zethrae.us/blog

As far as cheap thrills go, Smule’s Ocarina application for the iPhone ranks pretty highly. To play a note one blows into the phone’s microphone and touches a combination of the screen’s four hotspots.
I read the notes off the screen as I played. Lots of other Zelda songs have also been written up by the application’s community but ‘The Song of Time’ is one of the easiest to play.

The blogosphere has recently fallen in praise at the feet of a new application currently released in its beta stage, called Spotify. I too am excited about this application, it has some very nice perks.

• Firstly, Spotify is Swedish. And I am half Swedish. And I am in the habit of stressing this fact in a futile attempt to pretend I am more exotic and diverse than I really am.
• Streaming does appear to happen almost instantly.
• The music is apparently streamed at about 160 kbps. Whilst this obviously gives lower quality sound than those FLACs you downloaded from your music tracker of choice, I can not tell the difference when listening on my home speakers, so I’m happy.
• Spotify scrobbles to last.fm, and I love last.fm. In fact, last.fm is now probably mainstream enough that any streaming application that ignored it would probably be sunk. People enjoy showing off their tastes.
• There are very few ads, even in the free version – if you can get an invite to the free version.

But, enough of that. Let’s put this thing to the test.

Because there is no way for me to scientifically test this application in any reasonable amount of time I am simply going to pit Spotify against my 20 most listened to artists in the past 3 months according to my last.fm. This is an interesting test for me because I download most of my music from illegitimate (but brilliant) sources. (In fact I download all of it, but I also buy cds and visit concerts if I enjoy the music.) Perhaps if a service such as Spotify allowed me to properly ‘test’ music, I would be less inclined to download it. I want to see if Spotify would have been a reasonable substitute for illegal downloading by seeing what percentage of the music I have enjoyed most recently could have been streamed on their service. » Read the rest of this entry «

I generally dislike tradition and I have never subscribed to the notion that New Year’s resolutions are anything but futile. That said, I do have one New Year’s tradition which has so far lasted me since 2006 (what a run, right?). I take the time to cut down my yearly music dump playlist down it my true favorites of the year. In the process, I take out any song which featured the previous year, cut almost all artists down to just one song and remove anything that I’m not totally thrilled about.

Anyway, yesterday I did my final 2008 playlist. Here it is.

Air     -     Sexy Boy
AmpLive     -     Reckonerz (ft. Charli2na)
Archive     -     Fuck U
Basshunter     -     Patrik And The Small Guy – Throw Your Hands Up
Beirut     -     Nantes
Ben Folds     -     The Frown Song
Bob Dylan     -     Like A Rolling Stone
Brand New     -     Untitled 02
Bright Eyes     -     Lover I Don’t Have To Love
Clearlake     -     Keep Smiling
Conor Oberst     -     Lenders in the Temple
Crystal Castles     -     Crimewave (Crystal Castles VS HEALTH)
Daft Punk     -     Veridis Quo
Death Cab For Cutie     -     Grapevine Fires
Death Cab For Cutie     -     Styrofoam Plates
The Decemberists     -     Record Year
Deerhoof     -     Believe E. S. P.
The Dexateens     -     Slender Thread
DJ Blow     -     Title and Registration
Elbow     -     Weather to Fly
Electric Six     -     Dance Pattern
Eminem     -     Rock Bottom
The Faint     -     Worked Up So Sexual
Finch     -     Ender
The Flaming Lips     -     The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
Flobots     -     Handlebars
Frightened Rabbit     -     The Modern Leper
The Good, The Bad & The Queen     -     The Bunting Song
Gym Class Heroes     -     Cupid’s Chokehold (feat. Patrick Stump)
Interpol     -     Pioneer To The Falls
Jonathan Coulton     -     Re: Your Brains
Justice     -     The Party
Kanye West     -     Stronger
The Killers     -     Spaceman
LCD Soundsystem     -     New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Matisyahu     -     King Without A Crown
MC Lars     -     Space Game
Metric     -     Combat Baby
MGMT     -     Kids
Middleman     -     Good To Be Back
Modest Mouse     -     Fire It Up
Murder By Death     -     The Devil Drives
Murder By Death     -     Spring Break 1899
Neutral Milk Hotel     -     In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
Nine Inch Nails     -     Discipline
of Montreal     -     Gallery Piece
Panic At The Disco     -     That Green Gentlemen (Things Have Changed)
Pendulum     -     The Otherside
Pixies     -     Where Is My Mind?
PJ Harvey     -     The Piano
Psapp     -     Hill Of Our Home
Queens Of The Stone Age     -     Suture Up Your Future
Radiohead     -     Fake Plastic Trees
Serj Tankian     -     Empty Walls
The Shins     -     Saint Simon
Sigur Rós     -     Gobbledigook
Stars     -     In Our Bedroom After the War
Stars     -     Going, Going, Gone [Live]
Sufjan Stevens     -     For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti
Vampire Weekend     -     I Stand Corrected
Weezer     -     Pork & Beans
Wolf Parade     -     You Are A Runner And I Am My Father’s Son

Is this something you do? Will think of doing it now?

(list compiled by exporting playlist as unicode text and importing it into excel before editing.)