Music Rec
Love the Biggie flowing through my music stream today
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 03/10/2010 - 03:52
Love the Biggie flowing through my music stream today
Categories: Music Rec
Firefox Is Losing The Race To Chrome
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/09/2010 - 19:06
Many people have asked me why I started developing ExtensionFM on Chrome before Firefox. Firefox has about 25% market share while Chrome has only 5%. Below are ten reasons why I believe Chrome is the better browser right now and easier to develop applications for.
Let me first say that I have had a love affair with Firefox for the past five years. I started using it in the summer of 2005 when I was, ironically enough, an intern at Microsoft. I want Mozilla to succeed. It is important to have a ‘non-biased’ company in the browser space. But right now, they are getting their butts kicked by Chrome (and its Webkit cousins).
Here are 10 reasons (with 1 bonus) why Chrome has surpassed Firefox.
- Speed: Chrome renders pages faster than Firefox. On Mac it is even more noticeable.
- Weight: Chrome uses a lot less memory and system resources than Firefox.
- HTML5: Both Chrome and Firefox have implemented a bunch of HTML5 features. There are still many more to come. To this point however, each has implemented a different set of features. The set of features that Webkit has implemented are more important at this point - WebDatabase, WebSockets, etc.
- CSS3: Related and equally important to HTML5 is CSS3. At this point Webkit has implemented a lot more of the spec, including multiple backgrounds and background gradients.
- Extensions: Chrome extensions do not require a restart on install or when they update. Firefox’s do. Right now Firefox has more extensions. But all the good ones will come to Chrome. Chrome also makes it really easy for developers to package extensions for delivery in the gallery or on a third party site.
- Video Support: As part of the HTML5 video element, browsers can now create a native video player that is controlled by Javascript (thus bypassing Flash). But this means very little if the video player does not support the leading codec - H.264. Chrome supports this, Firefox does not (b/c of licensing reasons).
- Audio Support: Equal to the video element above, HTML5 introduced an audio element that is a native player controlled by Javascript. But as with video support, audio support is only as good as the codecs it ships to play back different formats of music. Unbelievably, Firefox does not ship a codec that supports MP3. Let me repeat that. Firefox does not support MP3. They only support the open source and far less used OGG format. Chrome of course supports MP3 (as well as OGG).
- Startup: On both Mac and PC, Chrome starts up a lot faster than Firefox.
- UI: Chrome has a very minimal look with only the basic “chrome” surrounding the web window. Firefox looks more bloated. Even Mozilla recognizes this. The next version looks a lot more like Chrome.
- Threaded Tabs: When a tab in Chrome crashes, it does not freeze or crash the entire browser. This is because each tab runs in its own process. All Firefox tabs run in the same process. If one tab crashes, it brings down the entire browser.
- Mobile (Bonus): Here is a list of companies that ship mobile devices with a Webkit browser: Apple, Google, Palm, RIM (coming), Nokia. Here is a list of companies that ship a mobile device with a Firefox browser: None.
Categories: Music Rec
RT @cashmusic: The new @familyoftheyear EP, Through The Trees is out now, available directly from...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/09/2010 - 18:50
RT @cashmusic: The new @familyoftheyear EP, Through The Trees is out now, available directly from the band at http://familyoftheyear.net/
Categories: Music Rec
RT @extensionfm: New Release: Auto-updating sites and the music activity stream -...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 21:28
RT @extensionfm: New Release: Auto-updating sites and the music activity stream - http://bit.ly/9nNu6R
Categories: Music Rec
ExtensionFM New Release: Auto-Updating Sites and the Music Activity Stream
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 17:47
The latest release (3.2) introduces auto-updating sites. This means that songs will automatically be added to your library, from the sites you have already visited, as those sites post them. You do not have to re-visit sites to get new songs. This all happens in the background.
The All Songs List view has been tweaked a little with timestamps to better reflect this new ‘Music Activity Stream’:
All sites have auto-updating turned on by default. You can turn this off on a site-by-site basis by right-clicking on a site in the All Songs Pane View:
You can now also remove an entire site and all of its songs by right-clicking and choosing delete:
If you would like to remove individual songs, you can still right-click on any song in All Songs Pane view and choose delete. If you remove all the songs from a site, the site will still remain and continue to auto-update if you have not chosen to turn that off
Categories: Music Rec
RT @tnw_apps: Extension.fm, the must have music add-on for Chrome http://tnw.to/15miY by...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/08/2010 - 12:39
RT @tnw_apps: Extension.fm, the must have music add-on for Chrome http://tnw.to/15miY by @thomcummings
Categories: Music Rec
RT @albertwenger: Doing some reading online and discovering new music courtesy of...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Sun, 03/07/2010 - 03:46
RT @albertwenger: Doing some reading online and discovering new music courtesy of http://extension.fm and http://hypem.tumblr.com
Categories: Music Rec
ps - just bought it on Amazon
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 21:26
ps - just bought it on Amazon
Categories: Music Rec
Portugal. the Man came out with a new album this week! There needs to be a better way to learn about...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 21:26
Portugal. the Man came out with a new album this week! There needs to be a better way to learn about these things. Its not on Spotify yet :(
Categories: Music Rec
RT @rstaicut: It’s a great day for BeeMe! Testing today and getting ready to launch at our...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Fri, 03/05/2010 - 17:02
RT @rstaicut: It’s a great day for BeeMe! Testing today and getting ready to launch at our first coffee shop on Monday.
Categories: Music Rec
Paris, Tokyo by Lupe Fiasco. This song is 3 years old and I...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Thu, 03/04/2010 - 14:55
Paris, Tokyo by Lupe Fiasco. This song is 3 years old and I don’t know much about Lupe Fiasco. But I just discovered this song and can’t get it out of my head. Need to check out his albums now in my never-ending quest to find good hip-hop.
auri:
Lupe Fiasco - Paris, Tokyo.
Let’s go to sleep in Paris,And wake up in Tokyo.
Have a dream in New Orleans,
Fall in love in Chicago.
Categories: Music Rec
Unofficial Artist Guide to SXSW
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Thu, 03/04/2010 - 13:48
I’m excited! Next week I travel to Austin for a week long computer+music geek-fest at SXSW. A big part of SXSW is the music – there are nearly 2,000 different artists playing at SXSW this year. But that presents a problem – there are so many bands going to SXSW (many I’ve never heard of) that I find it very hard to figure out which bands I should go and see. I need a tool to help me find sift through all of the artists – a tool that will help me decide which artists I should add to my schedule and which ones I should skip. I’m not the only one who was daunted by the large artist list. Taylor McKnight, founder of SCHED*, was thinking the same thing. He wanted to give his users a better way to plan their time at SXSW. And so over a couple of weekends Taylor built (with a little backend support from us) The Unofficial Artist Discovery Guide to SXSW.
The Unofficial Artist Discovery Guide to SXSW is a tool that allows you to explore the many artists attending this year’s SXSW. It lets you search for artists, browse popularity, music style, ‘buzzworthiness’, or similarity to your favorite artists – and it will make recommendations for you based on your music taste (using your Last.fm, Sched* or Hype Machine accounts) . The Artist Guide supplies enough context (bios, images, music, tag clouds, links) to help you decide if you might like an artist.
Here’s the guide:
Here’s a quick tour of some of the things you can do with the guide. First off, you can Search for artists by name, genre/tag or location. This helps you find music when you know what you are looking for.
However, you may not always be sure what you are looking for – that’s where you use Discover. This gives you recommendations based on the music you already like. Type in the name of a few artists (even artists that are not playing at SXSW) or your SCHED*, Hype Machine or Last.fm user name, and ‘Discover’ will give you a set of recommendations for SXSW artists based on your music taste. For example, I’ve been listening to Charlotte Gainsbourg lately so I can use the artist guide to help me find SXSW artists that I might like:
If I see an artist that looks interesting I can drill down and get more info about the artist:
From here I can read the artist bio, listen to some audio, explore other similar SXSW artists or add the event to my SCHED* schedule.
I use Last.fm quite a bit, so I can enter my Last.fm name and get SXSW recommendations based upon my Last.fm top artists. The artist guide tries to mix things up a little bit so if I don’t like the recommendations I see, I can just ask again and I can get a different set. Here are some recommendations based on my recent listening at Last.fm:
If you’ve been using the wonderful SCHED* to keep track of your SXSW calendar you can use the guide to get recommendations based on artists that you’ve already added to your SXSW calendar.
In addition to search and discovery, the guide gives you a number of different ways to browse the SXSW Artist space. You can browse by ‘buzzworthy’ artists – these are artists that are getting the most buzz on the web:
Or the most well-known artists:
You can browse by the style of music via a tag cloud:
And by venue:
Building the guide was pretty straightforward. Taylor used the Echo Nest APIs to get the detailed artist data such as familiarity, popularity, artist bios, links, images, tags and audio. The only data that was not available at the Echo Nest was the venue and schedule info which was provided by Arkadiy (one of Taylor’s colleagues). Even though SXSW artists can be extremely long tail (some don’t even have Myspace pages), the Echo Nest was able to provide really good coverage for these sets (There was coverage for over 95% of the artists). Still there are a few gaps and I suspect there may be a few errors in the data (my favorite wrong image is for the band Abe Vigoda). If you are in a band that is going to SXSW and you see that we have some of your info wrong, send me an email (paul@echonest.com) and I’ll make it right.
We are excited to see the this Artist Discovery guide built on top of the Echo Nest. It’s a great showcase for the Echo Nest developer platform and working with Taylor was great. He’s one of these hyper-creative, energetic types – smart, gets things done and full of new ideas. Taylor may be adding a few more features to the guide before SXSW, so stay tuned and we’ll keep you posted on new developments.
Categories: Music Rec
I support the #StartupVisa. Send a tweet to Congress using @2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org or...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Wed, 03/03/2010 - 20:06
I support the #StartupVisa. Send a tweet to Congress using @2gov at http://startupvisa.2gov.org or just retweet this tweet!
Categories: Music Rec
RT @gregory80: I think extension.fm is turning into the internet radio station I’ve always...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/02/2010 - 23:28
RT @gregory80: I think extension.fm is turning into the internet radio station I’ve always wanted.
Categories: Music Rec
I just reset everyone’s ExtensionFM invitation code so you can now use it 1 more time. Feel...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/02/2010 - 19:29
I just reset everyone’s ExtensionFM invitation code so you can now use it 1 more time. Feel free to pass it to a friend if you want to.
Categories: Music Rec
last Thursday in pictures
Hypem - Tue, 03/02/2010 - 18:34
Max Silvestri, hosting, bonding with the Hype Machine pillow.
Cuddle Magic take the stage with 9 members, myriad instruments, and a giant penguin.
Who brought all the copies of “Fat Music for Fat People” to the swap?
Shark? get ready to rock the books off the shelves.
The Morning Benders close out the night with an acoustic set of songs from their new album.
This is a bookstore…
This was a wonderful, happy evening of friends and music, and thanks to everyone who came by and drank a beer, we raised nearly $3000 for Housing Works! Want to organize something cool in your city? Tell us what you’re thinking, and let’s help everyone fall in love with something new.
Photography: Kyle Dean Reinford
Categories: Music Rec
ExtensionFM Invitation Codes Reset
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/02/2010 - 15:34
I just reset everyone’s ExtensionFM invitation code so you can now use it 1 more time. Feel free to pass it to a friend if you want to.
Categories: Music Rec
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-2-28)
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Tue, 03/02/2010 - 14:27
My Top 5 Artists (Week Ending 2010-2-28):
Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
Categories: Music Rec
RT @spins Jack Johnson + Zach Gill just wrapping a rad Sessions… Tweets like this make me miss...
Dan Kantor - AOL Music - Mon, 03/01/2010 - 23:12
RT @spins Jack Johnson + Zach Gill just wrapping a rad Sessions… Tweets like this make me miss working at AOL
Categories: Music Rec
NodeJS and DonkDJ
Music Machinery - Paul Lamere - Echonest - Mon, 03/01/2010 - 14:04
Brian points me to RF Watson’s (creator of DonkDj) interesting post about how he’s using NodeJS to solve concurrency problems in his audio-uploading web apps. Worth a read.
Categories: Music Rec
