How I listen to, manage and get my music

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

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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Find some Words that rhyme at b-rhymes.com

Posted on December 6th, 2009 by thiswayup.
Categories: humour, justgeek.

Just found a website called b-rhymes.com recently through the Kohana website. Essentially this website can find words which sound similar to any word you typed in! Great building a poem, rap or lyric for lazy creatives? I gave it ago :)

Hanging around the streets, us the DS peeps and I thought we best retreat..
to that pub that what we see much of our club.
Sitting down, we unpack and unwrap for some gaming and much loved entertaining!

Hmmmm…probably won’t make the T. S. Eliot Prize but you get the idea

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Wifi homebrew on the DS

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

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:

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The secret of editing the left navigation bar in Media wiki

Posted on February 5th, 2008 by thiswayup.
Categories: justgeek, photography, productivity.

I been trying to figure out how to edit the left navigation bar on my own media wiki which I use for documentation for my thoughts (usually for shortcuts and quotes). I had another go through google and found this post with a comment that unraveled the secret to editing the left navigation bar! Basically you put into any page:


[[MediaWiki:Sidebar]]

THATS IT!!!!! All this pain trying to go through files and it was in a wiki tag. Sigh.
And as soon as you click on it, it displays the properties of the left bar to edit to your hearts content!

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