that’s whacked

MTV Music API

Thursday, Oct 30. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been futzing around and exploring MTV Music’s new APIs lately. In a testament to how easy both the MTV Music and the mashTape Provider API is (okay, granted, I’m biased on the mashTape one… but still)… I threw together an MTV Music Video mashTape add-on. This add-on adds MTV Music Videos to mashTape’s Video Tab… letting you see full-length, high quality original artist music videos.

All I have to say is that it’s awesome. MTV deserves serious kudos for opening up such a fantastic and powerful API free of the usual red tape and crap that many APIs come with. Honestly, I was expecting a much more restrictive API with badges, and app keys, and embedding restrictions ( iMeem, I’m looking at you), and all that. And, I’ll just say it… I had really low expectations given this was coming from MTV. My impression of MTV lately is that they just don’t “get it”. “it” being music on the Internet, and in the age of Web 2.0.

Fortunately I was horribly horribly wrong, and I’m quite pleased with the new API. The only thing missing is external script control of the player, which I asked about. Hopefully it’ll come soon.

Angele Dubeau

Thursday, Oct 30. 2008  –  Category: Music

We went to see Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà at Yoshi’s Jazz Club last night as part of KDFC’s classical concerts in nightclubs series. T’was a fantastic show… she played a concert she called Myths & Legends, with pieces inspired by or based on legends dating back to 200 B.C. On the setlist were a couple of pieces from her new album, Fairy Tale. Specifically, the second track from the album, Lady Caliph was incredible. I’m hardly a classical music critic by any means, but that piece was filled with some of the most moving sounds I’ve ever heard come out of a violin.

The pianist, double bass player, and third violinist were amazing… their facial expressions showed how much they enjoyed playing… even when they weren’t! There was one piece that was sans piano, so the pianist was basically just sitting in her chair for the whole piece… but she sat there looking around at the other players, and you could just sense how much she was into the music and enjoying it. Really really awesome to see that kind of energy in a 9 piece classical concert.

… their final encore piece was a rousing cover of Paint it Black which was absolutely brilliant.

highest rated

Friday, Oct 24. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Here’s my highest rated music playlist… in photo form. One of the things ♪Photo does is let you snapshot the canvas and save it as a screenshot, which makes for a cool way to show people what you’re listening to (IMHO). I uploaded a new version of ♪Photo today that fixes a bunch of bugs (including one particularly heinous memory leak), as well as adding some more features such as a tiled background and actual track listing playback (as shown in the attached screenshot).

This is turning out to be kind of a neat media view for that 10 foot view of your media… e.g. when you have it hooked up to a TV and you want to just space out and browse your music. Especially if you collapse the playlist and the servicepane and make Songbird go full screen.

♪Photo

Thursday, Oct 23. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been hacking on a new Media View for Songbird this week… partly as something fun to do since I’ve wrapped up mashTape, and partly as an excuse for me to play with Canvas.

Here’s a screenshot of my asian pop playlist that doesn’t have too many artists in it. Basically this is a way for me to visualise a playlist or library by artist and album images. It’s handy for me since I tend to recognise things spatially and visually… especially for international artists in languages I can’t read or speak (Chinese, Korean, and Japanese being great examples). For instance, I know that if I place my artist image for 伊藤由奈 in the top-right and scale it bigger than the rest (since I’ve been listening to her a lot lately), it’s easy for me to jump to her music quickly.

Of course this becomes less useful (but makes for a cooler screenshot!) when I do it with my entire library.

update:

Songbird on OpenSolaris b99

Wednesday, Oct 15. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

Installing & Running Songbird on OpenSolaris b99

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWsongbird

joyous day. This is our first distribution to carry Songbird in its package repository, so I’m hugely psyched. Major props to Alfred for pushing through all the hard integration work to get Songbird into OpenSolaris.