Note: This site is currently "Under construction". I'm migrating to a new version of my site building software. Lots of things are in a state of disrepair as a result (for example, footnote links aren't working). It's all part of the process of building in public. Most things should still be readable though.

Found Music and how imeem beats lastfm

For the past few years SXSW has been releasing music samplers with a ton of free MP3s from artists who are going to preform at the festival. I've found a lot of music that I like sifting through the sampler and am going to start posting some of it here.

I wanted to find a site that already had the audio clips and would let me embed them in my site. The first site I looked at was last.fm. I've used them a few times in the past to stream music and thought I remembered seeing a way to pull out their player and put it on other sites. When I looked again, all I could see was a way to embed it on facebook, myspace and digg. There was no code you could simply grab and embed on a personal site.

Strike One.

This struck me as weird so I did a quick search and found some pages that suggested that you had to create an account before you could get code to embed.

Strike Two.

Don't make me sign up to really get benefit out of your site. I was in the mood to see how it worked anyway so I created an account and added the song I wanted to the Library, hit the "Play your Library" button and got this:

TODO: Find this image and place it here: http://www.alanwsmith.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/last-fm-bs.png

NOTE: Currently searching: vault3/Backups

What?

I have to add 15 artists before I can hear any of the songs I want.

Strike Three.

And, by the way, to hell with your site. I'm gone.

~

Next stop: imeem.com.

First thing I see is a nice search box right in front of me on the home page. I put in the artist I want to hear, and see a list of songs from that artist. Click on the one I want to hear and a nice little player pops up and starts the song for me. Check out the bottom of the player and the code for me to embed the song is sitting right there.

Sold.

The worst part for last.fm is that they actually had a song that I wanted to include that imeem didn't already have in their list. So, they would have won even if I had to jump through some hoops. Seems like a huge miss out of them.