A few interesting, music related things I’ve been playing with recently that I thought I’d share.
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Pandora - Given a song, an artist, the site creates a stream of music that sounds like what you gave them. You can then adjust what each station delivers to you, based on you saying you like or dislike a particular track.
Currently in invitation only preview mode, send them an email and you might be lucky. It is a great way to discover new music. Downside is that it is based on a very good AJAX style web interface, which means getting it to play through my Airport Express isn’t fun. But then it is a preview…
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Cover Flow - Still in tech demo phase, but showing ridiculous amounts of promise, a visual browser for albums. Integrated into iTunes and a host of web sites so most of the cover art turns up, with drag and drop for those that don’t.
Gives back the feel of flicking through your albums, which is something I missed when I was at a loss as to what I feel like listening to.
Only for Mac OS X 10.4 at the moment
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Delicious Library - Somewhat over-hyped recently, this is still a really good start at a product. Provides a digital track record of your physical assets (CDs, Books, Movies, Games) and the ability to remember who has borrowed what.
I’ll be more sold on this when I can see what is in the library of my friends. It is more interesting to know what I can borrow from others as I already know what I have (or had, given how good I am at tracking borrowers). To that end, the export functionality is somewhat lacking.
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MPC (& MpcOSX) - Music Player Daemon. Server side music player with a host of clients. Incredibly useful if you want to set up a server somewhere with all of your music that can be controlled from just about any type of client.
The existing clients are still a bit alpha in terms of feel, but the idea is solid.
See linux.ars for a bigger write up (towards end of post).