January 13, 2009
· Filed under
music
It's not often I stumble across something I really enjoy on Youtube, but today, thanks to a little help from Boing Boing, I discovered Danielle Ate The Sandwich. Danielle has a large series of videos of her performing mostly original songs and some covers. It's just her beautiful voice singing her quirky lyrics accompanied by an acoustic guitar or ukulele.
I've been listening to her tracks for the last 40 minutes or so and ordered her CD. She somehow reminds me of a more folky version of the Barenaked Ladies. Her songs and videos are infused with goofy moments and some odd lyrics, but she's full of genuine earnestness that is refreshing and comforting. Great music to warm you up on a cold winter Tuesday afternoon.
October 24, 2008
· Filed under
music
The obvious comparison for SoundCloud, one of the latest social communities to hit the web, is Flickr. Instead of photos though the site is a place for amateur and pro musicians, bands, producers and samplers to share their audio with the world.
Audio creators can upload their work and tag it, while listeners can browse and search through tracks, adding the best stuff to a list of favourites, sharing tracks with their friends and of course leave comments.
Like Flickr's notes, SoundCloud users can leave comments on the time line of track. If you really love the way a beat drops at 1:23 you can say so. The audio player is a nice clean design that clearly shows the load status, the waveform of the track and all other relevant info.
There are no limits on file sizes which means I'm listening to an hour long breaks mix as I write this. Free accounts are limited to uploading five tracks/month and they offer pro accounts ranging from €9 – €59 per month with varying limits on track uploads and access to stats.
One interesting feature is the Dropbox. People can send tracks directly to you either through SoundCloud or via embed code for your website. They also support the usual "Web 2.0" suite of features such as friend following and widgets for your blog and Facebook accounts.
The best part is the quality of the content so far is really good. Great electronic tracks but also some good metal and rock that I've heard as well. SoundCloud is easily the best music sharing site I've seen so far. Rather than mess with things, they've emulated the Flickr formula so closely that it will be hard for this service not to succeed.