Oggy Live Today

Online Music Day

As a deep music-lover, I spent my time rebuilding my computer environment for music today.

• Purchased “Cliffs of Dover”, a guitar instrumental tune by Eric Johnson, at iTunes for $0.99. This is probably a long-tail kind of song picked up by not so many people, but it is a great one.
• Played Miles Davis at an online radio station I ‘created’ at Pandora.com. This is what I couldn’t try in Japan because of the area restriction for the sake of content copyrights.
• Visited and played with Dotomi.com. This is a cool music recognition technology.
• Renewed my account at Playlog.jp (an online music society in Japan), and installed its  iTunes plug-in, which keeps track of song list I play on PC and shares the list in the community.
• Created song list (i.e., a playlist) of jazz guitar tunes to share at the community of Mixi.jp, the largest SNS in Japan. Installed “Mixistation” software, which, again, keeps track of songs I play on the PC.
• Played with Last.fm, a large online music society that also distributes its own music player software.
• Installed two applications (Pandora and iLike) on Facebook. It seems that iLike is more broadly used than Pandora in the Facebook community.
• Backed up my 25,000 iPod-songs onto the PC. The PC hard drive that contained the songs had been dead. So I ran CopyTrans (a shareware) to restore all the songs in my old iPod back to my PC, after trying three other freewares, all of which failed. I found CopyTrans a easy-to-use and reliable s/w! (e.g. The other freewares collapsed the Japanese song names imported from the iPod.)

I have been familiar with most of these online music services or software for long time, but recently I could not allocate my time to enjoy music deeply and to catch up the latest tech scene of what is going on in this area. So it has been a good chance for me to revive my hands-on spirit and refresh my mind in this kind. All of these services are very cool and most of the functions are much more easy to use and reliable than before. At the same time, using these is still somewhat time-consuming and inanimate to me though.

In particular, this April I had a chance to join the speaker event of the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergren, the event hosted by the Entrepreneurship Club at Kellogg. He said Pandora is (and will be) focusing on the internet radio and its competitor is Clear Channel, the largest radio network in the US. (I will talk about the club some time later.)