Rattletree at Revolution

Beto and I saw the band Rattletree last night at Revolution. They are a 6 piece percussion band (though I only counted 5) with a heavy focus on several homemade marimbas which they use to play Zimbabwean dance music. The show was an excellent mix of high energy grooves and mellow interludes from the matepe (small hand-plucked instrument inside a large gourd). You can hear some of their music at the band’s website and if you get a chance to see them, don’t miss it. Oh … and if you happen to be at one of their shows and you’re not dancing/grooving in some way … there’s no hope for you, you’re already dead!

Web 2.0 Update — Music

I’ve found some goodies that all music lovers will enjoy. First is Songbird. It’s an open-source music browser built on the Firefox architecture. It’s still in developer preview status (i.e. it’s not finished) but the functionality is there. It’s great for searching the web for new music, old music, rare music, any kind of music. Songbird is being built to replace your current music program (e.g. Window’s Media Player, Itunes, etc…) but it specializes in finding music using a variety of search engines and music blogs. When it finds a song for you, it allows you to either add it to your library and keep the song on the web, or you can download the file to your own machine. It provides mp3 player support, Audioscrobbler, and “add-ons” so the features will keep coming as more and more users write software for it. The full version is set for release sometime this year.

For those of you looking for more adventure, you can make your own media player with Foobar2000. LifeHacker wrote a post about this program that shows what some of the readers were able to come up with. You can read the original LH post for more information about Foobar2000 and some of the functions you can control. As far as I know ( I haven’t used it yet) Foobar2000 only plays media files, it won’t go finding media for you a la Songbird. However, I’m sure someone will come up with a way to get these two gems talking before long, for now, just find and download the music with Songbird and listen to it with Foobar2000.

There are lots of other music tools out there, I don’t have time to talk about all of them (or try them all for that matter). Some others I’ve used or heard of are:

Last.fm internet radio

MediaMaster online media library storage

finetune internet radio

and of course: Pandora

If you know of any other good music utilities on the web, please leave a comment and share.

Time for me to get back to work.

Online Music Library

I want to share an awesome website called, “The Music Genome Project” aka. Pandora. It’s an online collection of over 400,000 songs by more than 20,000 artists and it’s free. To get an account all you need is an e-mail address, I’ve yet to receive a single e-mail to that address and they are the only site I’ve given it to so apparently they feel the same about spam as I do.

Starting is Easy. Just enter an artist or song name that you like. Pandora will then compile a radio station for you based on specific qualities of that song/artist. As new songs come into the station you can give them a thumbs up or down, you can even move a song to another station if you like it but don’t think it belongs on the current station.

With their specific music license, Pandora doesn’t allow you to rewind or go back to a song, or play a specific song on request, however, if you make a station based on a song, it will play sooner or later, just not right away. Pandora doesn’t have any classical or world music but I’ve made several great stations based on varying genres and I think any music lover will find something they enjoy.

There is also a standalone player called OpenPandora. It performs the same function as the website, without requiring a dedicated browser tab or window. There is also a website dedicated to helping you expand your Pandora stations and musical interests called (what else?) Pandora Stations. And finally, you can share stations with your friends that have a Pandora account and listen to their stations, though you can’t rate songs on stations you don’t own. So if you set up an account and want to check out my stations, let me know.