A story on TechCrunch notes that Yahoo has released some code for their new browser based flash media player. While I don’t see a personal need to use their player when there are already so many perfectly good flash media players available, I can’t help but try it out. If it’s easier than installing the typical player or fiddling with a nifty module in blog software, maybe people will post more music! In fact, maybe I’ll start a real podcast one of these days…

I’ve linked a couple instrumental ditties below that I recorded on my Guitar Lute [image page] that were thrown up here on my private podcast recently. They aren’t perfect, but they were done
Spagnoletta
Minuet in Em

You should see a little grey player icon next to each mp3 link if you want to try the player. Otherwise, you can just click the direct link. [update: It doesn't seem to work in Opera, though is OK in Firefox, Safari, and IE]

I use Windows XP Pro at work, and I like to play music whenever I’m actually at my desk. There are a lot of different programs to choose from that can play my collection of MP3s, and I’ve used a lot of them over time. I used to use Winamp exclusively (see old story on this site), but their advertising gimmicks through via internet since they were purchased by AOL is annoying to say the least, and I never liked the playlist management in Winamp. Recent versions of Winamp added a ‘media library’ window sort of like what iTunes has, but yet another window floating around (Winamp already had three if you count the player, the equalizer, and the playlist thing) was just the last straw. I’ve used iTunes for several years now, mainly because that’s what I used on the Mac, more than out of any real thought that it was superior in some way. As software goes, it certainly *is* superior - and in many ways, but that’s not really the point of this post! For all iTunes really good points, it has some major detractions for me. It’s a big, bloated program for one, gobbling up many megabytes of my precious Ram. It’s also a bit of a CPU hog (though it’s really not all that bad considering the power it gives you to manipulate your music in real time (the party shuffle is one of my favorite pieces of iTunes). iTunes makes it very easy to work with MP3 tags as well, but more on that later.

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It’s been awhile since I played with the Flock browser. I wrote about Flock here in October ‘05, but at version 0.2, although the browser worked, it wasn’t on par with other browsers I use (I mainly use Firefox at this time). Flock has progressed a great deal since then, and if you use Flickr (the free photo sharing site), you might want to take a look. I’ll describe what it’s able to do below…Primer: Click here for a quick review of what a browser is, and how Flock does the job. Flock is more than just a web browser, and although I don’t discuss it here, it can also serve as an ‘News aggregator‘.

To be fair, Flock v.0.5.15 isn’t even a real ‘beta release’ yet, they’re calling it a ‘developer preview’, but it’s quite functional and seems stable enough (at least on the Mac). Based on the Mozilla Gecko engine, Flock has all the features I dig about Firefox including the search plugin window, and a powerful real-time cache search (finds stuff you’ve already visited and displays it in real-time as you type). Flock developers are planning for a first release, and you should see announcements soon for version 0.7 codenamed Cardinal this month sometime.

There are several new features available in this newer version of Flock. While the Flickr integration isn’t the only thing that’s new, it was the thing that really grabbed my attention. I’ve been using Flickr for some time, at first just to try it out, after a friend (Non-Prophet) mentioned it. You can upload a certain amount of photos to Flickr for free every month (there is also a ‘PRO’ version for a nominal yearly fee which allows unlimited uploads). The service allows you to share photos with friends and family very easily, and create a website for them even if you know nothing about coding for the web. Flock provides a Flickr ‘roll’ viewer in a ‘toolbar’ at the top of the browser window (a strip about 100 pixels high just below the normal tools menu but above any webpage you happen to be viewing). If you ’sign in’ to your Flickr account, you get some other features as well, like a quick link to your own photos, as well as your registered contacts’ photostreams.

In addition to viewing images, you can UPLOAD them too (once you have a Flickr account)! This is pretty cool, since otherwise you need to visit your own Flickr webpage and use their upload form, or download and install a separate program to perform this upload function. Having the upload function built so seamlessly into the browser is pretty slick and easy to use. By selecting the ‘Photo Uploader’ toolbar, the toolbar area changes from displaying photos to a blank area to which you can drag your photos.

Once you click the UPLOAD button, the image is sent to Flickr! Simple enough for a grandmother to love. That’s really the idea here, to make using the web to share and collaborate easy enough for non-webmastery types. Flock is on track to transform the web browser into a communication portal device of sorts. It may not be true ‘reinvention’, but it does offer a few truly innovative tools. I’ll be playing with Flock more in the future I can tell.

For about $15,000 you can get a device that will play your old 33rpm LPs (records) without a needle. The device can purportedly eliminate pops and crackles, and recover the audio information even from damaged (cracked) records. This page on the ELP website describes how the technology works. Used as an archival tool in the Library of Congress, it would be wonderful if this technology was affordable enough for regular folks like me with a lot of old records in the garage - but I won’t be holding my breath.
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A playlist from our Nov 18th, ‘05 house party, output from iTunes is up for site members only. Thanks to those that came by! We’re planning another one for sometime before Christmas as the Pale Ale comes of age. Stay tuned! Nate loves playing VJ also, and he hopes to be able to get the projector next time too. Details on the projector: DLP projector, BenQ model 6110