Finally, after more than year, I managed to rate every song in my iTunes library. That's almost 10,000 songs. Why would do I do this?
Because I have so much music. Having it all rated allows me to sort it all better, and even more importantly, to give me a way to filter it all out. I got the idea of doing this from this post. As I was going through and rating it, it let me realize what music I had was crap, so I knew what to get rid of.
Most of my music I know fairly well, but there's stuff that I've downloaded (legally, of course) upon someone's recommendation, or after reading a record review. Stuff like that I probably haven't listened to as much, (or sometimes even at all...) so I won't always remember how I like it.
Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye all in one place? Singing?! Amazing. I came across the Symphony of Science a while back, and as a new video came out yesterday, I should probably finally show it to all of you.
Here's my favorite one so far:
Apple pie from scratch: First invent the universe Science is awesome.
It seems that I'm about 3 weeks behind on reporting on the iTunes Genius feature. Maybe if iTunes didn't prompt me to constantly download feature-less updates (not to mention trying to trick me into downloading Safari), I would have gotten it sooner.
Nonetheless, the idea behind Genius is that it scans your library, and then whenever you click on the genius button (the symbol for an atom), it will build you a playlist based on that song. They have finally decided to join the ranks of Last.fm and Pandora. Their recommendations are more like Last.fm's, because it provides you with songs based on what other listeners like you are listening to.
Unlike Last.fm, it only plays songs you have however. But don't worry, there's a sidebar which you can open which will suggest similar songs for you to buy. Just make sure you don't already own them, even if iTunes thinks you don't.
What you see above is a playlist generated from When the Sun Goes Down, by the Arctic Monkeys. Pretty impressive; the playlist does mesh well together. They always start with the track that you used to create the playlist, and they normally play a couple other tracks by that artist, yet still keep it diverse, artist-wise.
It's not without its problems though. When I wanted to create a Christmas playlist based off of 'Somewhere In My Memory (Home Alone)' by the Boston Pops Orchestra, they told me that "Genius is unavailable for that song." Sad, well let's try 'Let it Snow!' by Bing Crosby. Still unavailable? Does iTunes hate Christmas???
I'm not the only onegetting this message. A lot of people are getting it when using tracks that aren't sold on iTunes, most notably the Beatles.
As you can see, I eventually found something to build a Christmas playlist off of. This wasn't the only track I was able to do so with; I'm at about a 60% success rating with Christmas songs.
Somepeople love this, and others, not so much. Some will make fun of it, but I'm pretty impressed. Good show Apple, good show.
Recommendations
Apple is late to the game
But still arrogant
Despite the potentially impending doom for Pandora, they keep at it; good for them. I've highlighted two new improvements to their interface below. Nothing is really updated in terms of features, but aesthetics are important.
1. Station Edits
The station you are listening to appears larger, and you can see the small words 'Station Options' present. You can see this in the red circle on the left. 'Add variety to this station' is new'ish. You've always been able to seed more music into your station, but this is more clear for the less experienced user.
2. Guide Us
If you look at the circle on the right, you see the thumb up, and thumb down buttons. These normally used to appear when you hovered over the album, which worked fine, unless you wanted to quickly thumb songs, which wasn't possible because you have to wait a few seconds.
There was a large button in the bottom right which said 'Guide us'. When you clicked it, a large dialog box appeared, which took up half the screen, and had some redundant features, since the thumb up and down buttons were present here as well. One of the nice buttons is the snooze button, which allows you to prevent a song from playing on any of your stations for a month. Prior, you could only set this option for a currently playing song, but now that there is the menu button for each song, this has been fixed.
Good work Pandora, and good luck staying afloat. I'll probably discuss this in a later post, but if you are forced to switch over to a subscription-based system, I will pay for it, and stick with you (as long as I can still scrobble my tracks to Last.fm). If you could get to my two suggestions, that would be great as well.
My eyes swelled up with tears as I read this article. Pandora has been running off advertising and venture capital, and was projecting to finally be in the black in 2009, but the Copyright Royalty Board finalized its decision to double the royalties internet radio must pay.
6 months ago my music listening could be broken down to:
10% Pandora
5% Last.fm*
85% iTunes
But now, I'd say that the rankings have changed to:
80% Pandora
2% Last.fm*
18% iTunes
Given that this affects all internet radio, will any of it last? Last.fm seems to have a better business model, since they have paid subscriptions, and the listening isn't all mainstream, there are a lot of artists who upload their music for free - these factors would reduce their cost per play. But, hopefully they won't go under, they'll figure something out...
I wanted to make reference to Pandora's box, but I couldn't decide if this would be analagous to the box being opened, closed, or smashed to bits. Because the box contains chaos, yet the service is being shut down... it's too much for me. Any thoughts on that? Anyhow, thanks to merrickmtg for the news (from Twitter).
Pandora is a browser-based internet radio system. I've talked about it before, so I won't explain it; refer back as needed. I love it; I listen to it for many hours a day, but there are two things that bother me, that it really needs.
1. Auto-pause
Often time I'm sitting at the computer, listening to Pandora, when someone will send me a link to a YouTube video, e.g. I will then pause Pandora, and watch the video. What happens next? Nothing, because I forget to unpause Pandora, and I'll realize 30 minutes later that it's too quiet, and it will hit me that there's no music.
Would it really be that hard to install a feature that can detect whether or not another window is playing a video? To be honest, yes, maybe it would be hard, but it would be an amazing feature.
2. Verification before exiting
Because Pandora is in the browser, in one of my tabs, I will often accidentally close it, or open something in the same tab as Pandora. This isn't a big deal with other things, I just hit the back button, and everything's back to normal. However, with Pandora, the music stops, and I have to wait for Pandora to reload, and then it starts up a different song, and I lose whatever song I was listening to.
This feature is definitely possible, and would not be hard. A dialog box would just have to pop-up saying "Are you sure you want to navigate away from this site?" Meebo does it, and it's very useful there, just as it would be here.
The auto-pause feature would be nice for all media players, and verification before exiting would be nice for all web-based media players, I just singled out Pandora because that's the one I use. I couldn't find a suggestion form for Pandora, but I will send this post to their Twitter account.
Pandora and Last.fm are two amazing online music services which I utilize and love. I'll talk a bit about each.
Pandora is a music service which streams music from the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project analyzes songs and attempts to classify them, similar to music fingerprinting. It assigns different variables such as "everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony." The way it works on Pandora is that you type in a song or artist you like. Pandora will then select that song, look up it's attributes, and create a radio station based on these. It will then play songs with similar attributes (or 'genes'). As you play music, you're able to give songs thumbs up and thumbs down, and you will be customizing your station as you listen.
Last.fm takes a more social stance on internet radio. As you listen to music, tracks are 'scrobbled' your profile. You're able to see what tracks you have listened to, and charts are created to show you your listening habits. As you add friends on Last.fm, you're able to see what they are listening to, recommend music, and see what your music compatibility is with them. You're able to listen to music from the site directly, or install a plugin on your computer to scrobble music from iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. It has some other nice features such as finding concerts in your area that you would like based on your preferences.
And here's the best part. Real-ity created Pandora.fm. It is a mashup of Pandora and Last.fm. You're able to listen to your Pandora stations and have the tracks scrobble to your Last.fm account. There are Firefox plugins which allow you to scrobble to Last.fm as well, however, Pandora.fm is nice because you can use it without downloading anything. This is what I use in lab primarily.
If you have any questions, let me know, but otherwise enjoy the music. If you use Last.fm already, feel free to add me as a friend.
The title is a bit misleading - it's really a mix of two different things, so if you were expecting to see pale, eerie, floating vaginas, you're fucked up this isn't the article for you.
I was going through my RSS reader, and the following article popped out at me: Kidney Extracted Through The Vagina, First Time In Europe, Second In World. If that isn't one of the strangest images you've thought of, you have a twisted imagination. The idea is that you can reduce the amount of recovery time required, and scarring by going through the babyhole. Normally, you end up making a 6 cm incision, however with this method, you only need two smaller, 1 cm incisions. Oh wait, "Furthermore, another non visible incision is done in the internal part of the vagina, where the kidney is extracted." How is this a good idea??? To be fair, they're doing this to a 66 year old woman, so she probably doesn't get quite as much use out of it, but c'mon.
This is the image I was about to use, but then I saw the first image, and it fit better with the title. Earlier, I made a post about Nine Inch Nails' new album, Ghosts I. At the time, I had only downloaded for free, Ghosts I. A few days later I paid the $5 and downloaded Ghosts II-IV. I really enjoyed it. One of the feeds in my RSS reader is Pitchfork Media. They review music, so it helps me keep up with what's new, and if an album gets above an 8.0, I'll usually... acquire it. I was shocked to see that they gave Ghosts I-IV a 5.0. I disagree strongly with this, however there was a line in there which is very true. "Reznor stands to make millions from Ghosts, something that certainly wouldn't have been true if he'd released this two-hour 4xCD instrumental work on a major label." Anyhow, that's it for now.
Finally, after more than year, I managed to rate every song in my iTunes library. That's almost 10,000 songs. Why would do I do this?
