gHacks technology news » music discovery http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:43:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Music Business News http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/31/music-business-news/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/31/music-business-news/#comments Sun, 31 Aug 2008 08:00:37 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=6652 It can be hard at times to follow musicians if you are a fan of them: Where are they right now, when is their next live concert, when does their next CD come out, will they come to my town? Most people get their music business news from music magazines, band websites and music portals but it is still difficulty to find the information that you are craving for.

Enter Cloud Speakers, a music business news aggregation site that offers more than a slightly unusual layout and choice of color. Cloud Speakers displays music business news on their pages. It has a vast database of artists and labels which can be followed on page, by email or RSS news feed.

They collect news, reviews, audio and video and make it available on their website. The user can filter the four main categories, if he is only interested in reviews he can only display those. The audio category is a very appealing category on the website. Users can play the music that is listed in that category. The frontpage of Cloud Speakers is offering an mp3 player that is showing and playing the latest mp3 as well. (A similar feature is available on individual artists pages)

music business

A source is provided next to each news item to read the complete news article or review on the original website. Although there are a few reasons why using Cloud Speakers might be a good idea there are some that stick out. The first is that it is possible to follow artists by RSS news feed or email update. That’s indeed a nice feature if you are a hot blooded fan and crave for news on your favorite artists.

The second is music discovery. It is possible to play music on the website which might give a user the opportunity to find new artists that he likes.

It is interesting to note that Cloud Speakers is missing many of the social news portals features like commenting on news, rating music or making friends. That’s a refreshing change for some users while others will probably miss those features dearly.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/08/31/music-business-news/feed/ 2 Favtape http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/favtape/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/favtape/#comments Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:42:02 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=5673 Favtape has received some news coverage lately and basically everything that can be said has been said about this website where users can share their favorited and bookmarked songs of their Last.fm and Pandora accounts.

Well the service got updated a while ago and is now displaying the top songs of every year from 1901 onwards to 2008. Each year holds hundreds of songs that can be played fully on the website. Talk about an awesome way to discover new music or listen to old classics that you grew up with.

Besides that they have added the Top 100 iTunes songs and the Top 100 iTunes Rap / Hip Hop songs to their website.

favtape

I personally do not use Pandora or Last.fm but still find Favtape pretty useful for the mentioned reason.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/07/28/favtape/feed/ 0 Tune into Pandora from outside the United States http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/20/tune-into-pandora-from-outside-the-united-states/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/20/tune-into-pandora-from-outside-the-united-states/#comments Tue, 20 Nov 2007 07:30:56 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/20/tune-into-pandora-from-outside-the-united-states/ Pandora recently announced that classic music is being added to their music database and I decided to take a look at the service and see if it still had this US only restriction in place and if it would be possible to access Pandora from outside the United States. I knew that it should be possible to access Pandora this way as long as the service that I would be using would not spill my IP but display its own which of course had to be from the United States.

I first tried accessing directly which redirected me to a restricted website explaining why I was not allowed to listen to Pandora from my location outside the United States. So, the ban of everyone from outside the United States is still in place at Pandora.

My second try was with the excellent Secure Tunnel solution which I use for some time now that allowed me to watch Hulu and download from NBC Direct as well. I activated Secure Tunnel in Opera and Pandora would load and play fine as if I was a user from the United States.

pandora access denied
access pandora from outside the United States

As you can see the first screenshot is displaying the apology that they can’t serve me at Pandora while the second screen is showing a working Pandora interface with Secure Tunnel (aff, not free).

A user commented a while back in the Hulu article that I wrote that it was able to access Pandora with web proxies as well as long as they would be based in the United States. I tried that with several of them and I did not see the restricted website but when Pandora was starting to load it displayed that they were having technical difficulties at the moment which was not true because I was listening to Pandora just fine in Opera.

Please let me know if you have found a proxy that is working with Pandora so that I can confirm this method and search for some proxies to add to this article.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/20/tune-into-pandora-from-outside-the-united-states/feed/ 8 Download any song from Imeem http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/19/download-any-song-from-imeem/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/19/download-any-song-from-imeem/#comments Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:05:12 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/19/download-any-song-from-imeem/ I just discovered that it is really easy to download music from Imeem. I was searching for a song that I heard in Radio and the only hit that I received was a profile link to Imeem. I had to register to listen to the song online which I did but what I really wanted was to download the song I was listening to to my computer to put it on my mp3 player which happens to be my Nokia N73 mobile phone.

The source code does not reveal lots of information about the location of the song which means I once again have to fire up Grab++ to grab the real url of the song and download it. All big music portals use randomized songs these days which are generated when a user requests the song. They are available for a short period of time only which means that time is essential.

Download Orbit Downloader if you have not done so already and start Grab++ from the Tools menu. Grab++ sits there analyzing the Internet connection waiting for multimedia links. All links to multimedia files are listed in Grab++ and can be send to the Orbit Download manager to be downloaded directly to your computer. Grab++ has to be started before you load the Imeem page that contains the music that you want to download.

The download should be started immediately after discovering the link in Grab++ to avoid a timeout. If you get a timeout and the download does not finish delete it and try again.

Imeem uses ridiculously large filenames with the flv (flash video) extension. Make sure you rename the downloaded music from Imeem to be able to recognize it later on.

You might want to convert the flv file to mp3 afterwards. A great software that does this is the Freez Flv to Mp3 Converter

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/19/download-any-song-from-imeem/feed/ 8 Find Songs from bands and artists http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/18/find-songs-from-bands-and-artists/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/18/find-songs-from-bands-and-artists/#comments Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:42:07 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/18/find-songs-from-bands-and-artists/ Songza is a music search engine that searches websites for music of the artist, band or song that you enter into the search form. Most interesting is the fact that they mainly search Youtube for those artists or songs. Don’t yell at me just yet, this is not another “Search Youtube, display Videos” type of website.

Instead of displaying the videos they only play the music of the videos getting effectively rid of the video part. The music is still transferred as flv files and I suppose they just found a way to reduce the video player to zero on their website. The concept is great however and navigation feels much faster this way.

The website is making good use of Ajax and songs can be added to playlists, shared with friends, watched at Youtube and rated. The only real problem that I see is that there is no information on the length of the songs. We all know that some guys upload 20 second clips taken with their mobile phones.

It would be really nice if the duration of each song would be displayed there as well.

songza

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/18/find-songs-from-bands-and-artists/feed/ 3 Find out what the world is listening to http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/06/find-out-what-the-world-is-listening-to/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/06/find-out-what-the-world-is-listening-to/#comments Tue, 06 Nov 2007 06:09:18 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/06/find-out-what-the-world-is-listening-to/ When I was young I was astonished by the fact that the top music albums of each country varied a lot. There were surely those million sellers that made their way into virtually all charts of this world but most of the time the chart music was different. Great Britain for instance was always way ahead of my country and it was always a good market to see what would be in the charts soon in my country.

The Music Map is a world map that displays the top ten charts of many countries. You can start by clicking on a country on the world map or by selecting a continent first. Some countries are further divided into their states and you can only get information for those states.

Once you click on a country or state the top 10 artists and top 10 albums are displayed. When you click on one of the items displayed it will show a detailed view.

music world map

It would be nice if there would be a way to listen to the music displayed in those lists or see a Youtube / Last.fm mashup that would stream those songs. This is not done yet which means that you have to manually search for the artist or album on those sites to get an impression.

Read More:

Music Map

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/06/find-out-what-the-world-is-listening-to/feed/ 1 What is the name of this song ? http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/02/what-is-the-name-of-this-song/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/02/what-is-the-name-of-this-song/#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2007 06:40:03 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/02/what-is-the-name-of-this-song/ I can’t rememeber the name of the song but it goes something like this.. If you ever have been in a situation where you were not able to remember the name of the song that you heard either because it was played on radio or a song of the past you should check out the new service Midomi to get a good chance to discover the songs name.

Midomi offers two ways to find the name of a song or artist who performed the song. The first method requires a microphone while the second requires textual information about the song.

If you got a microphone you could sing or hum part of the song that you remember and Midomi tries to find information about that song in their database. This works pretty solid even if you are not a professional singer.

what is the name of this song

The second method requires that you can remember fragments of the lyrics of the song. Just enter the text that you can remember into the search box on the main page of Midomi and wait until the search found possible matches which are displayed on the next page which loads automatically.

You can play the songs that have been found to find the one that you are looking for if it is also in their database. Midomi offers a great way to find songs that you crave to know more details about. I really don’t like it if I hum a song all day because I heard it on radio not knowing which artist sang the song.

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