The Best Things To Happen To music In 2006
I already made my list of the best albums of 2006, but what really stands out last year wasn’t the music, but how technology changed the way I listen to music. Here are some of the best things to happen to music in 2006:
MP3 blogs
Finally there is a “legal” way to download music. When I was using Kazaa and similar file sharing sites to get music I was constantly discovering great bands that I had never heard of. When I went straight and kicked the file-sharing habit, I lost my link to new music. Then I found a handful of MP3 blogs that talk about new music and let you sample MP3’s of the artists. Here are the MP3 blogs that I follow regularly:
Gorilla vs. Bear
I Guess I’m Floating
I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
The Yellow Stereo
Hype Machine
With all the MP3 blogs all over the place, there is a good chance there are some free MP3’s out there of that band you just heard about. Hype Machine is kind of like a search engine for helping you find tracks from bands you like. It indexes the MP3 blogs and tells you what the blogs are talking about. A slick feature is the ability to create an rss feed for any band. For example if I wanted to keep track of every time an MP3 blog posts a file by the Shins, Hype Machine allows me to create that rss feed. Amazing.
Songbird
MP3 blogs are great, but they require you to visit the sites, look for tracks, download what you think you might like, then sort through the downloaded files to see what you want to add to your permanent collection. It is a bigger job than you can do while working on something else. If only there was a way to have a music application that could sort through the websites you visit regularly, pull out the mp3’s and play them on the fly. That is exactly what Songbird allows you to do! It is a web browser and music player hybrid that creates playlists of all the mp3’s linked on a web page. You can let it play in the background and if you like a song, simply click a button and Songbird will download it for you. Songbird is still a little buggy since it is still in beta testing, but it holds huge potential.
iTunes with Cover Flow
If you are like me, you have used iTunes for years and have never taken the time to add album art to your songs. Then Apple comes out with iPods with colored screens and you realize how awesome it would be to have the album art show up on screen as the song plays. Hopefully you didn’t spend days or weeks manually adding art to thousands of songs because the latest version of iTunes comes with a handy “Get Album Artwork” button. If that weren’t enough, it also came with a smooth as butter feature called Cover Flow which let’s you sort through your library as if it were a jukebox.
Sizzling Keys
The latest version of iTunes is great, but it still has a flaw or two. For example, if I am in Photoshop and I have iTunes playing in the background and I want to pause the current song, I have to find iTunes, hit the pause button, then go back to Photoshop. Sizzling Keys is an application that allows you to control iTunes from anywhere on your computer with simple key combinations. You can customize it however you want, but these are the commands I use:
Control + Spacebar = Play/Pause
Control + Right Arrow = Next Track
Control + Left Arrow = Previous Track
Control + 1-5 = Rank this track with this many stars
MP3 Phone
We are finally breaking through the hype and there are some phones on the market that are actually worth using. I have talked enough about my Sony w810i Walkman phone, but it let me just say that when expanded to 4gb of memory, this is a heck of an mp3 player.
