Music February 26, 2008

And this time it’s not kid’s music, even.

I’ve been annoyed recently at work, because I’ve been working on some intense projects lately that require concentration. I sometimes like to listen to music, because podcasts can be too distracting. Since we share offices, I use headphones, of course. Serves the extra purpose of screening out goofiness from the boys next door to my office. They’re great guys, but sometimes I’m better off not hearing every word so I can focus.

But here’s the thing. I’d be in the mood for Rosie Thomas or Kenny Wayne Shephard or Lorie Line or Greg Greenway or Squeeze or the Violent Femmes – there’s a flashback for you. But the CDs were all at home. I didn’t want to cart them all to work nor store them there, even if I had the space to do so. Sometimes things disappear from our office, unfortunately. I don’t have an iPod, and don’t really want one. That seems like a very expensive thing for me to lose rapidly. What to do?

I happened on this list of the top underrated web apps on Lifehacker (of course!), and I decided to upload all my music to the web so I could access any of it from work or from home or wherever I have internet access.

I have numerous CDs from years ago; not much that’s current, but then again I’m not a huge music buff. A lot of times I’ll hear a brief interview or music clip on NPR and track down the artist info. That’s how I ran across many of those linked above. Much of my music tends toward the folk/blues end of things. My tastes are eclectic – it depends on what I’m in the mood for, if anything at all. I also truly enjoy silence, probably because I experience it so rarely in our house. But when I want to listen to a particular thing while I’m working on something intense . . .

So here you go, have a listen. Uploading took forever and a day, but it was stacks and stacks of CDs. I’m still organizing playlists and such to make it easier to go by my mood or the genre.

Let me know if you find the controls intuitive; if so you can explain it to me. It’s basically streaming randomly from the 600 songs I’ve uploaded, as far as I can tell. So if you don’t like the song, you can click to the next one, or you should be able to click on the playlists on the right. I’ve creatively named them things like “Jazz” and “Folk” and “Blues”, aren’t I clever? Anyway, double clicking on any of those will narrow things down for you a bit if you like. Or be random, whatever. The universe is serendipitous. You may run across something that strikes your fancy. If so, buy it.

This app was purchased recently by Imeem, which has agreements with many labels to pay royalties, and you can also buy the songs yourself. From everything I can tell, it’s legit.

It’s also been a little buggy in the last couple of days, but that’s apparently not typical and will hopefully improve shortly.