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Thursday, October 16, 2003
The problem I have always had with P2P networks such as Napster and especially Kazaa/FastTrack have been that they are only good for finding music you already know. You will rarely be exposed to something new. So if I'm looking for something moderately popular (forget finding rare B-side industrial, it ain't gonna happen), I'll find it, but I won't hear a new band I might like. For that, about all I can do is listen to the RealPlayer stream from [WSOU] or some MP3 streams like [Corrosion].
I've been playing with [iRate Radio], which is interesting. It's a sort of filtering system that grabs legal new music from a number of places like IUMA. As you listen to random tracks it grabs, you rate the music and it learns what kinds of things you like, eventually bringing you new music that matches your tastes.
So far, so good. You can see a decent synopsis of how it works [here].
The easy way to launch it under MacOS X 10.2 or later:
Open /Applications/Utilities/Java Web Start
Open the Preferences. For the "Remote Applications URL" enter "http://irateradio.org". Hit OK. After it takes a minute to load, you should see 4 choices in the Java Web Start window for applications to run - run either of the 2 Swing clients, "iRate Swing" or "iRate Swing (unstable)".
And speaking of music, last night Kaley, Sara, and I went to check out a semiprivate performance of Thrice and meet the guys at the [Santa Monica Apple Store]. A fun time was had by all, even if we got funny looks for humping hedgeanimal dinosaurs.
[ 10/16/2003 03:52:00 PM ] [
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