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Virb
YouTubeEntries from August 1, 2007 - September 1, 2007
Virb Video Lightswitch Effect
I was playing around with Virb, the MySpace for people who like well designed web pages. Their video player keeps with their minimal, but elegant design philosophy. A really great feature, in fact the player’s only feature, is the ability to essentially “turn the lights off” and view the video on a darkened background. Simple design at its best.
Jadam Kahn
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Paying Tribute to Freebird for Non-Smokers
The concertgoing landscape forever changed the day when that first fan raised his lighter in a darkened arena to pay tribute to his favorite power ballad. In the years that have followed, people stopped smoking and many venues have banned it altogether. A recent trend is fans using cellphones as a hollow replacement to the mesmerizing, elemental lure of flickering fire. No need to worry though - a new iPhone application lets you keep the flame alive in our new clean-living world.
Top 100 Rock Ballads
VH1’s Top 25 Power Ballads
The Power Ballad Timeline
Vote for Your Favorite Power Ballad
Franceradio.net: Music Search Engine
Franceradio.net is yet another music search engine. Just type the name of a song or artist and browse mp3s found. You can play individual results in the browser, export the results as a playlist to your media player or embed the song into your own web page or blog.
Results from the search are not as comprehensive as similar services such as Skreemr and Seeqpod - even for popular and classic french pop. Also search terms need to be exact as the system is very unforgiving of typos and splitting multiple keywords. The UI elements are also a bit confusing - a star traditionally connotes a rating but here it means to “use this song as a specific search term.”
Here is an example of the widget:
franceradio.net
Animoto: Professional Music Video Maker
Animoto is a new service now in Beta, that allows you to create your own music videos based on your images and music. Their first release is Animoto, a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. According to the company:“The heart of Animoto is its newly developed Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film.”
Select Video Type
You can create short 30 second videos (free) or full length videos ($3).
Upload Images
Simply select the files from your hard drive you wish to upload. Animoto is actually surprisingly fast - I uploaded over 80 images in under 3 minutes. Once uploaded, you can reorder images, rotate them and set which images should be given added emphasis.
Upload Music
You can select music from Animoto’s limited library of music (indie rock, electronica, or hiphop) or upload you own song from your hard drive.
Finish Your Video
Animoto provides a detailed progress meter to show you the production stage your video is at.
The Final Product
The final widscreen video is output directly on screen. You can play the video directly and go back to remix it either manually or by running the engine again. You can also send the video to a friend via email or use the embed tool to get code for posting videos on your website, blog or profile page.
The results are really very good. As you can see below in this 30 second short, Animoto does an excellent job at analyzing the music and providing transitions and motion to reflect the tempo.
My ITunes Widgets
ITunes is now offering a suite of widgets that help them dip their toe into the music social networking space. The suite of widgets are beautifully designed (as expected) and provide a range of customization including different sizes and color schemes. The widgets allow you to share items like your iTunes purchases, iTunes reviews, and iTunes favorites.
While this is pretty cool, the widgets only provide data based on your interaction with the iTunes store, which is cool if you buy lots of music and happen to only listen to your purchased items. I guess that way no matter who’s widget you see, the music will always be available for purchase. However, it would be great if they provided a means to actually share your true charts that included no-store music. Until that day comes, I guess I’ll stick with the Last.fm widgets.
Live Nation Concert Widgets
Live Nation, the online concert ticket and search service, introduced a set of widgets and browser tools to help extend their reach. The Concert search widget comes in two skins and lets users search for concerts and venues directly from your website, blog or profile page. The Venues widget lets you keep track of upcoming events at your favorite local venue. A search bar for IE7 and Firefox adds Live Nation search functionality to your browser’s search bar.
Out of the many Concert 2.0 tools, Live Nation has lagged behind in terms of artist tracking, venue tracking, personalization and social features. While these widgets can certainly help move the service towards Music 2.0 goodness, they still have a long way to go.
Current Radio Songs on Your iPhone
Sometimes when listening to terrestrial radio (oh so music 1.0) you may find yourself in that rare instance where you actually come across a song you like. But terrestrial radio doesn’t always have a means for letting you instantly know what is playing. A new iPhone application allows you to see what songs are currently playing on the radio. The application allows you to browse several major markets to see what is currently on. Data is provided by Yes.com.
Execution is pretty basic at this stage. It would be great if they eventually provided album art, and the ability to purchase and download songs from iTunes (as soon as that feature is available on the iphone of course).
The Shape of Song
Smashing magazine has a great overview of the current state of data visualization methods. There are music examples, many of which I covered in my Last.fm Visualization tools article. An interesting find was a Java tool called The Shape of Song. You can either upload a MIDI file or select one from their repertoire. The application then provides an interactive visualization of the song. 
Arcs represent parts of the song that have identical passages and the diagram as a whole represents the composition’s deep structure. As compositions become more complex, the tool allows you to see very interesting patterns and relationships. MIDI files can be divided into several tracks, which typically represent different instruments or voices. The software in The Shape of Song analyzes each track separately, since each instrument often has a unique pattern of repetitions. Unfortunately tracks are represented by numbers instead of the instrument name so its difficult to tell exactly what you are looking at.
Last FM Introduces Scrobblevision
Last.fm just released some new video features yesterday including the ability to embed Last.fm video wherever you want on the web, watch the video fullscreen and scrobble it to your Last.fm profile. The embedded video displays a video frame, a large play button, metadata and playback controls. Once you click the play button, the metadata disappears and the video begins. To see the metadata, just roll over the video. Fullscreen mode is very nice and seems to playback with little problems.
My biggest complaint about Last.FM’s video offering is that there simply is not enough video yet. Out of all my top artists, I could only find less than a handful that had any videos associated with them. What’s more annoying, each artist detail page still has a video tab that just links to empty content. They should just suppress the video tab if there are no associated videos and stop wasting my time hunting for phantoms. Additionally, the current implementation does not recommend videos on my Dashboard or include them on the Tag Detail pages - for instance, I should be able to see top videos from artists who were tagged “French Pop”.
Its still early, and there is a promising future here when a significant video catalog is available, but in the meantime, I’ll stick with YouTube or one of the many great Last.fm/YouTube mashup services.
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