VitaminCM.com

The Best Music Services Part 5

This is the fifth article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

Even though you can do a lot from the home page of most internet music services, you need to be able to take the show on the road. When you can integrate your favorite music service into other third party sites and devices they become more powerful and useful.

I have a few standard ways that I will judge each service’s third party integration:

• Plug-ins for your desktop music player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.)
• Integration with popular Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.)
• Standalone Application for your phone (iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc.)
• Embeddable player for your web page

A service will need at least one check for each category for a “perfect” score.

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Miscellaneous Ramblings iPhone, last.fm, music services, music streaming, pandora, social networking, third party integration

The Best Music Services Part 4

One of the things that makes online music services more interesting and useful than your iTunes library is the aspect of a Music Community. Not only can you hear good music, but you can connect with friends and others who share your tastes. This allows you to socialize about your favorite artists and see what others think and listen to. I get a lot of suggestions for new music from the people in my online music communities.

This is the 4th article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

Let’s take a look at the types of community and social networking that each of these services offeres. (P.S. If you are interested in sharing musical selections with me, there are links at the bottom of the post.)

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing community, last.fm, Music, music discovery, music services, music streaming, pandora, slacker.com

The Best Music Services Part 3

This is the 3rd article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

If I want to hear all of my favorite songs, I can just listen to the “My Top Rated” playlist in iTunes. One of the real values of a good online music service is the ability to turn you on to good new music that you DID NOT know about.

These days I find just about all of my bands from suggestions on my favorite services. Let’s take a look at how our players stack up on the issue of Music Discovery.

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing last.fm, music discovery, music services, music streaming, pandora, slacker.com

The Best Music Services – Part 2

This is the 2nd article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

The best reason to use any of these music services is to have them send you great music. There are many different ways of determining what “you” will like. They all seem to straddle the line between art and science with a touch of voodoo thrown in. I have spent a lot of time trying to get a stream of good music out of all of these services. Let’s take a look at my mixed results. (Don’t forget to give your feedback in the pole and comments below.)

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology, Web Surfing ilike.com, last.fm, Music, music services, pandora, slacker.com, survey

The Best Music Services – Part 1

This is the 1st article in a 5 part series on the Best Music Services on the Internet. See the rest of the series:

1. The Most Reliable Online Music Services
2. Online Music Services with the Best Suggestion Quality
3. The Best Music Discovery Service
4. Best Community Driven Online Music Services
5. BBest Third Party Integration among Online Music Services

One of the most important features of a streaming music service is reliability. All of the other stuff doesn’t matter much if the music keeps stuttering and dropping out or the site’s navigation flakes out all the time.

How Am I Rating this Category?

Interface and Navigation – How clean and usable is the interface? Can I quickly get into my playlists and stations? Does everything work; quickly and without hiccups?

Streaming Quality – When I click Play, what happens? 1 or 2 seconds, then music or do I get hypnotized watching a loading graphic? Does one song flow smoothly into the next or am I stuck in the waiting room?

How Did I Test?

I already use some of these services a lot, but I gave each one at least a half hour on my Desktop (Ethernet cable), Laptop (Wi-Fi) and my iPhone (over AT&T’s lousy 3G network). Let the games begin…

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Media, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Music, Product Reviews, Technology ilike.com, jango.com, last.fm, Music, music services, online music services, pandora, shoutcast, slacker.com, streaming music

Separating the Contenders from the Pretenders

There are a bazillion services out there that will stream music to you over the interwebs.  A few are amazing an then there are well…”the rest”.

Loading up a few hundred thousand songs and streaming them is not really that big of a deal. The “special sauce” is what adds real value to these services.

Let’s to take a look a some of the major players in this space to see how they all stack up.

The Contenders

I will be evaluating the following seven music streaming services.

iLike.com -enables fans to discover and share playlists, new music that matches their personal tastes, and concerts by their favorite artists. iLike offers retail links to iTunes and Amazon to purchase music, Ticketmaster to purchase concert tickets and Thumbplay for ringtones.

Jango.com  – Jango is a social music service that lets you create and share custom radio stations. It’s the easy way to play the music you want online, legally and free.

Last.FM – Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love.
Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like – and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

MusicStrands.com – MyStrands’ Social Recommender is capable of automatically learning people’s tastes and how their preferences evolve over time. It can be used to generate real-time music recommendations.

Pandora.com – Together, ateam of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound – melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics … and more – close to 400 attributes! They continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

Shoutcast.com – SHOUTcast Radio offers thousands of free Internet radio stations from DJs and broadcasters around the world.

Slacker.com – Slacker is what radio was meant to be: personal, portable and free. Slacker attempts to deliver free personalized radio that is customized for everyone. Slacker combines the knowledge of the nation’s leading music experts from every genre and your own personal tastes to create the perfect radio stations for each and every listener.

If there are any that are missing, add them in the comments and I’ll try to cover them in a subsequent article.

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Media, Music, Product Reviews, Web Surfing ilike.com, internet radio, last.fm, music services, pandora, shoutcast, slacker.com

Sharing the Best Tutorials on Twitter

If any of you are Twitter users, you’re probably aware of the #followfriday phenomena. The original theory to tell the people that you follow about other Twitter users who regularly post interesting, useful tweets. This is a great concept that helped me find a bunch of good people to follow.

Recently #followfriday seems a lot more like an artificial, obligatory way for everyone to pump up each others follower counts.

I still do post the occasional #followfriday tweet using the following guidelines:

1. They are someone whose tweets regularly add value to my experience.
2. I can provide a reason for why I’m recommending them. (for example, #followfriday @abc123 They have the best information on #letters and #numbers anywhere on the web)

This serves two important purposes: It lets you know why you might care and the #tags give a little “twitter-wide” credit to the person being recommended. (Help the follower and followee; good idea, right?)

My Variation on the #FollowFriday Theme

VitaminCM.com is all about helping you learn how to do things. So I came up with the a twist to the original idea that will hopefully help pass on useful information. I’m calling it #TuesTorial.

During the week, I’m going to bookmark any good tutorials that I come across. Each Tuesday I’ll tweet the ones that I think are particularly helpful. If you would like to see my suggestions, just follow me on Twitter.

They will also be posted here in the sidebar widget.

Here is the format that I will be observing:

#Tuestorial – Great video showing how to do #XYZ – link.url/12345

I promise not to shamelessly promote any of my own articles, just other people’s work that I think is excellent.

If you want to see my suggestions follow me on Twitter. (They will also appear in the Twitter widget to the right.)

Your Call to Action – Please Join In the Fun

If you really like the idea of sharing helpful tips, please join in. I really want to see the tutorials that you recommend, so put your @Twitter name in the comments below so that I can follow you.

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Productivity, Software, Tutorials, Web Surfing followfriday, social networking, tuestorial, tuestorials, Tutorials, twitter

How Have Twitter, SMS, and Facebook Replaced Plain Old Email?

Email is still a very important communication tool. However, it’s not quite as simple as it once was. There are so many options for sending and receiving email. I was a big Outlook guy (and briefly Thunderbird) for years, but I have recently switched completely to Gmail.

Since I got my iPhone I do about half of my emailing on-the-go. I also text a lot more now due to the really nice threaded text messaging application. I can’t wait for MMS with the 3.0 operating system this summer.

I also use Twitter a lot from my computer and phone.

This all makes me wonder how everyone else is managing “email type” communication with all of the options available these days.

Don’t forget to add your Twitter name to your comment.

Don’t Forget to Leave a Comment

I’d love to hear what kind of interesting ways all of these technologies have changed the ways you communicate.

Miscellaneous Ramblings communication, email, reader poll, sms, survey, text, twitter

It Ain’t No BlackBerry and it Sure Ain’t No iPhone

This weekend my wife needed a new cell phone.  I’m on AT&T and using an iPhone. She’s on Verizon and will not consider changing. Since she likes my phone , but wants to stay on Verizon, the obvious answer is a BlackBerry Storm .

I was kind of excited because it would be cool to compare and contrast the iPhone and Storm.

Off to the Verizon store…

They actually had 3 working Storms to demo (nice!). She picked on up and started uncomfortably fiddling for a few minutes. All the while I’m hanging over her shoulder trying to help her find/do things. She was having such a terrible time of it and not mincing words. I just figured that it was all her.

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Gadgets, Miscellaneous Ramblings, Product Reviews, Technology AT&T, blackberry curve 8300, blackberry storm, cell phone, iPhone, product review, Verizon

My Favorite Places for Tutorials and Instruction

VitaminCM.com’s goal is to help people get more from their technology. I want to help and inspire people to do more fun and useful things with computers, the internet, and gadgets. This help is provided via detailed written and video tutorials along with News, Reviews, and Surveys.

I would like to share several invaluable resources that I use for information, instruction, inspiration, and tips of my own. This is my list, I would love to hear where you go to learn new things. Please include any relevant places in the Comments below.

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Productivity, Tutorials, Web Surfing