How do you know whether you will like a movie or not? You could read reviews or ask friends – but unfortunately movie critics as well as friends usually have a different taste in movies than you. MovieLens wants to help at this point. MovieLens is an internet project of the university of Minnesota. It […]
recommendations
Searching for new music is still a tricky business. In Discover New Music That’s Perfect for You, I once presented a few recommendation systems which adopted to the personal taste of the user. Critical Metrics walks a different path. It systematically spiders through music reviews in various media. The collected recommendations are then presented at […]
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 […]
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.
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.
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 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 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 […]