new favorite music-discovery system
I love the iTunes store like I love air. — and not so much as a ’store,’ but as a research facility.
Thirty seconds of hundreds of thousands of tracks, free? Bitchin’! I’ve spent hours and hours exploring their library. (Mel threw an African feast party last summer, and I put together hours and hours of great, contemporary African music one Saturday afternoon — and it cost about $40. Without the iTunes store, we would have been listening to “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight)” all damn night.)
That said, there are at least two problems with the iTunes store.
- It requires iTunes.
And since I’ve been trying out Ubuntu as my main machine for the last few months, that’s been a pretty serious limitation. - It’s reviewless.
You can see ‘popularity,’ whatever that is, but it’s a little challenging to find the new good stuff. And the stuff they promote … well, I suspect money changes hands somewhere.
So!
Check out the awesomeness that is searching for new music in Metacritic music and then hearing the samples in LaLa.com. Metacritic music gathers the opinions of many critics, then boils it down into one score; LaLa lets you listen in their Flash player to :30 clips. Also, LaLa plays the whole album, one clip after another, whereas in iTunes you have to clip to start any clip.
Also, LaLa makes it a lot easier to point to albums and playlists. So, for instance … “the best reviewed album of 2007? I preferred these other ones, but here’s a list.”
Pretty neat, pretty cool.
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st. joe’s choir » amazon's mp3 store says:
[...] good for the ‘music browsing and listening’ (mentioned recently) … Amazon’s MP3 [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:17 pm