I’m a firm believer in the rule of three so when I heard the Gorgon City – Motorola track last week I knew I had found the final piece in building a music playlist that celebrated the sounds of telephony. The lead off track is Damien N-Drix & STV – Let It Ring, an absolute banger, built around the sound of GSM interference. I was amazed when it was released since LTE had made this signature sound a thing of the past. The third track is Count of Monte Cristal Sinden – Beeper, another track nostalgic for a not too distant past where the beeper was the on demand way to get in touch with someone. We these three tracks, I opened it up to twitter for more contributions. It’s now got some pop, hip-hop, and more electro. Check it out!

Lately, I’ve been stumbling across quite a few awesome musicians and then discovering they’re part of the record label Ninja Tune. (For example, Edwin linked to a Blockhead video today.) I quipped on Twitter that Ninja Tune should just offer a subscription service and send me all of their new music. Jo told me that such a thing isn’t completely far-fetched. She gave Ghostly as an example. As part of the Ghostly Music Service, you pay $15 a month and they send you a weekly update with all new releases, random back catalog selections, 15% of store items, and access to the previous 60 days of releases. You can gift the subscription too: $85 for 6 months or $150 for 12. It’s always a good idea to build systems where your real fans, the people that really want to give you money, can.

UPDATE: Ninja Tune, and other labels, now uses Drip.FM to for monthly subscriptions.

Social music service Blip.fm just added a new feature. Like Foursquare and other services, users now earn ‘badges’ for activity on the site. They aren’t applied retroactively though; I had to blip at least one track to make sure they were working. Interestingly, quite a few badges are earned through the actions of others: people reblipping your tracks and giving props. Some appear very hard to earn: ‘Top 10’ for ranking in the top 10 most listened to DJs in a month. A few of the badges also feature levels. Level 1 seems pretty easy but level 3 looks impossible. It’ll be interesting to see how these play out and I like how the game is structured (direct and indirect badges).

I like using Blip when I want to share a single track on Twitter (which I had been using Songza for). I’ve never really used it as a starting point to discover music. Unfortunately, Blip’s reliance on outside sources for music makes link-rot (blip-rot?) in playlists extremely high which is always disappointing when I review my old shares. You can find my profile on Blip here.

The problem of streaming audio from one computer to another has cropped up a few times over the years in different forms. I had to solve this again recently, but this time around I really like the solution.

I use two computers in my apartment. My black MacBook is attached to a 24″ Dell monitor in the bedroom. I also have a 2006 Mac mini plugged into my projector and home theater in the living room. My Drobo is attached to the mini and holds my music collection. I do most of my work on the machine in the bedroom and use iTunes to mount the library over the network. If I want to listen to music in the living room, I close iTunes and then connect to the mini using VNC and reopen it. This lets me maintain a consistent library and manage my music from whatever machine I’m using.

Continue reading →

I just saw Kenna featured in a new PSP ad. It’s great to hear another album coming out. I bought Kenna’s first album after seeing the video above on Cartoon Network (YouTube, friend of the long tail). It’s not the first album I bought based just on an animated video either. You’ll find Kid Koala’s Fender Bender after the break. Continue reading →

I am in love with Mashuptown. It’s a frequently updated mashup podcast. Here are some of my recent favorites:

• DJ Schmolli – What’s This Name For
• Aggro1 – The Streets of Hotel California
• DJ Max Entropy – Short Skirt London Bridge

monome40h is a really interesting music controller. This video shows it wired to several hardware sensors and doing many things other than playing music i.e. Conway’s Game of Life. I’ve been curious about this device ever since watching the first demo video. It looks like they’ve got another video now. I actually met the team behind this and got to play with one at MakerFaire.

I had been using the Google hack Lifehacker recently reposted to search for MP3s in open directories. I was thinking “hey this is useful enough, I wish it was a bookmarklet“. So I grabbed a <a href="javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;isearch google bookmarklet and slapped the search string into the Javascript. (which coincidentally is how the majority of the code I’ve written is constructed) Here it is: <a href="javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;iMP3 search. Maybe if I hadn’t dove in head first I would have noticed i-hacked’s search box which does the same thing or even that far superior bookmarklet someone else wrote (probably correctly too).

This wasn’t the method I used to get Justin Timberlake’s Sexyback though. If you visit his site (don’t it’s loud), the flash player will drop the whole MP3 right into your browser cache. I kid you not, its ID3 tag is “Weird Al’s – Don’t Download This Song” .

I haven’t heard a lot of Kasabian, but I certainly enjoy animation. Here’s a link to a big version [via Antville]. Whenever I see something obviously rotoscoped my brain spends a large amount of energy reconstructing what the scene would look like in real life. I think that’s one of the downfalls of the technique.

The South by Southwest Fesitvals have have provided sample tracks from many of their artists for the second year in a row. The two torrent files contain over 3GB of some of the best music in the country. It’s completely free and legal. I discovered some great bands last year thanks to these torrents and I hope for more of the same this year.