David Emery OnlineScrobbling Timelines
Graphs are clearly Laurie’s raison d‘être, so it didn’t take me long to figure out that a great way of thanking him would be to write some code that does something we’ve been working towards for some time at Last.fm: generating personalized, real-time scrobbling history graphs.
I love graphs, me. Last.fm + graphs is hence a match made in heaven.
I know a lot of people use Last.fm for things like the recommended radio, forums and all that jazz but I use it solely for scrobbling and storing that data – what I played, when and how often. In fact, the more ways I could replicate the idea of scrobbling across other media the better; I’d love to scrobble watching films and TV (which technically could be done by Sky if they wanted), reading books and magazines (maybe on the iPad?) and all sorts of other things; in fact, it’s what interested me in Foursquare, which is pretty much scrobbling of location.
My scrobble graph can be found here.
Visit ➔MusicDNA Wants to Compete with Apple's iTunes LP Format - But Will Anybody Care?
MusicDNA, a new file format that looks a lot like Apple's iTunes LP format, wants to bring liner notes to the 21st century. MusicDNA is a new rich-media extension for digital music files that enriches songs and albums with additional data like lyrics,
I’m not super into the idea of these new ‘rich-media’ music formats – does anyone really want them? – but what I really don’t understand about either this or the rival CMX is where the hell people are supposed to buy these things from?
You’re certainly not going to be able to buy these things from iTunes (as they already have a rich-media format and have implemented it in the form of iTunes LP) and is it worth anybody’s time to make one of these things if you can’t sell them on the biggest music store?
Visit ➔Thesixtyone Unveils a Gorgeous Redesign, Users Predictably Revolt
Music discovery site thesixtyone unveiled a radical—and gorgeous—redesign a couple days ago. The redesign presents a single, lush full-screen photograph as each song plays, while smaller snapshots fade in and out screensaver-style. The controls are
Thesixtyone redesign certainly looks nice – obviously I’m a big fan of the full window photo thing (in fact my 2009 Top 20 was going to look just like that but I ran out of time). However, I agree with the ‘revolting’ users – it’s practically impossible to use now, and it feels like lots of functionality has been lost (I don’t know if it has or not, but it’s impossible to find things that used to be there).
Pretty and experimental is all well and good, but it needs to be useable too – see the way Hype Machine does it; the main site is super useable, but then they go and do cool, different things for their 2009 Zeitgeist alongside it.
Design and usability can be done at the same time – it’s not one or the other.
Visit ➔Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical
An upcoming major revision of iTunes will copy each user’s catalog to the net making it available from any browser or net connected ipod/touch/tablet. The Lala upload technology will be bundled into a future iTunes upgrade which will automatically be
I’d love this to be true, and I think it will be at some point in the near future. There’s no way though that Apple won’t charge for it, and probably charge a little bit too much, as is their wont. Would make sense as a killer feature to add to MobileMe (it would certainly make me signup).
Visit ➔Open Letter From OK Go
This week we released a new album, and it’s our best yet. We also released a new video – the second for this record – for a song called This Too Shall Pass, and you can watch it here. We hope you'll like it and comment on it and pass the link alo
I love the ridiculous situations this industry gets itself into sometimes, where it seemingly makes more sense to let people embed a video from other sites like Vimeo (who don’t even like having commercial videos on their platform, and hence have some slightly horrific clauses in their T&Cs that let them do far to much with your videos) rather then focus everyone on YouTube.
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Vampire Weekend - Contra
As part of the ongoing series of ‘things’ we’ve done for Vampire Weekend that I’ve written about previously we’ve just put up the album to stream on their website (and in handily embedable form below).
Luckily for all concerned it’s really rather good – I would say that though so have a listen and make you mind up for yourself:
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