Amazing! Finally I do not have to take out my A-Z

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Video Games Live – Oh what a night!

Posted on October 24th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Music, Other gaming.

On Monday 22nd October at the South Bank Royal festival hall, there was (IMHO) the highlight of the games calendar (no not Halo 3 release I'm afraid), the Video Games Live concert. Essentially it was an evening of classic video games music played live! Well to be more precise there was the London Philharmonic Orchestra playing game tracks.
It was hosted by the two creators Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall. Both are gaming composers who team up a couple of years ago to create an event drawing in music from the 30 odd years of gaming. So we got to hear music from Frogger, Tron, Halo, Metal Gear, Civilization, Chrono Cross along with others.

The night started with a group of us DS:london crowd meeting in hall of the South Bank center. I was really looking forward to this night given that I been meaning to check out the South Bank Center hall since it's refurbishment, plus last year was just bloody good fun when it was at the Hammersmith Apollo. There was a nice cos play in the hall whilst we waited for the show to start. When it did, I think the sell out show (the first sell out show since the refurb) was enjoyed by everyone. The cencert was comprised of the cosplay comp (nice) ,the blind folded pianist's of youtube fame (brilliant) who could play the tracks thrown at him at amazing speeds, the composer of outrun (was ok), a couple of stage comps (frogger and space invaders) along with just a whole bunch of tracks. My personal favorites was the Final Fantasy, War Craft, Halo and Tetris tracks. Simply amazing.

Can't bloody wait for next year.

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Blog meetup…pt deux!

Posted on October 1st, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Drinking, web 2.0, Wordpress.

Just for all you bloggers out there, the next meet up is this Thursday 4th of October from 8pm at the Churchill Arms (Kensington Church Street). More details and etc on Upcoming. Be there or be potentially disappointed from your night of unfufilled discussion and drinking which this night will contain. Don't say I didn't warn ya!

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Fancy custom tshirts in nice packagin + cake!

Posted on September 27th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, gifts, London gems.

So here I am sitting on my ass in my new flat browsing Current TVand I stumble on a rather nice piece on a London based custom tshirt company called Tshirt Patisserie. Basically you make a custom Tshirt in your design using the tools provided and they post it in a striking gift box...along with a cake! Perfect for those special pressies! Then you can either choose to deliver or pick up the custom tshirt from the store on brick lane.

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My fave photos…

Posted on September 18th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Flickr, Hong Kong, photography.

Bit lacking on what to blog about today. So I decided to pick some random photos from Flickr.

Hong Kong temple
When I was on a biz trip in Hong Kong, I stumbled upon a couple of temples in Central, one of which is the following of Man Mo Temple.

Another Hong Kong Temple
Another one was the Tin hau temple, dedicated to the Goddess of the Sea.

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Tetris grand master!

Posted on September 12th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Nintendo DS, Other gaming.

Every once in a while, just when I pull some decent beats on level 5 of Tetris on the DS. I find people like the following....
If you get bored at the beginning, check out the last quarter of the clip.

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Blues + Human beat box + amazing = Son Of Dave

Posted on September 9th, 2007 by thiswayup.
Categories: cool stuff, Music.

The other day I was at the very excellent Big Chill House to see a simply amazing one man band, Son of Dave! Simply put, imagine having a guy who uses a bit of recorded human beat box on the go singing the blues whilst playingthe harmonica and stamping his foot alot. Sounds chaotic and it seems to be but just simply put, amazing. Check out the 6min documentary about the guy in this youtube video else just check him about below. Bloody good stuff!

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