Archive for the ‘last.fm’ tag
New-look Quadrophobe Website
I spent a bit of time updating the Quadrophobe website yesterday, using the fantastically flexible Wordpress platform and a number of plugins to bring together content from Flickr, provide a nice interface into upcoming gigs and performances and link off to their other digital identities (MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm). The band seem really pleased with it (which is nice :)) and hopefully it is simple (yet powerful) enough that they’ll be able to run the day-today functions of the site. Next addition is a Flash MP3 player for the band, so people can listen to the tracks on their website.
Check it out: www.quadrophobe.com
As part of the site I got round to uploading some photographs I took at the JackFM Next Big Thing competition a week ago to my Flickr account.
Genius Playlists
I’ve been a subscriber to the excellent last.fm service for a long time now; I love it when clever technology is put to a cool purpose. Not only can you track your listening habits (which can be pretty interesting in itself, worthy of its own blog post which will follow), but with some analysis the clever guys at Last.HQ can recommend music that you will probably like. I use the stand alone app at work, too, to listen to music, giving me access to stream my music ‘from home’ as well as other interesting new tunes.
Around the same time as I got my iPhone 3G (and hence started using iTunes (never fear, I will not forget you, Frankel)) iTunes 8 was released. Apple were making a song and dance out of Genius, a function which would generate you playlists based on a starting file, as well as recommending music which you might like to buy from the iTunes Music Store (oh, how convenient - thank you Mr Jobs ;)).
To me this sounded familiar, and after having a quick gander at it to establish what it looked like, I dismissed it. Perhaps it was my choice of track, but the results it returned weren’t great.
Fast forward two months. For a laugh last night, whilst scrolling through my music, I noticed the cheese-tastic classic Loveshack by the B52s. A quick right-click, Start Genius later and I had 25 tracks which are worthy of the status of ‘Le Grand Fromage’. Read the rest of this entry »
