Wednesday, March 12, 2008

How come we say "audio visual" not "visual audio"?

Here is my rundown of online musicking, in order of preference:

#1: Songza.com

I like it because you can search AND PLAY exactly what you want, and save your playlist. It is simple, easy, and quick. The only downside is that you get multiple listings for each song, some of which are scratchy, live, or otherwise not what you want. You have to listen to a few before finding one that is good. But then you save it to your playlist, so you don't have to do that everytime you listen.

#2: Pandora.com

I like Pandora because of it's "sounds like" features. You type in an artist or a song, and it creates a radio station around that artist or song, meaning it plays a mixture of that artist's music as well as similar artists. It is a great way to discover artists you don't know. The downside is that there is a limit to the number of songs you can "fast-forward" through if you don't like them.

#3: last.fm

This is sort of a combination of Pandora and Songza and Facebook, except you can't always listen to the specific song you want to like you can in Songza. Unlike Songza you can connect with other people by seeing who else listens to your music, tag the songs, etc.

#4: IMEEM

This is my least favorite because of it's layout and complexity. There is so much going on the page it is hard to understand, the layout isn't as readable as last.fm, and in short I wasn't motivated to spend much time at IMEEM since I am lazy and easily frustrated. I'm sticking with Songza.

As for the other online media sites:

Internet Archive

Too confusing. I did a couple of searches and came up with random crap or nothing. Moving on to the Absolute Sound Effects Archive, the link didn't work. So, onto:

Gutenberg.org's Audio Book Collection

This site is cool. I didn't actually download and listen to any books, but I trust that it would work and when I have time someday I might try it out. There are a lot of old books in a lot of formats, and I think it is a great service for those who can't read.

Mango Languages

I spoke German for a while when I was in college and lived in Vienna, so I thought I'd give the first lesson in German a try. Fortunately it was free, and you could hear the recordings clearly. Unfortunately if I didn't already understand the basics of German grammar I wouldn't have understood what they were trying to explain in the lesson with regards to the grammar. So although the idea is great, their lesson isn't the greatest. I wouldn't recommend Mango.

The only site I can really see the library using is the online audio books on Gutenberg. It would be a nice service to offer patrons the ability to download audio books.

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