Tinkering Within » Music

FLOSS Media Center Comparison Paper

Muzo B — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 10:12:43 +0000

The Telematics Freedom Foundation has just released their Media Center Comparison paper, where they compared the 10 most prominent FLOSS (for Free/Libre/Open Source Software) Media Center Projects. The projects compared were XBMC, MythTV, Boxee, Elisa, Neuros OSD, Freevo, My Media System, Entertainer, CenterStage+Plex and MediaPortal. The 20 page paper might be of great interest to many who are looking to take the next step and integrate their media in their living room.

The demo video I did for Plex with Aeon skin is also part of the paper as the featured video for CenterStage+Plex.

You can get it here.

The Hype Machine Zeitgeist

Muzo B — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:29:33 +0000

The wonderful music blog mecca The Hype Machine has released their 2007 Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist comes in three sections: The Best 50 Songs, The Best 50 Albums and The Best 50 Bands. It was compiled by extensive analysis of the data they collected from music blogs around the internet throughout 2007.

If you are into Indie, you owe it to yourself to check this out.

Link

Sleeveface

Muzo B — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:14:42 +0000

Check this out:

sleeveface: one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion.

www.sleeveface.com

There is also a fantastic Flickr pool that has over 750 awesome photos.

Free the Music

Muzo B — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:24:33 +0000

Founder of Audioscrobbler, Richard Jones aka RJ on the Last.fm blog:

As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.

Something we’ve wanted for years—for people who visit Last.fm to be able to play any track for free—is now possible. With the support of the folks behind EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner—and the artists they work with—plus thousands of independent artists and labels, we’ve made the biggest legal collection of music available to play online for free, the way we believe it should be.

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things. We’re also working on bringing full-length tracks to the desktop client and beyond.

Free full-length tracks are obviously great news for listeners, but also great for artists and labels, who get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized. This is good because artists get paid based on how popular a song is with their fans, instead of a fixed amount.

We will be paying artists directly.

Read the rest here.