I am a big fan of the digital mix tape site Muxtape. The simplicity of the site and its design is a good example of how straight forward web applications should be. My only complaint about Muxtape (IP issues aside) is that you can’t search, or even see descriptions of Muxtapes before you listen. This seriously limits Muxtape’s value as a music discovery tool. KillerTechTips.com posted the following article with a link to a site called MuxFind, which apparently solves this search problem. Now if there was only an index of MuxTapes by genere.
Muxtape is a site that lets you share music by allowing you to create mix tapes. Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to search the songs hosted on Muxtape but that’s about to change - thanks to a cool new tool called MuxFind. Muxfind can search thousands of songs on Muxtape by song or artist name.
As web applications become easier to write and less expensive to host, a variety of interesting and questionable music discovery options have cropped up. Because I represent startups with a variety of business models, I will avoid making any judgments on the propriety of these sites. All I know is that these types of applications aren’t going to stop popping up from all corners of the world.
A few weeks back we posted about our favorite BitPop site 8bitpeoples. As a follow-up, we thought we would cover another fast growing geek genre, Nerdcore. Nerdcore is a subgenre of hiphop, written to speak to geek culture. Despite the entertaining and humorous lyrics, the production value is high and these artists are not novelty acts. Nerdcore has been around for a while, but seems to be picking up steam.
Here are a couple embedded links to singles at Nerdcore forerunner MC Frontalot’s Website, along with a few of the lyrics about encryption from his song, Secrets From the Future:
Secrets From the Future
Get your most closely kept personal thought:
put it in the Word .doc with a password lock.
Stock it deep in the .rar with extraction precluded
by the ludicrous length and the strength of a reputedly
dictionary-attack-proof string of characters
(this, imperative to thwart all the disparagers
of privacy: the NSA and Homeland S).
You better PGP the .rar because so far they ain’t impressed.
You better take the .pgp and print the hex of it out,
scan that into a TIFF. Then, if you seek redoubt
for your data, scramble up the order of the pixels
with a one-time pad that describes the fun time had by the thick-soled-
boot-wearing stomper who danced to produce random
claptrap, all the intervals in between which, set in tandem
with the stomps themselves, begat a seed of math unguessable.
Ain’t no complaint about this cipher that’s redressable!
Best of all, your secret: nothing extant could extract it.
By 2025 a children’s Speak & Spell could crack it.
If you are looking to kill some time listening to music on the web, check out a personalized web radio service called Musicovery. They have a easy to navigate interface that lets you specify whether you are looking for music that is positive or dark, calm or energetic. You can opt in or out of various genres, and the resulting player shows a nice map of the music you are listing to an how it relates to similar artists/songs. There are some great existing services in this space that appear to be more in depth than Musicovery (e.g., Last.fm and Pandora), but for fast easy and entertaining access to music online Musicovery is an worth a look. Screenshots below:
Earphone manufacturer Shure makes top of the line in-ear headphones for musicians and their listeners. I have used their E2 and E3 models and they sound so good it is like the music is in your brain. My E3’s broke a couple weeks ago, and Shure’s customer service was fantastic. I called the number on the Shure website and was connected to a real person in Shure’s Chicago location. I explained that the earbuds had broken and how, and they told me to send them back and they would take a look. I mailed the broken headphones to Chicago and a week and a half later a new pair arrived. Shure’s customer service is outstanding.
Sensaphonics makes custom sleeves for Shure earbuds and in-ear monitors for musicians. These supposedly take the Shures to a new level by exactly fitting to the inside of your ear. My understanding is that they are more comfortable and block outside noise even better than the standard sleeves that come with the E3’s. In January I visited an audiologist to have molds made of my ears and placed an order with Sensaphonics. I wish I could give you a sense of how good they are, but after close to two months they still haven’t arrived. The customer service reps at Sensaphonics are very nice, and are easy to reach, but the company as a whole doesn’t seem to have its act together. If the Sensaphonics ever arrive, I will post here to let you know if they were worth the wait, but for now I wouldn’t recommend them unless you are prepared to wait.
Checkout the great selection of creative commons licensed music at 8bitpeoples.com. The artists featured there make upbeat and complex music using retro gaming hardware like the NES and gameboy systems.
8bitpeoples: ”
The 8bitpeoples first came together in 1999 as a collective of artists sharing a common love for classic videogames and an approach to music which reflected this obsession. Our primary interests were to provide quality music for free and most importantly to have fun. In the years since, we have grown in rank and expanded our goals.
We continue to provide the vast majority of all our releases for free, including printable covers and inserts so that anyone with the desire to can ‘manufacture’ physical copies of our albums. Furthermore, limited runs of most of our releases are available, offering superior sound quality to the mp3 releases and occasionally bonus tunes.
In addition to our continuing devotion to music, we now have a research & development division dedicated to the creation of software, construction of hardware, and dissemination of documentation related to our cause. Our love for the audio/visual aesthetics of early videogame consoles and homecomputers continues to provide us with the drive to push the medium to its very limits, and then see just how much further we can go after that … you know, just for fun. “
Warner Music has filed suit against music search engine Seeqpod for copyright infringement.
Seeqpod offers a music search engine that allows users to play music they find directly on the site. According to comScore the service had over 6 million page views in December 2007.
Warner Music claims in its suit that Seeqpod infringes on their copyrighted works by ‘making on-demand and unauthorized digital public performances of these works,’ making a direct and material contribution to infringing content by presenting content from ‘pirate sites.’
What’s interesting about this case is that Seeqpod is a search engine; it links to content as Google would, although it does allow users to play the content from their site, but ultimately they never host any of the content.
The EFA notes that there is little case law relating to search engines and copyright claims, and the DMCA should be applicable here; ‘the defendants are complying with the letter of the law, but copyright owners are now trying to change the rules in court.’
Thursday, June 5, 2008
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