MobileScrobbler - Last.fm for the iPhone and iPod Touch
Thus far I haven’t been too impressed with the available third party apps for the iPhone, but that all changed when I found out about MobileScrobbler.
It’s Last.fm for the iPhone, and not only does it scrobble every song you play over WiFi/EDGE, but it also lets you stream your personal recommendations, or play any tag/artist radio. MobileScrobbler continues to play while you browse the Web, text message, or work with other applications as well. Well done!
More Good Music: Electro 2007
Sure, it’s still only November, but I’m going to name the three most important electronic records of 2007. Justice’s unnamed Cross, Simian Mobile Disco’s Attack Decay Sustain Release, and Digitalism’s Idealism.
All have a good number of tracks that just blew me away, especially Justice. I’m really bummed out that I missed them playing at Circa (who are using one of their tracks in the site’s intro video it seems) a few weeks ago, but c’est la vie.
Good Music: Fubiz “Podcast”
Life in the Mile High City is leaving little room for writing lately, but I’ve got to say that the French blog Fubiz has some great electronic music as part of its “podcast”. (Parenthesis because the feed doesn’t do a damn thing in iTunes.)
New iPods this Wednesday?
There’s a ton of rumours floating around that a press event Apple is holding Wednesday will see the introduction of a new line of iPods. I say it’s about time. Though I haven’t even had my 30 GB black one for a year now, the design of this one dates back about two years and is starting to look a little stale next to the iPhone. Then there’s the issue of storage; I don’t have a problem with hard drive-based media players from a capacity standpoint (though mine is almost completely full, as shown above), but the performance on the full-sized iPod compared to the Nano (which uses flash storage) is just awful.
The iPod uses some pretty aggressive power saving mechanism that spins down the hard drive fairly often. While this is great for battery life, this also means that when I hit the next button, there’s a delay of sometimes one up to sometimes four seconds before the track changes, and even then, the album artwork takes a couple extra seconds to refresh. This is a lousy user experience. The Nano changes songs without skipping a beat, so I’d like to see them move to flash storage across all platforms.
Last.fm Tag Radio
Today on Last.fm’s blog they talk about tag radio and illustrate why I love the service so much. You can tag any song you’re listening to with anything you’d like, and not just limited to genres either. As Elias mentions in his post, there’s some great tags that will suit the time of day, or environment you’re in, like wake up, breakfast and coffee break radio.
I use a buy this tag on every song that I want to buy later on while listening at work, for example, so that I can easily play my station to decide if I’m still interested in the music. Get creative with tags while listening. You’d be surprised at some of the great stuff that you can discover this way.
Astronaut
I’ve been waiting to watch this all week, but with several thousand news items waiting, it got lost in the shuffle. The music video for the song Astronaut pulls photos from Flickr for each lyric in the song on the fly. I love this kind of stuff.
IBM Rocks
Very clever mash-up IBM Rocks links listening habits from Last.fm and IBM internal location IDs to show what IBM employees are listening to around the world.
Click a geo location on the map to see what employees are listening at that office or lab. I’m still working on bringing Toronto up in the ranks, but expect to see it on the map soon! [via information aesthetics]
Good Music: Mark Ronson
You know, there’s few times where I really get excited when I come across new music, but I really couldn’t contain myself when I heard the Lily Allen/Mark Ronson cover of the Kaiser Chiefs’ Oh My God on last.fm yesterday.
Mark Ronson’s album, Version, released back in April, does some big band covers of pop songs, among them, Coldplay’s God Put a Smile On Your Face, The Smiths’ Stop Me (feat. Daniel Merriweather), Radiohead’s Just (feat. Phantom Planet) and even Britney Spears’ Toxic (feat. Tiggers).
Amazingly (or not so much, in the case of Toxic), Ronson’s covers are for the large part improvements on the original tracks. There’s a little something for everyone on this album. The sax, trumpet, and in-your-face percussion from each mix is sure to satisfy band geeks, while the electronic beats will keep you moving, too. The last.fm artist page for artist says it all, laced with tags like hip-hop, funk, pop, alternative, and dance that one user succintly describes as a “tag minefield”.
Best of all? The music video; An animated Lily Allen does her best Jessica Rabbit for a group of mouth-gaping guys:
Also check out the video for Stop Me and Just.
Genius Marketing/Sales at Work
I briefly mentioned Stars’ new album, “In Our Bedroom After the War” earlier this week and how I thought it was a great album. I wanted to revisit this though, since it’s really developing into an interesting story.
I’ve received more hits to that post in recent memory from search engine queries about the new Stars album. The band’s Canadian recording label, Arts & Crafts Records, apparently released the album just four days after completion of the studio work in an effort to reduce illegal downloads of the album after its inevitable leak on the Net.
How brilliant was that? I very rarely buy entire albums through iTunes, and I don’t think I would have done so had they not gone ahead and released it two months ahead of schedule. The amount of buzz they’re generating around this thing, if not just for the marketing strategy alone is just amazing. I’d be interested to hear their sales figures on how the album sold ahead of the retail release as well. I imagine they’ll be through the roof, and with any luck, we’ll see more of this kind of thing from record labels in the future.
Beyond Trendy
I found this cute considering my (sarcastic) “how hip am I?” comment earlier referring to picking up Stars’ new album two months in advance of retail. A new addition to Threadless, “I listen to bands that don’t even exist yet.”
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Adam is a User Experience Specialist at IBM in Toronto and also produces content of all kinds around the Web.
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