5 posts tagged “digital-music”
The re-import of all of my music into iTunes is now complete. I took this screenshot showing what artists I have the most music of, in terms of total gigs.
Really, it's just a measure of what bands I have the most
boot-legged shows of. Another interesting thing to note is that my
music folder has 1,642 items in it, which means that my collection
definitely has a "long tail"-889 of those directories are 10mb or less.
I didn't post at all yesterday... such giznank. The DSL has been out at my house since last week-so I haven't been able to get on the internet at home at all. As it turns out the internet is rather important to the proper functioning of Comet-it has no ability to run offline.
Plus my mom was here this past weekend, as well as my great-aunt, so I've been catching up with her, which means explaining to her why the dining room is full of crap and other awkward questions.
Last night, though I bought a new ipod speaker system.
Oh man does it kick ass. I've been checking it out at the Apple Store for a year (ever since it came out) and inspired by this weekend's camping trip to Boonville for THE 10TH ANNUAL BOONVILLE BEER FEST
, and to celebrate my new job (at a company that makes blogging software, as if that
will ever catch on) I finally plunked down $250 and made it mine. It produces an uholy amount of sound for something of its size, and can, in theory, run off D batteries. It's not what I would call "portable", more "luggable," but it will serve quite well for a car camping trip.
I just updated the Trizzle project with a major new feature: the Recent Song Reviews page. This is a major step for making Trizzle a more interesting place to be, since it gives you a snapshot view of what songs have recently been rated and reviewed by the Trizzle community. I'm fairly happy with the formatting right now, but of course it's likely to change in the coming weeks.
The recent song reviews page also serves as a nice inspiration for the user to rate a song themselves, through the use of a the "rate this song" link on the right. I even used a exclamation mark to get the user excited.
I find this part of user interface design quite challening--enticing the user, trying to draw them in. It's a hard problem-easy to make something functional that gives information, harder to make the ui really inspire the user to make the leap from passive consumer of information to active participant. I think it will be a big challenge for Comet as well.
So last night I went to the Pioneers of the Inevitables' MozBirdParty last night at the SongBird nest in the Mission. I was nervous going in since I knew literally know one at Songbird. Once I entered, though, people were very welcoming and friendly. When I was at the bar, a guy introduced himself as Rob-turned out this was Rob Lord , the head pioneeer. When I said I was a prospective extensions developer (and immediately started talking his ear off about Trizzle) he took me over and introduced me to Aus , who is apparently the only guy there working on the Linux and Mac OS X versions of Songbird and gave me a demo of both. Well, I saw him try to make the Linux version and produce errors. The Mac OS version is running, though, but I didn't really get a chance to play around with it too much. I guess it's still too fragile. Based on what I saw I wouldn't expect the Mac and Linux versions to be publicly available until early summer. I asked Aus how it was working out to sqlite as the database engine and he said it was exceeding expectations, amazing how well it was doing. So that's pretty interesting. I wonder how large a music library they've tried it out with.
It was a pretty happening party. Michael Arrington was there (I had to my surender my position by the demo machine so he could take a look.) I met a lot of interesting people, from Yahoo, Apple, box.net and Flock. I gave the Trizzle pitch over and over, changing it each time, trying to see what connected with people. Tagging music collections definitely resonated, as did easy blogging of music. No one seemed to think it was a bad idea, I thought I even saw a few gleams of excitement.
I talked for a while with Erik Staats , who has actually programmed several Songbird extensions so he's way ahead of the rest of us. He works on them at night after the kids go to bed, after working a full day at his dayjob. That impressed me.
All in all, a very cool experience and got me even more excited about Songbird, and Trizzle's potential with it. I just wish they'd hurry up and get that Mac version out.
I made a working prototype of what the Trizzle Songbird extension might look like when a user selects a song and then chooses Trizzle This Song... (or something like that-haven't figured out the exact nomenclature yet.) As you can see, it allows the user to then tag, rate and "blurb" (my word for contextual micro-blogging) the song-the data then being sent to the Trizzle server and stored for the benefit of the user, his/her Trizzle "friends" (need something more original), and the world.
Speaking of Songbird, they're having a MozBirdParty
tonight in honor of their getting Songbird running on Mac OS X and Linux, and to thank the Mozilla community for their help.
