Tag Archives: music

Last.fm widgets and playlists

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My favourite music site has just introduced some nice new features.

Widgets

You can now use last.fm widgets on your blog / website. The widget choices we have are recently played / top artists etc., a quilt made up of the covers from your most listened to albums, a playlist player and a radio player. You also get four colour choices – last.fm red (which looks pink to me), black, blue or light grey. You can see the ‘recent tracks’ and playlist widgets in action on my sidebar. I was thinking of adding the album quilt too, but decided that might be slight overkill.

Playlists

Playlists themselves have been around for a while, but whereas previously they only played snippets of a song, they now play the full length tracks (providing they’re available in the last.fm catalogue). Using the aforementioned widget, that means you can easily share your taste in music with your site visitors. The only ‘catch’ is that your list will play in shuffle mode – this is presumably to get around licensing restrictions.

Charts display

It’s now possible to select different periods of time for the charts that show on your profile page. You can choose between your overall charts (as it’s always been) or 3, 6, or 12 month rolling charts. We’re also told that more customisation is on the way.

You can view the official announcement here.

Winging it, mac style!

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imac
Some time ago I owned an Apple Powerbook G4. Not a bad machine, though a little sluggish from time to time. For one reason or another I lost interest in it, and went back to my Windows desktop and laptop, eventually selling the Powerbook.

Lately my interest in the Mac world has risen again. Having Intel based processors these days, it’s opened up a whole new world of possibilites. To cut a long story short, we went to the Apple store in Sheffield yesterday, and came away with a nice shiny 20″ iMac, with wireless (mighty) mouse and keyboard.

I have my music all set up on an external drive, along with Harman Soundsticks II speakers (which are very nice, my music is sounding great), and iTunes actually runs nicely on the iMac. The windows version is a complete mess compared to this, which is why I normally wouldn’t touch iTunes with a bargepole. But I think it may become a favourite now (apart from the store at least).

So, I’ve spent the last 24 hours busily exploring new software and various gizmos (like Quicksilver and Growl). It’s opened up a whole new world. I’m sure I’ll be happily exploring new things for days and weeks to come. Oh, and if you’re a Mac user, feel free to mention your favourite bits of software in the comments, although I’ve owned a Mac before it’s been a while!

My software favourites so far are -

Slayer are gods

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(Or Unholy Alliance Chapter II, but I’ve used that title already.)

It’s the morning, or should I say afternoon, after the night before, and I’m not feeling too healthy (I’m so not used to headbanging anymore, or standing for 6 hours straight come to that), but it was so worth it.

Slayer really are gods, I will never forget that performance. They opened with the legendary South of Heaven, which immediately had hundreds of heads swaying in unison. And they played Dead Skin Mask! I know, how could they not, but still, I was fearful that they wouldn’t with them having a new album to promote (which is good, but I wanted to hear the classics). They did play a few from the new album (Eyes of the Insane amongst them I’m glad to say), but it was good to hear the old stuff (they did an excellent performance of War Ensemble and Angel of Death too).

The other acts were great too, with the possible exception of Thine Eyes Bleed. I wasn’t too impressed by them. Children of Bodom were great but it was too short a set (I’d have preferred them to have the longer set in place of In Flames). Though In Flames did surprise me, I really enjoyed their performance. Not that I don’t like them, but generally I prefer CoB.

The biggest (pleasant) surprise of the night was Lamb of God. Damn can they give a great live performance, they were excellent. I think it’s safe to say I will be listening to a lot more of them.

And now I’m going to go and dose myself up with paracetamol and hibernate for the rest of the day, in an attempt to nurse myself back to normality. Or at least my version of normality. :)

Today’s the day

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My itinerary for this evening is as follows:

    Doors (not the band, sadly) > 5.00pm

    Thine Eyes Blind > 6.00pm

    Children of Bodom > 6.40pm

    Lamb of God > 7.35pm

    In Flames > 8.30pm

    Slayer > 9.50pm

If I’m not back and screaming excitement by Saturday evening, please send out a search party. I may have gotten lost amongst the sheer awe of the Slayer set.

Sharing discoveries

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I was going to leave a comment as reply to James’ recent(ish) post on the software and tools that he’s discovered, but then I realised it would likely be far too long to do as a comment. So I thought I’d do a list of some of the things I regularly use here instead. Not just software, but websites as well. Some of which James has already listed (Firefox, WordPress, Evernote, Avast! Antivirus), so I won’t go into detail about those here.

1. TiddlyWiki

tiddly.jpg

I love this little gem. Not only is it functional enough to organise oodles of information (or your life), and small enough to fit on a USB key, but because it’s a .html file that also means it’s cross platform. Due to it’s lightweight nature and cross platform goodness, this may well replace Evernote for me, possibly coupled with Google Notebook. However, I have heard reports that it doesn’t cope overly well with large amounts of data, so unless you plan on having a regular clearout of old entries, it may not be the best solution for you.

2. MediaMonkey

mediamonkey logo

I’ve tried a lot of media players over the years (Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Foobar, QCD, and others that I’ve likely forgotten about). MediaMonkey may not be the best looking media player out there, but it’s feature packed and doesn’t suck the life out of your system’s memory. I liked it so much that I paid for it (there is a free version available, but I’d recommend paying for it. It’s not expensive and it’s very much worth it). The only downside is that it’s Window’s only. Which brings me to….

3. Amarok

Amarok

If there was a Windows version of this, I would be very tempted to drop MediaMonkey entirely. This media player is simply beautiful. Sadly, it’s only available for Linux currently (though I’ve heard whispers that it may be coming to Windows also).

A new version has been released in the past few days which also adds support for Magnatune, a DRM free music store (is this the first linux music player to integrate a music store?). Though it’s hardly a rival to iTunes, being made up of lesser known independent artists, it’s a nice feature.

4. Last.fm

last.fm

This site is quite simply, a music lovers dream come true. It tracks the music you listen to, compiles your very own music charts, and makes recommendations to you based on your listening habits. It also allows you to keep up with the music your friends listen to, and has streamable radio based on tags (such as genre, similar artists) and user profiles. A recent update has also added event recommendations, a musical taste compatibility meter so that you can see how similar your tastes are to other members, and some free mp3 downloads.

I’ve been using it since last November, and was hooked from the start. Admittedly I am mad about music, and lead a fairly sad life, so the same effect on you can’t be guaranteed. :) However, it has become my most visited website, I’m a complete Last.fm addict. It’s introduced me to so many great artists that I’d never have otherwise come across, and that alone is worth using the site for (Pandora just doesn’t do it for me, though I use that occasionally too).

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