After years of knowledge absorption and months of development, our team at RawVoice launched PodcastFAQ.com today. Finally one site that has everything you need to know about podcasting. At least that’s the plan. We know that we couldn’t think of everything, that’s why we left the site open for community/user contribution. Simply click the “submit content” button and let us know what’s missing or inaccurate. Two weeks ago we opened the site up to our community at Blubrry, Podcasternews and TechPodcasts and they have helped us a ton getting it ready for today. So… if your looking to learn a bit about podcasting, get refreshed or just want to see what its all about. Check out PodcastFAQ.com. [http://www.podcastfaq.com/]
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0822072051, originally uploaded by 131j.
I hope this band rocks… I’ve heard good things about them…. We’ll see.
Well, it looks like I don’t have to go to Jury duty tomorrow. I guess thats good, though I’d like to see what its all about at some point… Oh well now I can just look forward to a little Lez Zeppelin tomorrow night. I hope they are as good as I have heard.
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Finally had the chance to post The Video from the Spring Symposium. It’s a pretty high quality wmv so load and buffering may take a little time. I’ve also heard there are some audio issues on the Mac end but I hope to get this up on YouTube soon. Otherwise enjoy!
[Going to 11 - This is Mick Beckam]
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I attended the Morrissey show last night at the Filmore. I have never been much into his solo stuff unlike Aileen but I love the Smiths and had heard rumors that he was now doing Smiths songs in concert. Besides, I have never seen him nor the Smiths live so I figured, what the hay. I will not get into details because I’m sure there are plenty of die hard Morrissey websites that can give you a second by second narration of the show. But I will say this. He sounded great, the band sounded great. His new stuff was surprisingly good and he did 4 Smiths songs! Last night was a blast!
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I’ve stumbled across yet another service in the everlasting quest for the perfect streaming music site. This one is called Finetune [finetune.com] Essentually finetune seems to take the best from Yahoo Launchcast and the best from Pandora they mix them up, add a little web 2.0 socialness to it and spit out their product. I can listen to preselected stations, I can create an instant station based on an artist or a tag users have applied to various songs or I can create a playlist. That’s right, Finetune allows users to go through Finetune’s extensive library of music and create custom playlists. Once you’ve made this playlist it can then be set as public for the rest of the Finetune community to enjoy, comment, tag etc. There are some RIAA type restrictions that Finetune must adhere too but personally I dont find them too intrusive. For example, when creating a playlist you must have at least 45 songs and only 3 per artist before it can be used. But there is a great “I’m lazy” feature that will round out your playlist if you get overwhelmed trying to find 45 tracks. The feature that I am most excited about with Finetune is their cute little interface designed to optimize the finetune experience on your Nintendo Wii. It’s great and even looks like a nintendo branded application. So after spending hours creating the perfect playlist, making friends, tagging songs adding favorites, fire up your Wii (if you’ve found one) and bring the music to your living room.
I can’t believe it took this long but someone may have finally gotten it right. SanDisk is partnering up with yahoo music and producing an mp3 player with Wifi that does what it’s suppose to do. If you have a Y! Unlimited account (which I do) and open wifi network you will be able to connect to Y! Music download songs and listen to the Launchcast streaming radio stations. This is an extremely exciting announcement. Unfortunatly 250.00 (4gb model) is a bit high for me so I will have to wait a bit until I get one of these things but, I think I have found my next MP3 Player. I have two questions. based on the EMI decision to offer drm free music if and when Yahoo offers drm free EMI stuff will this device download it? Also will you be able to download podcasts on this thing? If so this device will be paving the road for what Apple, Microsoft and others should do. Hmm I bet the iphone will be able to do all this too. I hope so the more the better. [link to story] [link to Sandisk Sansa Connect]
It seems that greedy greedy RIAA will suck the life out of anything on the web that is music related. They have successfully lobbied the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board to raise the cost to stream copyrighted music. What does that mean to the user? Well, if you listen to say Yahoo music or some other web radio station. It will no longer be free, you will hear more commercials or if you are paying for a service, the subscription fee will increase. All for the money Hungry RIAA who takes most of these earnings for themselves leaving the artist with the same pennies per song they have been earning all along. LAME!
[Link To Story]
Yes it’s cheesy and poppy but gawd that guy sounds just like Freddie Mercury.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzA0nG_PurQÂ
So that’s like 1 video?
Kidding aside, MTV is a little late in the game, but still It’s pretty cool that they are now realizing that they need to get up to Web 2.0 Standards
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070212/en_nm/viacom_youtube_dc_2
Some guy made an upright bass with scraps of wood, weed wacker twine and some radio shack science project for a pickup. Pretty Cool! Check it out
The people running this page tag it as “The Worst Album Covers of all Time” Personally I think they just may be the Best Album Covers of all Time. My Favorite? It’s a tough call but (Jim Post: I love my Life) may take the cake. (Thanks Amanda)
Link to Page
This Commercial Has Everything! Explosions, Rock and Roll! Race cars Giant Hands and of course Skidmarks on your Soul!.
Watch
I’m not sure if I’m just getting old and cranky, or maybe I was just spoiled living in Cleveland. But Denver’s local music scene is crap! I have seen a fair share of the talent here and it has been mediocre at best. This past weekend was the Annual Denver Post Local Underground Music what ever Fest. Pay 10 bucks and see bands at 4 places (all within a block of one another) all night (6-midnight) I think there were 30 something bands playing total. All in all not a bad deal. Infact I was pretty excited. Unfortunatly every band we saw completly sucked. Infact for the most part, it was pathetic. People would psyche me up for a band. “Hey you gotta check these guys, they are a little of this withe a little of that they totally rock!” “Right on man, that doesnt sound bad let’s go see them” And… they were terrible. That was the pattern all night it became very dissapointing. There was a band that I had actually heard some tracks of (munly and the somthing harlots) that made me think Hmmm they could be interesting. Infact the place they were playing (way to small for a seemingly popular local act) filled up real fast. When they started to play… You couldnt hear anything. It was ridiculous, people talking over top an acoustic band trying to play through a coffee house sound system. C’mon!!! The band eventually got frustrated after a song or two and I guess went out back and tried to play there but then got yelled at etc etc It was a mess. For the Grand Finale we made it to another venue for one of the more talked about bands of the evening. They were called “Mr Pacman”. Hmmmm, Who were they? Well, apparently a foursome made up of a bassist, drummer and then two others playing Vintage (early 80’s) synths. On top of that they wore radiactive looking suits and helmets. Not
unlike the Moog Cookbook but I wasn’t looking for originality at this
point, just some good Music. Unfortunatly we didnt get good music, Just a couple of guys ( I admit with alot of energy which was needed for the evening) abusing the hell out of these great instruments. They were producing nothing but trash! None of the songs had much of a melody, and the few that did went nowhere from there. Their cute little schtick of saying they were from another planet and they have come to blah blah got really old when they couldn’t back it up with their music. Arghhhh! Anyway, if it wasn’t for the good crowd and hanging with friends all night, the evening would have been a total bust. You know I just may have to get my hands dirty.
This past weekend was by far the hottest 3 days I have ever experienced. 101 – 103 were the highs for the weekend and I know that may not be hot by Arizona standards but when you don’t have ac, 103 it’s hot anywhere! Unlike the humid Midwest where you sweat sweat sweat, the dry Colorado air just bakes ya. Neither of which are desireable. I take AC when I can get it but I’ve lived most of my life with out it so it was never a big deal but I couldn’t wait to get to work today and be able to stay cool.
On another note, I went and saw the Racconteurs last night at the Filmore and I must admit the rocked pretty hard. I was pretty sure it was going to be a rockin show, but after the mediocrely bland opener (forget his name) I was starting to get concerned. none the less White and co. heated up the already hot venue for a much needed rock fest. I have always said that The White Stripes would be so much more of beast if only they had a bass player and a rockin drummer. Well the Racconteuers enforced that thought. These are one of those bands that gives you that hope that Rock is back.
Now that I had subsribed to Y! Music Unlimited, I had to get myself something other than my iPod to take my music with me. Luckily I was able to get a hold of 1 yr old Creative Zen 5gb digital audio player. I must admit it was great I pulled the of the box plugged it in, and the Yahoo music engine instantly recognized it and asked me if I should start moving music over. Well that was easy. I wondered if this would work as easily when I plug it into another computer.. With my iPod this is a big No No! In PC world (I’ve heard it’s different in Apple world) your iPod is only aloud to sync with one computer. This totally sucks especially if I have stuff at work that I’d like to move to my iPod. Luckily with the Zen, this wasn’t the case. I plugged it into another computer and its was completely recognized!
Weirdly enough a little bit later in the day My destop informed me that one of my hard drives was almost full. So I decided to move the contents of Itunes to another another hard drive on my system. If you havent done this… Have fun. Apple is not a big gfan of moving music despite keeping the itunes setup install etc etc all in the same place. I litereally had to copy over all my playlists over and then re connect my iPod where iTunes then informed me that the ipod was associated with a different computer and if I wanted to connect it to this one (which is the exact same computer the music was just moved to a different Hard drive) I would have to re move all the music over. This was a good two hour process. Certainly not convienient yet i was prepared and set it to move as I headed to sleep.
It’s certainly interesting to see how companys are handling all this DRM stuff. It certainly looks as if the user is not the winner. We’ll just have to learn how to suck up and deal with all this, choose to listen to completely rights free music or steal it and hope not to get caught.
As far as the actual devices. I do like the design of the Zen yet its interface is certanly not as efficient as an iPod and the lag was a bit more than the iPod as well. If only someone could get it ALL right.
My quest for more music in an ease of use experience has steered me through several solutions. All have done the job in no more than a mediocre way. Launchcast, Launchcast plus, Pandora, Itunes, Emusic, AllofMP3, I have tried them all. So I guess it was only a matter of time, before I finally explored a subscrition based model. I started looking into Y music Unlimited late last week by dowloading their Yahoo Music Engine. Despite having a limited launchcast account at the time the application was really cool, It was sort of set up like iTunes where you can manage your current music collection but also alows for interefacing with their subscrtion streaming service (launchcast) as well as their sunscritption download service (Y Music Unlimited) I started toying around and quickly saw the possibilities. Not only do these services interact fairly flawlessly but you also have the ability to intereact with friends also enlisted in the service my sending songs albums playlists etc via im and email. None the less I signed up (yahoo prorated my price based on my exsisting launchcast subscription) for Y Unlimited To Go. The “ToGo” was an additional cost (of course) but allows me to move all of this music to an mp3 device. Unfortunatly iPods do not work but I have an old Creative Zen Micro that should be arriving in the mail anyday. All this cost about 10 bucks a month, Will this be my permanent solution? Who knows but its been pretty cool so far… Just the ability to pull up any song anytime is crazy… I love it.
I have been using My Yahoo as my home page for probably 7 or 8 years now. One of the sections I have in My Yahoo is something they call Daily Picks. Every day this module is updated with 3 interesting, quirky, cool websites. Usually they do a pretty good job and every once in a while they come up with a real winner. That was certainly the case last night as i was checking Yahoo’s daily Picks.
www.pandora.com
you have to Check it out.
I was having a mind freeze when trying to describe Pandora so here is what they say “Pandoraâ„¢ is the doorway to this vast trove of musical information. With Pandora you can explore to your heart’s content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings – new and old, well known and completely obscure – to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.”
… and thats pretty much what it does… all through a pretty slick flash interface. You can rate songs, remove songs and create up to a hundred personalized stations…
There is a free ad driven version and a subscription version.
I’m a pretty avid user of Yahoo Launch Cast infact, I am classified as a Fanatic (2,589 total ratings) So the first thing I started thinking was a comparison to between the two. Personally I think Pandora has done to 300,000 songs what I have done to 2,589 unfortunatly Pandora and I have different thoughts about music and I can see this as it plays a station. But I do have the ability to influence the stations I have created in Pandora much as I do in yahoo. I don;t think its quite up to Yahoo Launch cast but is really cool the y way it works and most certainly am going to spend some time with it… Gawd I love technology!
Someone or some band did a mediocre rock cover of the Katamari Damacy Theme. Love the double bass kicks
btw, There needs to ba an album full of Katamari covers
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Cool video for a Grandday Song “the Sophtware Slump” Done entirely on an AppleII
Check it out