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09-10-2015, 08:41 PM
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#151 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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The End of Scrobbling - A Farewell to Last.fm
Digital music has been a fascination of mine since the turn of the millennium. Audioscrobbler came into being in 2002 while I was in college, and the thought of sharing my listening with a global network of musical peers was exhilarating.
Audioscrobbler merged with Last.fm in 2005, taking the social element of music to a whole new level. There were forums to discuss listening trends, metadata analysis and recommendation engines... all while independent blogging exploded onto the scene in a flood of obscure music fetishism.  In the years since I admittedly lost touch with the service and dropped off the scrobbling radar to focus on personal relationships, collecting unscrobbleable LPs, and developing my career. As the summer of 2015 came to a close my life was settling up nicely - I left Windows for Linux, I have a fiance, a fantastic career, and I've just purchased my first home. With these stations of life secure, my mind returned to the world of scrobbling and the possibilities of merging big data and my own hyper-specific musical tastes. I developed a ~500 day plan to scrobble every track from my library 24 hours a day for over a year to submit every title toward Last.fm's recommendation engine. Surely a library of over 110,000 tracks would produce some intriguing results! But this evening, I logged into Last.fm and looked around to find that the site has retired all of its original functions. The social forums are closed. The "neighborhood" of your peers is now inaccessible. The homepage offers only a most-popular-globally-this-week roster plastered with "Uptown Funk" and other predictable tracks.  The Wikipedia spelled out what I'd missed - CBS had acquired Last.fm for £140 million in 2009. Wasting no time, in February of that year the service handed listener data over to the RIAA over concerns about a then-unreleased U2 album. By 2010 the service closed the custom radio feature, (again over licensing issues) and in early 2015 they partnered with Spotify, further crippling the usability of the site. But the nail in the coffin came in August of this year with their fully-overhauled website. It received almost universally negative criticism from its users, who cited broken and missing features. Given the new light of this information, I'm terminating the full-library scrobble project and saying farewell to Last.fm. Still, I shall not mourn the loss for long. The social function of digital music has experienced a parallel evolution in the world of private forums and closed groups on social media sites like Facebook.  A magnificent record I discovered thanks to a Facebook Record Community Every morning I'm greeted with "now-spinning" rare vinyl treasures and independent music reviews which top anything you'd find from a recommendation engine. One user from South Korea offered nearly 40 daily installments of records from his Tangerine Dream collection, each accompanied by a custom write-up on the featured release. Private tracker communities, classic bulletin board systems, and other social structures of the web continue to serve as a brilliant resource for musical discovery. Last.fm served us well during a pivotal time in the age of digital media, and it will be missed, but we'll carry on.  RIP Last.fm 2002 - 2015
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09-12-2015, 07:36 PM
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#152 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Ambient Sound for Study or Sleep
As I entered the final days before I move into my first home, I began to contemplate the changes to the sonic space of my studio. I anticipated that the new space would likely be devoid of external noises and the familiar nuanced sounds of other persons moving about in the residence. I also considered the longing I'd felt for the bustle of a metro village cafe - something I've yet to find locally befitting of an eccentric like myself.
So it appeared I'd a new project on my hands - to archive a bank of ambient noise to calm me and to promote productivity in my new home. Astonishingly, (as I'd never searched YouTube for ambient field recordings before), there was an incredible bank of 6-10 hour environmental recordings available, and all of it for free. I extracted the audio from each, archived my favorite selections, and put together a playlist for my readers to sample for themselves. The playlist includes:
Explore my playlist below. I'd welcome further recommended environments if you have any to share! And as the [ytp] and [ytplaylist] codes don't appear to work, here is a good old-fashioned hyperlink. 88 hours of ambient soundscapes
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Last edited by innerspaceboy; 09-13-2015 at 12:21 AM. |
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09-18-2015, 05:57 PM
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#153 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Fall 2015 Megapost: The Playlist Project
This summer brought many changes to The Innerspace Library. First we started fresh with a Linux OS and finally said "farewell" to Windows. There was a brief period of limbo as I tested various open source media management software to find the right fit for my collection. I finally settled down with gmusicbrowser which outperformed Clementine and other major players in its handling of large libraries and in the incredible versatility and customization of its GUI.
This was the very first time since the launch of Winamp 5 (the amusing successor to Winamp 3) that I'd explored the power of music metadata to organize my library dynamically across multiple data points. (I'd never really saw the need during my years with MediaMonkey Gold.) But as the summer drew to a close, I was still irked that my Subsonic media server lacked the function of genre browsing. I'd previously sidestepped this issue by generating mammoth genre playlists to serve as my personally-themed radio stations, each with hundreds or even thousands of the finest albums of their respective genre. But it was this fresh start in the last few weeks that inspired my refinement of those playlists into distinct album libraries which would zero in on a specific moment of music history. The aim was to bring a semblance of order to the hundred thousand plus tracks in my file library and to give me a set of starting points to really explore the neglected and unplayed folders of my drive. I'm proud to declare that this evening, the project was a complete success. I've created 100 all-killer-no-filler libraries showcasing each of the largest collections in my catalog. I found that 68% (9,300 albums) of my music library fell neatly into one of these 100 categories. The following is an index of these 100 playlists, sorted by number of albums. This roster effectively summarizes and gives order to what is otherwise an insurmountable archive. I'm going to enjoy exploring these playlists throughout the fall and into the winter months. Playlists with 1000+ Albums
Playlists with 200-999 Albums
Playlists with 100-199 Albums
Playlists with 75-99 Albums
Playlists with 50-74 Albums
Playlists with 10-24 Albums
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09-25-2015, 09:27 PM
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#154 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Evocation Poème Symphonique
Once in a blue moon, (or in this case a blood moon), I shed my polished sophisticate exterior and get a little creative. Tonight is that night, so light the incense, don your beret and check out what's cookin'.
I seldom get into poetry, doing my best to avoid anything with a rhyme scheme or regular meter. But I do fancy a particular strain of poem - nonsense verse and cut-up/plunderphonia. John Lennon developed his own delightful style of jabberwock in his books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works which inspired my first exercises writing "Lennonish" in college. And in more recent years I found a fascination with the history of plunderphonics, perhaps best-executed by James Joyce is his masterwork, Finnegans Wake. This evening I tried my own hand at the cut-up method, constructing something of a self-portrait from fragments of my music library. The library will be my legacy and I hope it will survive far beyond my years, so its content seemed well-suited for such a task. Evocation Poème Symphonique pulse steady a chance operation in and out of phase from houdini's musical box deep distance kontakt and the kosmische braindance i sing the body electric strange overtones intergalactic echowaves funky breaks and solo flute one finger snap and the jazz of tomorrow tricks of the light cirrus minor the broken radio of Istanbul station turn me loose walking like a shadow voodoo fusion or synesthesia a prayer for the paranoid an index of metals walkin' the blues it's wonderland syndrome tones for mental therapy justified ancient and bird's lament straight no chaser alone again with the dawn coming up we are the music makers fast 'n bulbous and the curse of ka'zar all this and more tonight at innerspace Regular readers will undoubtedly pick up on 20-30 references to favorites from my collection. But I think it functions just as well without the cliff notes Thanks for indulging me. Back to our regularly-scheduled exercises in library management.
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09-28-2015, 08:03 PM
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#155 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Lesson one: Basic hip.
 Tonight's scene - Del Close & John Brent: How to Speak Hip. Fall out in your pad and dig this crazy thing. Get me? Put your ear to it and check out the side.  DJ Food caught a few samples from this LP on his Kaleidoscope album. Check out "The Riff." Kaleidoscope also featured Ken Nordine, legendary for his Word Jazz and Colors LPs from the same era.  Outta sight.
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10-06-2015, 01:49 AM
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#156 (permalink) | |
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Music Addict
Join Date: Jan 2013
Posts: 113
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https://soundcloud.com/dhatu/female-...od-azzi-willow Last edited by CLOSER; 10-06-2015 at 03:25 PM. |
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10-06-2015, 08:10 AM
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#158 (permalink) | ||||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Where've you been since 2013?
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10-06-2015, 03:27 PM
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#159 (permalink) | |
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Music Addict
Join Date: Jan 2013
Posts: 113
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https://soundcloud.com/dhatu/female-...od-azzi-willow Yes I find your journal brilliant, haven't had the time to sift through it all the posts yet but I'm working through it. As for where I've been.. Sort of just disappeared from the forum for a good two years and just recently started posting again. For a while I actually forgot about this site, so now I'm giving it another go.. |
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10-06-2015, 06:09 PM
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#160 (permalink) | |||||
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Music Addict
Join Date: Feb 2015
Location: The Organized Mind
Posts: 2,044
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Yes I find your journal brilliant, haven't had the time to sift through it all the posts yet but I'm working through it. As for where I've been.. Sort of just disappeared from the forum for a good two years and just recently started posting again. For a while I actually forgot about this site, so now I'm giving it another go..[/QUOTE]
I did the same when I signed up. Glad to have you, and thanks again for perusing my journal!
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