Internet Music

I am a music Snob.  I listen to music constantly and almost exclusively I listen to music streaming over the web. So, I thought it might be interesting to others to see what tools and services I use.

Slacker, Rhapsody, Mp3Tunes, Last.fm, Logitech SqueezeBox, MusicBrainz, MusicIP...

The services I use are:

Slacker
Slacker has replaced Pandora for me.  Mostly it is an issue of feature set.  As a subscriber I get unlimited song skips.  I get the ability to finely control a station.  As long as I include at least 15 artists, I can set the station to play only the artists that I explicitly list or I can ask it to recommend new ones. Additionally, I can "save" a song to my library to play on-demand later.  The library navigation is not so good though. The algorithm for suggesting new songs seems to be very similar to Pandora.  It tends to suggest songs that I like. Pandora was a little better at suggesting songs I would not have come across otherwise.

My slacker stations: My World -  Anti-Divas -  Dad Jazz -  HipHop -  My 80's -  Tango Saloon

Rhapsody

Rhapsody is a service of Real Networks and is well worth the cost. It is the best service that I have found for "Hey, remember that song... 80's song... Soft Cell was the band... Tainted Love, yeah, that's it. Play it. Play it." It also has radio stations and play-songs-like-this options but they are not very good. Rhapsody does a sucky job at creating community around music.  But that is what Last.fm is for...

Mp3Tunes

Mp3Tunes.com is a fantastic service for mp3 backup.  Cheap and easy with a lot of nice features like the ability to have multiple computers, to buy music from the web and have it load directly to the web locker and nice web player interfaces for playing your music anywhere.

Last.fm

Last.fm is a great social network for music lovers.  First, it has the ability through its scrobbler functionality to know everything that I am listening to on any of the services listed above.  Then it finds others who listen to music similar to what I listen to and I can navigate through my "neighbors" favorite songs or play "stations" of that content.

Some Other Stuff

Logitech Squeezebox

Logitech bought SlimDevices which was a fantastic, inexpensive home stereo component that can play music from all of the sources above. I was not impressed with Logitechs early efforts to but the last few firmware updates have been improvements.  I have both the SqueezeBox Classic and the new SqueezeBox Duet which includes a web enabled remote.  The major disappointment here is that the wireless connection is flacky and I have to restart the remote or re-connect to the wireless frequently.  Until they get that fixed, I would not recommend this device.  However, it is really great when it works.  Sound is really good and with multiple players (including a software player that is open source) you can use this system to play music anywhere you have Internet in the house syncing all the players for multiple room stereo.  And finally, they have an open source server (SqueezeCenter) that you can set up in the house or you can use the SqueezeNetwork which is an On Demand version of the same.

MusicBrainz

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections. Find out more in the introduction.

MusicBrainz is a lot of things.  Mostly it is an Open version of CDDB that enables a huge community of people to maintain meta tags about their music.  It is essentially Wikipedia for mp3 metatags. I have used it extensively to clean up my mp3 collection.

MusicIP

The MusicIP Mixer is a fantasitic way to create mixes from your existing mp3 collection. It begins by creating an acoustic fingerprint of your mp3 collection and then you choose a seed song(s) and it finds more songs with compatible fingerprints. It has created mixes that I never would have thought of, putting what I thought would be incompatible artists together to great effect.

Comments

[Ashley Messick]

THANK YOU for suggesting Slacker to me. I hadn't heard of it (I have similar complaints about Pandora - seems to suggest songs I wouldn't have heard of otherwise but only gets songs I love every once in awhile) and now I am using it and love it.

[Conches]

Great to here. Thanks for the comments and tanks for reading!