DISQUS

@Sista Stroke, no problem, the comment is well earned :-) I hope you are doing well these days.

Yea, I don't like the UI on the Picard version either. I'm glad the MusicBrainz stuff helped though.

Keep in mind that it's all based on percentages, so some of those songs that didn't get identified might be accurately identified, the percentages just didn't match whatever the default settings for the taggers are.

I definitely understand the point of the SpreadFirefox (in fact I believe I have an account :)).

My question was more to the effective-ness in actually "spreading" the product in question. How effective is a Spread[Whatever] site in the actual spreading?

Community based projects can be successful (SpreadFirefox is actually a perfect example) but is the site responsible for those millions of downloads or is it the word of mouth of Firefox users (like myself). I co-host a technology talk radio show and the host and I are avid Firefox users and we recommend the browser every chance we get (we've even done segments on OpenID). So, I work the word-of-mouth side quite frequently. I find the community based projects (be they for coding software, marketing, or hive mind answering of questions) interesting and don't want anyone to mistake my questions in this post as negative towards such sites.

How effective is a Spread-site as opposed to actual word of mouth?

The links now work, sorry about that.

http://www.joeydevilla.com/. about the lack of credit. This post is nothing more than stuff I have bookmarked on the day in question.

However, the website you link to has WAY more examples, so even better :-)

Brian,

I was not aware of that patch and I'll look into it.

As for the interface side of things, I get where that might be a problem, however iTunes seems to handle the issue fairly well.

iTunes does many things wrong, but in my opinion the one thing it got correct was organization of tracks both within the file system and via the metadata in the application.

Jason,

That is certainly an earful. However your argument is nulled the second you started comparing my argument those of a rapper.

What I am talking about and the argument made by early rappers in the hip-hop movement are two different things.

Let me try and explain. Rappers were using their "samples" of other music to sell and make money off of. For that, the artist of the sample being used should be paid in full. However, this dicussion is about internet radio stations, specifically about the ones that do not have advertisers, are run off of some person's home computer in a garage somewhere. That is free promotion for a band. The web radio station is not making any money from the play of the song, because they do not have advertisers. That person is making zero dollars from playing that track. They simply like the band or song and wish to play it on their web radio station.

Another example is Pandora, this website makes little to no cash for playing artists on its website in an attempt to turn people onto NEW artists that are linked to Amazon purchase pages. I'm sure Pandora gets a small percentage of that Amazon sale, but I can speak from experience, it is not much. Also, Pandora PAYS for the rights to some of those artists they play. So again, your argument is defeated.

My point is that for what is essentially free advertising, the recording industry wants a cut of the spins. Regular radio stations have to pay for broad licenses to play what they play on the radio, because they sell to advertisers in hope to turn a profit. Any regular radio station that plays music over an internet stream should have to pay for the spins, that's how the business works. But to ask those who make zero money to pay up, is just ridiculous.

I'll put it in even simpilier terms: If you make money off playing the song, then you should pay for that play (be it a sample or on a radio station with advertisers) if no money is made off the play of the song, I feel that it is free advertisement for the artist/song.

Tim,

It is always nice to hear from those behind the curtain of some of the internet's best websites. It is truly a pity that the recording industry has let it come to this.

I myself have found quite a few artists because of Pandora, and would love to see it continue even despite all of this nastiness. I wish the best of luck to you and Pandora.

Bob,

You left two comments that said pretty much the same thing. I chose the lengthier one because it made your point better. I moderate all comments from new users as an added layer of spam protection. So sorry if you posted a second comment because you thought the first one did not go through.

In relation to the topic, I listened to other channels on Sirius before there was a Christian rock station so I just went back to listening to those. I have noticed a severe drop in my Sirius listening though.

Kirk, What I would do for your LPs is digitize them to wav using Audacity like you plan to. But instead of storing them in the WAV format store them in a lossless format that supports tagging. My recommendation would be to use the FLAC format since you can tag those files in using Tag Rename (which we will use to tag our files in this series). The cool part is that with lossless compression, if you need to go back to WAV you can and have the exact same file you started with. Another upside is that if you use something to convert the files from FLAC to Mp3, most conversion programs out there that support both formats will carry over the metadata from the FLAC files to the mp3 counterparts.

The FLAC format is fairly supported but you will not get support for it in iTunes or Windows Media Player. But since you plan on converting to mp3 for the items you want on your laptop or portable player, this won't be much of a problem. There are FLAC plugins that will give you some functionality for the format on iTunes and Windows Media Player. There are also plugins for Winamp.

Laurent, Whoops I'm sorry about that. I have updated the article to reflect the correct country of origin.

Jamendo is still a great site no matter where it is based.

Actually, I've played with the Nexus and the Inno units really didn't like either one. A friend of mine had the Nexus but returned after a couple of days because he didn't like it due to it's bulkiness and he also had trouble getting decent reception. On the contrary the three people I know with Stiletos (one of them has both XM and Sirius services), love them and get great reception.

I have however not messed with the new Helix players but have heard so-so reviews.

The issues my friend had with the Nexus might be location related, as I have heard of the portable units working very differently depending on the location (in the nation) of the user. And that is with BOTH services.

However you are entitled to your opinion just as I am mine. But, do not assume that research was not done just because you do not like the opinion given.

Wow Rakesh, that is pretty interesting. I can so with confidence though that I did not jack your title :-)

I guess with so many people blogging, it is only an eventuality that matching titles and topics will begin to pop up.

Welcome back, Dan. Glad to see you're still checking the site :-). I'm like McDonalds, I'm into repeat customers.

As for iScrybe, I'm waiting for it to actually become available. I've signed up for a beta invite but have yet to get one.

"Thing" has been performed several times live. The most recent appearance that I can remember is at the Steamboat on Congress (the newer version of the Steamboat club) back in Jan. 2003.

I keep trying to get them to play it but it hasn't happened in a while (at least that I can remember).

I tried WebWag when I found Netvibes. WebWag looks too much like PageFlakes, which I also didn't like too much.

In my opinion, Netvibes is the best overall looking of them all.