I realize I’m late to the party about last.fm, but I only decided to check it out recently. last.fm is a web 2.0 social networking site for folks that listen to a lot of music on their computer. I definitely fall into this category, in fact it’s the primary way I listen to music – I haven’t even owned a stereo in many years. The benefits of last.fm (a CBS owned site) only become apparent once you begin to publish some of the things you like listening to to it…
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As folks who read this blog know, I’m always checking out new ways to access, sort through, catalog, and otherwise enjoy my music files. As a long time Mac user (at least since they dumped their old OS and started using BSD), iTunes has really been the slickest, easiest to use and most fully functional music player available to me. But Apple’s incessant attempts to impose more ingenious and arguably ever more diabolical forms of their DRM (digital rights management) upon me in order to limit what I can do with my own music have basically forced me into an as-yet unending search for a better, free and open solution.
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A form of addiction just sucked two hours of my life away. Now that I have all my music collected together in one place (I didn’t have room on the old machine for both the music and anything else), I’ve set about the monumental task of correcting all the ID3 tags and adding cover art to the files, filling in the missing information, etc. It is a task that is both tedious and exhilarating at the same time.
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Earlier last year I posted here that if you like playing music on your computer that you should check out Songbird. It’s been a long time since then, and the folks at Pioneers of the Inevitable have been hard at work “working on creating a non-proprietary, cross platform, extensible tool that will help enable new ways to playback, manage, and discover music”. It’s an open source iTunes based on Mozilla code (Firefox), and if you haven’t tried it in a while, nows the time as they have finally released version 1.0. I’ve been using Amarok lately on my Ubuntu desktop at work so Songbird is going to be a tough sell for me. My Amarok uses a MySQL database to store all the song info so searches and sorts are incredibly fast – I don’t know if Songbird has a similar integration or not. I know that Songbird is missing some other stuff I dig about Amarok, but since I can’t run Amarok on the Mac (yet), and have been forced into using iTunes (which I don’t really like) Songbird is looking more like a viable alternative. Watch the intro videos or read on for more info that I’ll try to update as I use the program.

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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]