that’s whacked » MediaWeb

Posts filed under 'MediaWeb'

magnatune for the bird

I first heard of Magnatune at LUG Radio Live where they had a booth setup. I didn’t get a chance to check them out until yesterday, and it’s a pretty cool site. There’s some neat electronica up there along with the other usual genres. Their business model looks pretty interesting too, along with their CC friendliness and promotion of music sharing.

I started mucking about with a Songbird add-on last night and got something working a few hours ago that builds an additional “Magnatune” library in Songbird to represent all the tracks available on Magnatune. You can play them directly from the remote track (yay open web!) currently. I plan to add a way to purchase the track so it can be added to the local library as well (which should also allow it to be sync’d after purchase then too). It’s been an interesting challenge… and I’m still running into a few hiccups, I suspect because of the way I now effectively have two local libraries (which shouldn’t be that big a deal since devices, etc. all have their own libraries from Songbird’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s been a fun project so far… and I have to say, there’s something cool about having all 7600+ Magnatune tracks available for direct play within Songbird. I’ll definitely post this to the addons site when I’m done.

4 comments April 30th, 2008

the timeliness of the Open Media Web

Songbird has been pushing the concept of the Open Media Web for a while now, and openmediaweb.org’s first interview with Lucas Gonze is now live.

The issue of open-ness and captive data is especially timely given Scoble’s Facebook-ban. Granted, Scoble’s case is more around who owns what data - but it boils down to the same idea: it’s never as easy to get data out as it is to get data in. Web services should capture audiences and users through continuous innovation, not by holding our data usage.

Gonze’s primary message is that all media on the web should have canonical, authoritative URLs. This is not too surprising a message from the creator of the XSPF playlist format. I guess I’m conflicted here since protecting and charging for content is a reality of life. I’d love nothing more than to see album tracks by artists published for free with revenue coming from fan contributions and tours, but the reality is that isn’t happening. So music stores and publishers/labels will continue to charge for content. But notice that Gonze’s message doesn’t say that content should be free. In fact, expanding upon this, I’d love to see platforms that provide canonical URLs with standards-based APIs for basic media functions and commerce, e.g. a way for all music stores to provide:

an authoritative canonical URL to each artist, album, and track
a standard API to preview a 30 second sample
a standard API to authenticate (OpenID/OAuth?) with another ecommerce/financial site (PayPal, Bank, etc.) to purchase track
a standard API to download said track to media library

This same API would be applied (only without step 3) to free/CC-licensed/etc. content on the web thus enabling media players like Songbird to provide standard and uniform ways to interact with, sample, purchase, and acquire music thus freeing up labels and music stores to focus on innovation and creativity rather than the dull drudgery of running an ecommerce store.

2 comments January 3rd, 2008

Media Web Meetup: Portable Playlists

Our media web meetup last week was, imho, a great success. We had really good turnout, and a really interactive panel discussion between our four panelists:

Tantek Çelik (former Chief Technologist of Technorati, and microformats expert)
Lucas Gonze (XSPF and portable playlist guru)
Scott Kveton (Open Technology Lead at MyStrands)
Tom Conrad (CTO of Pandora)

Things got a little interesting with the debate over Flash (Tantek’s decision that “Flash is killing the web” vs. Conrad’s more pragmatic view of Flash as the default, if not standard). There was really interesting talk about XML formats and standards (and why you shouldn’t invent one), portable playlists, content resolution, etc.