Jamming on the Internet: eJamming AUDiiO

The Internet opened many new beautiful ways of communication, many of them even in real time. Unfortunately, Internet connections have always had a latency that has been too high to allow musicians to play across the globe. The small delays which appear on every net connection are a massive problem for musical applications. Now, another […]

Dave: The Interactive Music Video Installation

Last semester, Erik and myself created an interactive music video installation called “Dave“. It was the – so far – most intense project I have done. Well, it was worth it. 🙂 We created the first installation of this kind that I know of. The recipient, surrounded by displays, can alter the course of the […]

Floating MP3-Player: Music for your bath tub

JVC Japan presented an MP3-Player which floats in water. The JVC XA-AW33 (shiny name…) is waterproof and equiped with circular LED lighting for visualization effects. The manufacturer even claims that the music creates ripples in the water while playing music. Unfortunately, the floating player can only load 256MB of music and plays music in mono. […]

How mainstream are you? – The Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter

You are 17.35 % Mainstream! Crap! Looks like I am less alternative than I thought. 🙂 With the Last.fm-Mainstream-O-Meter, users of Last.fm (see “Discovering Music that You Like“) can see, how much their listening habits overlap with the evil mainstream. You only have to enter your Last.fm username and the webservice calculates – somehow – […]

Discover New Music That You Love (or at least like)

Music is great. Music is manifold. Everyone has his own taste of music. What is loved by one might be refused by the next. These different preferences make it pretty difficult to find new great music. The spectrum is – fortunately – large, but finding the music that appeals to you personally turns out to […]

Conclusion « Discovering Music That You Love (6/6)

Besides all this fancy new technology, you should not forget those primitive methods to find great new music. You can still ask friends for recommendations, listen in your record store to an unknown CD because it has an interesting name or simply looks pretty. The success rates of these “analog” techniques are surprisingly high.

Pandora « Discovering Music That You Love (4/6)

Similar to Last.fm, Pandora is a personalized radio system, but without community features. It does not use a separate player application, but a Flash player on its homepage.

iRATE « Discovering Music That You Love (5/6)

Gnoosic, Last.fm and Pandora work with a wide spectrum of music, including that controlled by the music industry. iRATE, on the contrary, has a different philosophy. It only plays free music.

Last.fm « Discovering Music That You Love (3/6)

Last.fm calls itself a personalized radio. That expression fits Last.fm pretty well. To receive this radio, you have to install a small application. This application receives the music directly from Last.fm’s servers. The system keeps track of the music that you are listening to – if you wish even when you’re using other software like […]

Liveplasma « Discovering Music That You Love (2/6)

liveplasma is another music map application. It is flash-based and looks prettier than Gnod’s music map. Unfortunately, it liveplasma does not know much about less popular bands. This can become very frustrating if your listening preferences aren’t very mainstream… especially because liveplasma displays Madonna’s music map each time it doesn’t find the artist you really […]