Life in Computerland, January, 2008, part 2 - Internet Music

I need background noise/music when I work.  It keeps me moving.   I prefer non-vocal trance/dance/electronic music that keeps a good rythm but doesn't distract me with lyrics that my brain starts thinking about.   Its ok if they are using voice as an instrument or as part of a repeating pattern (Like Daft Punk type stuff), but lyrics that tell a story or something tend to distract me from what I am working on instead of helping me continue to work.

I have been moving through some music services the last year, so I figured I would share...

Yahoo Music - Formerly Launch - Back in the Day, several years ago, there was this service called Launch.  It let you create a station and then rank music.  If your ranked music matched other peoples likes, then it would send play music for you that they had also ranked high.  This created a neat network effect of finding new music that you were likely to like.  If you didn't like a song you could skip it or rank it low, or even tell it to never play again. They had a lot of cool features like Moods that let you choose different types of music to play depending on your mood.   They also had a little bit of social networking aspect to it, but it wasn't exactly easy and didn't seem to buy you a whole lot to use it. Then Yahoo bought them and shortly afterwards, the moods and some other features went away.  Soon Yahoo made moods, unlimited skipping, high quality sound, playing without commercials and other features a premium, costing $3 a month.  yech.    I went on this plan for a year, but it just seemed to get crappier, and paying the money just didn't seem worth it.

XM Radio - I was already paying a subscription for XM radio and their internet music player was free with that subscription.  The downside was that only one station really fit the profile of music I wanted to listen to (channel 82 - The System).  and I couldn't skip crappy songs I didn't want to listen to.

ShoutCast - There are other radio stations out on the net such as Digitally Imported and SOMA FM, these have the same downsides as XM for the most part.  No skipping crappy music and sometimes they would have commercials (or at least nutty German DJ's practicing their English.)

Last.FM  - Last.FM was pretty neat, it offered many of the features of the old Launch that I liked and it was a free service.  I could rate music as only Love it or Hate it, but you could tag songs the way you wanted and then play music based on those tags.  It was hard to really customize a station but I could find music I wanted, and I could skip or ban songs I didnt' want to listen to.  They had some social aspects, lots of stats of the music you listened to, and even some cool little gadgets you could put on your blog/ web page.  Last.FM often suffers network issues or is just down.  You could play it from a web page or use a client that they had.   The latest client had the nice feature that had been built into the Yahoo music player for sometime of changing your tagline to the music you were playing.

Pandora  - Pandora is the latest thing I have been listening to.  I am a bit more happy with with the ability to cusomize the "station" i listen to.  I can seed it with several artists and songs.  It also seems to track which songs I rate up or down per station rather than globally. (Although at this point I only have one station.)   It is based on something called the Music Genome project that breaks down the music on a per song basis that describes what the song is like.  This is the basis of what other songs show up.    For instance I am listening to a track right now called Convex, by Velvet Acid Christ.  And the player can tell me that this track features electonica roots, hard rock influences, busy beats, gritty vocal style and altered vocal sound. The previous song played had hard rock influences, a knack for catchy hooks, a repetitive song structure, use of  tonal harmonies and a bumpin' kick sound (Serial Thrilla, by The Prodigy)  The next song I listen to will probably share some of those same types of features.  Pandora only seems to be playable through the web, which is a bonus for Leslie, who isn't allowed to install stuff on her computer, but a detriment to me, because I work with so many web pages and IE windows, having another window can be a pain.  It used to be a much bigger deal when IE would crash on a regular basis and take my music with it (back in the Launch days).  I find IE to be pretty stable now.    If you want to look up my station in Pandora, I am registered under jeff@jeffmartin.com.

Enjoy.  Post any good places for music that I haven't mentioned.