Active Publishing of meP3s (in addition to Passive)

Here is the next piece of my Frankenstein (watch screencast).

It adds active publishing to the passive publishing that I'm doing from aggregated play data from multiple music services. So, when you are thinking of a song you just type it in, and it looks for a free-range MP3 version of that song, shortens the URL, and formats it so that playTwitter knows how to deal with it. This is similar to what I talked about before except I have automated the formating, finding and posting to Twitter to make it more user friendly.

I've also added a field that let's users create collaborative playlists using Twitter hashtags (see previous post). This lets any/all people to add songs to a particular playlist. For example, see the "bestof2009" playlist. By default anyone can add songs to this playlist just by using the same name/hashtag. Well, that's great, but what if you don't want other people's junk in your list? Just use the "advanced search" features of Twitter Search to filter it down. For example, here is the list with just my contributions.

Just like on any other webpage with MP3 links, the playTwitter bookmarklet lets you "play the page". So, filter it however you want, then play it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Explore the Twitter Hashtag (marketing.blogtanker.com)
• John Stewart Examines and Explains Twitter (ctovision.com)
• What the Hashtag?! (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)

@friendP3 - Add to Favorites Playlist

When you are just a guy trying to hack something together in your free time, you are quickly and constantly reminded to not reinvent the wheel. That, along with my complete lack of programming skills, forces me to brute force and re-purpose stuff wherever possible (see last 5 posts or so for proof).

The great thing about that, is it helps open my eyes to features/products out there they will perfectly handle the use case I'm looking to implement. The newest ephiphany is that Twitter's "favorite" feature is ideal for creating a playlist of favorite songs that you may hear on @friendP3 or any other "twitter radio" station (current or future).

A video speaks 10,000 words...

http://screencast.com/t/IHoNJ5kkL

(by the way, I *love* Jing's screencasting app but they fact that the videos aren't resizable is a major problem since they are all too big - dimensionally - to fit into my blog)

Related articles by Zemanta

• More reasons to Twitter! (deanlisenby.com)
• 8tracks: The "Legal Muxtape" That Continues To Thrive (techcrunch.com)
• Gnip brings API access bliss (retaggr.com)

Playlist Reanimator

So, I'm still hacking around with some of my science projects and I now have an MP3 resolver for XSPF playlists working. You give it an URL to for an iLike or MyStrands playlist and it will go and try to rebuild it using free-range MP3s.

Why? Well, I started with those two services because their client software (iTunes/Winamp/etc.) plug-ins can automatically publish your playlists from your media player to the web. Since most people make their playlists on their desktop, this cuts out the step of having to manually recreate it on the web so you can share it with others. Also, it lets you leverage any other "playlist builders" (e.g. Apple Genius) on your local machine and then publish those machine generated playlists too.

For example, the URL for this (actually the URL of the XSPF file, not the page):

http://www.mystrands.com/playlist/9dbf0c1b6c932965

turns into this:

http://is.gd/jGuc




I still need to add support for Last.fm playlist and I'm digging around to see if I can get at the data for the playlists at iMeem and Playlist.

Yesterday, I also added the javascript Yahoo Media Player to this page, so now all of the MP3 links being spit out from my friendP3 stream are now playable as a playlist directly from the player.

More to come (hopefully)....

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Music: Top 5 Sites to Build a Playlist (mashable.com)
• Open web-based media links in external media players (downloadsquad.com)

AOL Music Gets Bold

aolmusic
Originally uploaded by jherskowitz

AOL Music launched their new Song pages this week (part of a rolling relaunch of the site), and I applaud the direction they are going lately (disregarding the overzealous ads I talked about a couple of weeks ago).

The legal mucketymucks over there have been slowly loosening their collars a bit and letting the product folks actually compete with the smaller players who don't ask permission, but rather forgiveness. First was the AIMtunes plug-in earlier this fall - which, to be honest, I was shocked that Legal let them launch. Now comes the new AOL Music song pages/player which includes a stay of execution for the once great - now on respiratory - AOL search property of SingingFish.

Basically, when you search for a song at AOL Music they first try to fulfill that request with a licensed/promotional copy of the song that they have secured from the labels. The new piece of the puzzle is that if they don't have it, they will present you a list of free-range MP3 search results. Those results are presented with a white play icon (versus blue icon of the AOL catalog songs)... click on it and it presents a list of possible matches that you can select and play.

They also do a nice job of merging the two sources.

Both official content and free-range MP3s are played back in the same pop-up player, and the assets can be mixed in the queue.




Next they need to be able to let users create a mixed playlist that they can embed and share... but I'm sure that is coming.

Shoutouts to Georgina, Grant and Dan.


The downside? The SingingFish fish ship basically has no captain. It used to be great but there is no one steering the ship anymore. AOL should reinvest in this (or similar) platform because right now too many songs are presented as being "found" but the links are dead. Let's hope they do... otherwise there is always Skreemr, Seeqpod and MP3Realm.

Roundtable: Portable Playlists & Catalog Resolution

One of my MyStrands partners-in-crime, Scott Kveton, was on a panel this past week about data portability, microformats and standards with respect to media. Others on the panel included Lucas Gonze, Tom Conrad and Tantek Celic.

Scott Kveton · Portable Playlist and other POSH-ibilities Meetup: "Before the panel both Tom and I were chatting about how there is really only one big problem that both Pandora and MyStrands face: catalog resolution. This is a huge problem that consumes quite a bit of developer time in both of our camps. Unfortunately, every playlist format out there simply punts on this problem. They point at some “resource” that is the catalog entry. Now, from a portability standpoint that’s great and I can appreciate the why’s of why you’d do that."

Follow the link to the full post, and then you can follow it up with Lucas Gonze's (creator of Webjay, author of XSPF and now part of Yahoo Music) post too.

the Wordpress of Lucas Gonze: "Or is the real problem still economic and not technical? Are there features which it would be profitable to support which entail portability? The problem isn’t how to enable portability, it’s why a business would want that. The status quo is lack of portability, with each music service an island. This sector as a whole hasn’t developed into a collective ecosystem, and businesses which do invest in portable identifiers don’t stand to gain any value until other businesses join them."

Also check out the comment threads on both posts too... the conversation continues there.

Listening Party... Take 1

A long time ago I told you guys about the great story I read about "Listening Parties". Well, it took me and my buddies a long time to finally get off our asses and have our first one.


Last night, at Casa de Herskowitz, I put the family to bed and squirrelled away in the basement with 3 other music loving friends. We threw in a variety beers (some homebrewed, some new experimental purchases, some old favorites), some barleywine, some vodka (I do love me some Grey Goose), and even some scotch for those that partake (I am *not* a fan). Throw in a half eaten bag of pretzels and we were good to go.

I just hooked up a mini-jack to RCA cable to my stereo and we just round-robined songs with each of us just plugging in our respective MP3 players when it was our turn. The basics... don't say who the song is before you play it. Let people discuss, guess and make comparisons while it plays. With the four people at our inaugural listening party we each got threw about 7 or 8 songs. I had a hard time narrowing my playlist down to a manageable size - in fact, I got it down to 12 songs even though we didn't hear them all. The bonus? I burned a CD of that playlist for each of my buddies. Next time, we swore we would make that standard operating procedure.

All in all, I was much enjoyed by everyone and we all swore that we would make this a regular event.

Here's my playlist: Listening Party #1

Company Claims Patent on Playlists

Ugh...

Company patents playlists, sues everyone: "The patents describe what essentially comes down to a playlist. 'A plurality of works can be collected together in a list for purposes of establishing a play or a presentation sequence. The list can be visually displayed and edited,' reads the '725' patent. Both of them describe ways to graphically display an arrangement of songs from CDs or any manner of media that can then be played back sequentially or out-of-order."

In related news I have filed a patent for a 'plurality of letters that can be grouped together for the purpose of establishing a word'.

If you guys have violated my patent, I will gladly settle out of court with you. :-)

One Llama

I haven't had time to review it in detail myself yet, but check out Somewhat Frank's coverage of One Llama...

One Llama For 'Fun' Music Discovery : Somewhat Frank :: web 2.0 ● technology ● life :: blog by Frank Gruber

My first impressions are positive ones. Clean/fun UI, easy to generate playlists and the integration with Rhapsody is really nice, although not very obvious (hint: generate a playlist then click "play all" in the upper right of the page). It generated some pretty good recommendations based on a seed... some obvious some a bit more obscure.

The playlist above was created using "Bridge and Tunnel" by The Honorary Title as the seed. Some of these artists I know, others I don't. Although, the first generation of this playlist included "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head" by BJ Thomas. That seemed a bit out of left field, but I've learned to love the unexpected in recommendations... they drag you out of your comfort zone and expose some new things every once in a while (although in this case I deleted the song and it was instantly replaced with something else).

My only real complaints is that the whole experience seemed a bit too solitary for my liking... even with the user profiles integrated "post to Facebook" feature. And the other is the embedded widget itself (above) - while is is pretty slick looking - there doesn't seem to be a way to get to the page and/or my profile itself (which is the only place you can leverage the freeplay Rhapsody integration. So, in that case you are stuck with a 30-second sample experience only. Not hard to fix... just a couple of hiccups on an otherwise impressive first release.

Holiday Traveling Tunes (UPDATED)

Need some ideas for a playlist for your long weekend travels? You may want to take some inspiration from here:

The 77 Most Unforgettable Movie Songs - AOL Music

Now with Fiql Playlists for those of you on Rhapsody or Napster....

View this FIQL playlist:AOL Music's 77 Most Memorable Movie Songs (#77 - 51)

View this FIQL playlist:AOL Music's 77 Most Memorable Movie Songs (#50 - 1)

Fiql Revisited

I haven't talked about Fiql in a while, and thought it was time. For those that have never checked it out, I highly recommend it. To over simplify, think of it as a place where playlists go to mingle, find their mates, and make babies.

Upload a playlist (data not the assets) from your media player, write a description (make it good if you want to get it called out as a "Fiql Pick"), categorize it, and submit. Fiql will then do the work to match the playlist (or as much of it as it can) to both Napster and Rhapsody. Combine that with Napster's 3-free-plays-per-song trial methodology and now you have a playlist that anyone can listen to (at least 3 times). If you are a Rhapsody subscriber, then you can seamlessly listen to playlists from Fiql - or easily export your playlists from Rhapsody into Fiql. Last.fm user? Then leverage Last.fm's webservices to download an XSPF playlist of your Top 50 Played tracks (http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/jherskowitz/toptracks.xspf) to your desktop. Turn around and upload the XSPF file to Fiql, and done. MyStrands user? Even easier, just find a playlist and click "download xspf".

One of the newer additions is that you can also add MP3 URLs for every track in your playlist (click the "link" icon next to the first song and it will run through the MP3s). I created one, check it out:

View this FIQL playlist:Spinner Spins

The beauty of it.... it is completely legal. The artists get paid, the playlisters won't get sued, Fiql makes money from bounties and advertising, and the consumers benefit from a service that acts as a translation layer between playlists - it is media player and media source agnostic. I actually uploaded my Music Now playlists (from Windows Media Player) so I didn't have to go and recreate them in Napster and Rhapsody.

There are lots of other nice (and very slickly designed) features as well... blogs, groups, forums, community/unsigned artist pages, and more.

I have a feeling there is more from where all this came from....

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible

Courtesy of Imeem....