Music Sharing

So as somebody who really enjoys listening to a large, diverse amount of music I'm always looking for new tunes to listen to. One of the things I miss about having moved away from most of my friends (growing up is a bitch, right?) is the suggestions we'd used to make to each other. You know, simple "hey, did you hear that song?" or "you've got to check this album out". One thing I've never really been able to find is a decent way to share recommendations and music with friends, but I think I've finally found a decent system. So the purpose of this note is to share the ways I like to discover new music, how I like to share my music, and a few other random things. This might be a long post, so bear with me (or just tune out).

First off, how I find new tunes - The Discovery Process:

Last.FM
Last.fm is best described as a social website, much like facebook, digg, or twitter, but its main purpose is the sharing and discovery of music. So once you sign up for a free account, one of the first things that Last.FM asks you to do is to upload your iTunes library (if you're an iTunes user on Windows/OSX) or other music library. What it does then is take your 'Played Tracks' info and builds a profile based on what you've listened to. For example, mine is here: cataphoresis at last.fm

Now that your information has been all compiled and thrown together, last.fm creates a few custom radio stations based on what you've listened to - a radio station based on your library. You then have the option to install the last.fm client, which sits in the background of your favorite music player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, Winamp, etc) and submits what you listen to so that it can further add to your custom station. In addition, you can indicate that you "Love" certain tracks, which further tailors your music.

Now once you've formed this music profile, you can add your friends - and they get the benefit of being able to listen to your custom stations and you can listen to theirs as well. You can see what your buddies are listening to, comment on tracks, recommend tracks to others (I'd like to take the time to recommend In Vein by Alkaline Trio) which they can often listen to in the flash player built into the website. The recommendations are a great feature.

If you don't feel like listening to a station based off your profile's music, other stations include 'My Recommendations' which offers tracks that you might like based on your past listening history, 'My Neighbors' which offers tracks that people with similar profiles to you have listened to, and you can always enter an Artist or Song title and get a radio station based off similar artists/songs. Admittedly, this last option is much better when left to Pandora, which I'll talk about next.

Another one of the reasons that I love the site is that I'm a statistics junkie - I love seeing charts of what I listen to. I know it's nerdy, but it's neat for me to be able to see from week-to-week what I listened to much. So if that's something that interests you too (you nerd) then this is a great site for you.

So go make a profile there, and add me.

Pandora
Pandora is probably the best-known of the internet radio stations. Using Pandora is simple - you type in the name of a song you like or an artist and up pops up a station based on that information. For the most part, the stations do a pretty good job - you can skip bad songs (but not too many skips) and if you create a profile at the website, you can save the better stations to your profile and listen to them again later. Oh, and of course it's free.

Metacritic Music Reviews
There's no shortage of people willing to offer their opinion about anything online and music is no exception. Instead of going to 20 different music review websites just to find consensus about a new album, you can go to Metacritic which is an aggregator of various review sites (they do music as well as movies, games, and TV). So I periodically look at the reviews, look for the ones that score well across the board, and listen to a few of them (last.fm is great for this). Now sometimes the critics love what I absolutely can't stand, sometimes they hate stuff that I love. I just like to use it as a way to keep up with new releases and some new stuff that might've slipped right by me. Neat site.


Okay, now that I've found the music, how do I share it?

First off, I've mentioned last.fm. So what else?

I've toyed around with different ways to share my music library over the internet for years. Shoutcast streaming internet music stations were neat but didn't offer the user any control. So they got nixed. I also tried a variety of iTunes sharing programs (such as Mojo) but most of them had their flaws. Finally I found a pretty good one.

Simplify Media
Simplify Media is a free application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that allow you to share you music libraries with other registered users over the internet. Being a Mac user, I primarily use iTunes, but have no trouble sharing music with friends using Windows Media Player in Vista. You sign up for a free account, let it index your music library, and once it's finished you can add your friends in the application and share your tunes and play theirs. Great stuff. Another plus is that if you have an iPod Touch or an iPhone, you can connect to your computer's music library when you're away from home. Cool stuff. So if you give it a shot, add me.

I much prefer this method versus just sending albums over AOL Instant Messenger. Far less illegal, and plus it saves on disk space.

Hope some of this was interesting - if not, then I congratulate myself for having stolen a few minutes of your life that you're never getting back. Hooray for me!