Digital Noise: Music and Tech

I've been reading good buzz about Spotify for several months now, but the noise seems to have reached a fever pitch with recent coverage by music industry blogger Bob Lefsetz and Sunday's announcement that the new U2 album, "No Line on the Horizon," is available on Spotify in several European countries right now--a week before its official worldwide release date of March 2.

Some quick background: the promise of Spotify is music, on-demand, from any computer with an Internet connection. Which sounds a lot like Rhapsody, Napster, Microsoft's Zune Pass, or any other of the countless subscription-based services that have come and gone...except that there's a free ad-supported version. Sort of like what Qtrax was promising, only with streams instead of downloads (and actually available instead of merely promised). Or perhaps sort of like Imeem, only without the confusing attention-deficit-disorder interface.

Or--let's be honest here--like all the dearly departed P2P services of yesteryear, only legal with partners including the four major labels plus independent digital distributors CD Baby and The Orchard. Songs are encoded in the Ogg Vorbis codec, which offers higher quality-per-bitrate than MP3, and distributed on demand using the Torrent protocol.

But of course there's a catch: Spotify is only available in some European countries, and the free version is invite-only, which has made me skeptical. It's like hearing stories about some magical land far away where fairies deliver golden music directly to your earbuds.

Where else are you going to find a bunch of Scientist tunes for free?

My curiosity got the best of me, and I finally wrangled an invitation to the beta version of the free service. I'm happy to report it works exactly as advertised and is unquestionably the best music service I've ever used.

Apart from finally delivering the promise of on-demand music that I've been waiting for since the first time I listened to an audio stream over the Web in 1996 or so, the Spotify designers must be praised for designing a beautifully simple and functional piece of software that combines the best of online and offline so you don't know (or care) which is which.

Slacker released its radio app for the iPhone yesterday, and while it'll have a hard time topping Pandora (which was just updated to version 2.0), there's a definite place for it.

I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more fringe hits, and it did a nice job of balancing the obscure and the palatably mainstream.

Pandora's strength is the ability to create customized radio stations based on a particular artist or song--Pandora calls them "seeds." If the station's too narrow, you can add more variety by adding additional seeds, although this doesn't always work as I expect it to--for example, adding Yo La Tengo to my Pink Floyd station had no appreciable effect, still leaving me stuck in classic rock land (Zeppelin, Doors, John Lennon). If you don't even want to take this much trouble to customize a station, Pandora offers dozens of genre-specific stations, from Techno to Reggaeton.

The trouble with Pandora's genre-bound stations, though, is they're not customizable at all--you're stuck with somebody else's programming, and you can only skip six songs per station per hour (a concession to content owners, who want to sell you downloads and subscription services).

Slacker has a much better approach toward genre-specific stations: it lets you fine tune those stations along three spectra: personal favorites (play more or less of them), popularity, and year of release. (The Web version of Slacker is more like Pandora, with artist-specific stations.) This helped me create a lot of variety without having to muck about very much. For instance, when I fine-tuned Slacker's '80s Alternative station to play more "Fringe" songs, it did a nice job of mixing the obscure, like Flock of Seagulls' "Nightmares" (did you know they had more than one song?), with the weird but popular, like Peter Gabriel's "Big Time."

Both apps are free, so if you've got enough space, you can switch between them--Pandora when you're feeling finicky, Slacker when you just want somebody else to drive.

I've been a fan of the Sonos Multi-Room Music System ever since I saw it in action at a neighbor's house a couple summers ago. There's no other solution that gives you such easy access to so much music in so many places in your house, whether that music is stored on your computer or delivered via partnerships with Internet music providers like Last.fm (owned by CBS, which also owns CNET), Pandora, or Rhapsody.

You should be able to save $399 off the price of a Sonos home system by downloading this free remote control app to your iPhone or iPod Touch. But Sonos hasn't made the necessary bundle available.

Recently, Sonos sent me a system to test out with their new free iPhone controller (more about that later), and I came away even more impressed. The setup process was a model of clarity and efficiency--every consumer software developer in the world should study it. (Microsoft, Apple, are you paying attention?) Without going into exhaustive detail--you can read CNET's full review if you're interested--the one-page quick setup guide worked flawlessly, the installation of the PC desktop controller software was fast and easy, and once installed it took less than 5 minutes to index my entire 25GB music collection. Connecting new devices to the system was as easy as walking up to them, pressing a couple buttons, and waiting for the lights to stop flashing. Done. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being attaching speakers to a PC and 10 being getting a MacBook to connect to a PC-based home wireless network and print to a PC-attached printer using SMB, this was about a 3.

To be honest, the only reason I haven't bought one--a reason which you'll see in almost every review and head-to-head comparison--is the system's price. The standard two-room Bundle 150, which gives you two base stations (one with amp, one without) and a controller, starts at $999. You can plug one of the stations, the ZP90, into any audio system with an auxiliary line-in, but the amplified ZP120 needs standalone speakers--Sonos will sell a pair to you for $179.99. Expanding into extra rooms requires you to buy additional ZP90s ($349) or ZP120s ($499). It adds up.

Another oddity with the system is that one Sonos device in your system needs to be plugged into a router with an Ethernet cable. The justification is reasonable: Sonos uses its own wireless mesh to avoid interference with regular Wi-Fi networks. But in practical terms, this will probably raise the price even higher.

Case in point: my wireless router's in the room with my PC. I don't need a Sonos system in there--I'll just plug headphones or small speakers into my PC. So if I'd bought one of these bundles, I would now have to go out and pay $100 for a wireless bridge to connect the Sonos system to my wireless router without wasting a base station. Yow.

There's an easy fix to both problems. In October, Sonos released a free app that lets you use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a remote control for the system. It eliminates the need for the CR 100 controller.

So why not create a new two-room bundle for iPhone users with home wireless networks? (Two groups that I imagine overlap significantly--call it the SuperGeek bundle.) Take out the CR 100 controller, which lists for $399. Replace it with the ZoneStation 100--the wireless bridge--which lists for $99. That would theoretically knock $300 off the price of the Bundle 150, bringing it down to $699; with speakers, the price could be $849. That's still not cheap, but it would be well below that psychological $1,000 barrier, making it easier to justify. (You could buy these parts a la carte today, but they'd cost almost the same as the bundles with remote--$948 without speakers, $1,127 with.)

Sonos could even package an entry-level one-room iPhone/Wi-Fi bundle--just a single ZP90 and ZoneBridge wireless bridge--for something like $399 (a $49 discount off the a la carte price), and I bet they'd fly off the shelves. And the product is so cool, and works so well, once people are in, they'll keep adding extra base stations as they can afford them.

Finetune is one of the increasing number of sites that lets you hear songs you don't own, for free. It's got about 2 million songs from all four major labels and many indies. How does it stay out of the legal crosshairs of the recording industry? By restricting you to building playlists with a minimum length of 45 songs (although there's an "I'm Lazy" button that fills in a partially completed playlist with similar selections--mostly songs from the artists you've already picked). The playlists can have no more than three songs from the same artist, you can't have the same song on two playlists, and they play in random order.

I signed up for Finetune back in 2007 when it was relatively new, but hardly ever used it. That's because there are now far less restrictive (but legal) ways to hear songs on demand, including Last.fm (owned by CBS, which also owns CNET) and Imeem, as well as quasi-legal sites like Songerize. On these sites, you just run a search for the song you want to hear, and if it's available, you can play it right then and there. Simple.

Finetune let me pick out three songs from the new Spiritualized album, even though I've never paid a dime for them.

(Credit: Screenshot)

It had been so long since I checked out Finetune, I scratched my head when I received an e-mail in my in-box this morning imploring me to check out its new iPhone application. (It's not actually new, but went live in October.) If you don't have an account, the iPhone version resembles Pandora--you pick a favorite artist, and it constructs a playlist based around songs from that artist and other songs it thinks you'd like. Nothing particularly innovative there.

But the magic happens when you log on to the Web site and create a custom playlist. Then, when you log on to Finetune on your iPhone, it's there for you. The playback order is still randomized, and the same restrictions apply. But overall, it's a great way to create playlists from lots of music that you don't own, or that you might own but have never gotten around to ripping. I particularly found the "related artists" to be useful--it's very helpful if you want to explore a particular genre or era of music that you never got around to collecting.

For example...this morning, I started with some '80s music that's in or around the edges of goth--stuff like Love and Rockets (owned and ripped), Siouxsie (ditto), Sisters of Mercy (owned and ripped but not on my iPhone because of space constraints), Bauhaus (can't find the LPs and refuse to buy them on CD), Dead Can Dance (ooh, forgot about them). That led me into all this '80s and '90s psychedelia that I've often heard or borrowed but never owned or ripped, like Primal Scream, Lush, Swervedriver, The Verve, Mojave 3, Spacemen 3 (which reminded me that there's a new Spiritualized album out that I haven't heard), which somehow led me into Galaxie 500 and Luna....You get the idea. And now I've got a really cool playlist for the next few times I take a drive, and I might get some album buying ideas for the next time I'm at Amoeba Records.

In case you're just awakening from a coma, today's election day in the United States, and turnout's expected to set records.

You'll find this song from Pocket Rocket on the Punk/Ska/Psychobilly channel. I liked the composition and the instrumental playing enough to rate it one thumbs-up.

But what about tomorrow? After the polling places have closed and the results are in, what can you do if you still hanker to cast a ballot and make your opinion count? OurStage offers you the chance to make or break thousands of independent artists by listening to and rating their songs.

The Web site's been around for more than a year, but last week the company added a free iPhone application as well. You can choose from more than 50 stations in genres such as indie rock to death metal/grindcore to singer/songwriter (with separate categories for male and female). Unlike the Web site, which asks you to judge two songs head to head, the iPhone application simply asks you to rate each song with one, two, or three thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Even if you're not particularly interested in voting, it's a good way to discover loads of new music you wouldn't hear otherwise. The ratings determine which songs rise to the top, which means the average quality of songs you'll hear on any given channel is pretty high--better than surfing among randomly connected bands on MySpace pages, for example. Pick a favorite genre--I like their Experimental channel--and you'll probably find a couple gems.

If you're into live music, JamBase is essential, with a searchable list of more than 50,000 shows in the United States. It's updated by fans, so it tends to be up-to-date and more complete than newspaper or events sites. And it's a heck of a lot easier to run a search on JamBase than it is to pick up your local weekly and look through the ads and print listings.

Enter your Zip code, and the JamBase iPhone application will return a list of local live music shows in your area.

Now, JamBase has come to the iPhone. You could always access it through the built-in Safari Web browser, but a free app released Monday lets you enter your Zip code--or, if you allow it to use the iPhone 3G's built-in GPS tracker, it will figure out where you are automatically--and then displays a list of shows in your area for the next few days. If you've saved a list of favorite bands at the JamBase site, you can enter your username and it'll limit results to just those bands.

It's definitely a version-1 application, and thus a bit klunky--when you click on a listing, it opens the JamBase site in Safari to give you the listing details, and you can't search for particular bands directly from the app. But it's free, and nice to have if you're stranded in, say, Los Angeles for a tech conference and want to escape from the officially sanctioned parties for some authentic jazz at a club nearby.

I wrote about the latest version of Lala when it started beta-testing back in May. At the time, I dismissed it as a weird hybrid between all-you-can-eat subscription services like Rhapsody and free streams from the likes of Imeem. I didn't understand who'd pay 10 cents to stream a song an unlimited number of times when there are already plenty of free (mostly ad-supported) streaming sites out there.

So I was surprised to see reviews of that service Monday that used words like "spectacular" and "revolution." As it turns out, Lala has made a couple of small but crucial changes that could turn it from also-ran into the first indispensable online music service since Pandora.

The changes affect Lala's music locker service, which lets you store songs from your personal library "in the cloud" (that is, on Lala's Web servers) and then access them from any computer later.

Back in May, the locker service worked only with MP3 files, which meant that anybody with a large collection of CDs ripped from iTunes (which uses AAC by default) or a Windows Media-based player was essentially out of luck. No more--the Music Mover application now recognizes both AAC (.m4a) and WMA files as well as MP3s.

Lala's online player looks a lot like iTunes, but why mess with the industry standard?

(Credit: Lala)

Second, the company has worked with the major labels to give users the right to access songs they already own without having to upload them. If Lala has the rights to a particular song, and it recognizes that you've got it in your library, it just lets you stream it for free. (Eight years ago, the labels sued the original MP3.com out of existence for doing exactly the same thing. How times have changed.)

That means you can get started quickly--so far, after about an hour of scanning, the Lala Music Mover has recognized 500 of the songs in my collection and added them to my locker without forcing me to upload them manually. (The final tally after running it overnight: 1,971 songs recognized and added, 1,474 that I'd need to upload manually. That's a ratio of just under 60% recognized.)

Finally, Lala is reportedly planning an iPhone application. That would mean iPhone access to your entire music library--goodbye capacity limits! I can't wait to download it.

One annoying bug: I couldn't resize the window for the Music Mover application, which meant I couldn't read some of the error messages songs that Lala couldn't upload. In particular, it rejected three songs because they were too large, but the error message was cut off before I could read the maximum size. Turns out, these songs were all over 50,000KB--huge epic songs, 25-plus minutes in length--so that seems like a pretty reasonable limit.

Once you're using the music locker, the other parts of the service begin to make much more sense. For example, if you're already streaming all your music via the Lala player--which looks a lot like iTunes in a browser --then buying perpetual rights to stream one more song for only 10 cents becomes a very reasonable idea. That's the whole dream of "cloud computing" in a nutshell--once Internet access becomes ubiquitous, the differences between online and offline blur until the distinction eventually becomes meaningless. There are also some interesting social networking and sharing features that could help users discover music on the site, such as a widget you can post on your Web page that lists four favorite songs.

A great idea, well executed. Nicely done, Lala.

CNET has written several times over the years about Audacity, a free, general-purpose sound-editing tool. I've known people who have used it to manipulate sound for podcasts and the like. But I'd completely forgotten about it until today.

One of my colleagues been looking for a tool to split recorded audio presentations into portions to go with the corresponding individual PowerPoint slides. I thought Apple's GarageBand might work, but he found it too opaque, and our office (like most) is PC-heavy, which would have complicated efforts to train other folks on how to do this job.

Then he downloaded Audacity, and it fit the bill perfectly. It let him see audio waveforms to figure out where the speaker stopped talking between slides, easily split the recording at those points, and clean up other extraneous noise from the track. At the same time, it didn't burden him with features more geared toward budding musicians such as built-in instrument sounds or an on-screen keyboard.

Reading through the documentation, I realized Audacity might be the perfect solution to a problem I've been facing myself. Today, I use Microsoft's Digital Media Plus Pack to record my LP records to digital format. But Microsoft discontinued that XP-only product when it released Vista and doesn't support it anymore. Worse, it records only to Windows Media Audio, which means I have to convert the files to AAC or MP3 before I can play them on my iPod.

But Audacity lets me record directly to MP3 using the LAME encoder, which I've already got installed for another audio-conversion program. Although MP3 offers sound at the same bitrate as AAC and WMA, hard drive space is now plentiful enough to encode everything at 320kbps, which is perfectly adequate for on-the-go sound.

Screenshot of Audacity running on Windows

(Credit: Audacity)

Have you ever spent a long, happy evening with a new effects pedal and a pair of headphones? Do you have an Apple iPhone and $3.99 to spare? If so, open the iTunes Store and download Bloom immediately.

The hypnotic Bloom application for iPhone.

Released last Thursday by Brian Eno, who more or less invented ambient music, and fellow traveler Peter Chilvers, Bloom is like discovering a seashell you've never seen before--beautifully simple yet infinitely complicated.

It displays a pastel multicolored screen. You hit different spots on the screen to play different notes--bass notes at the bottom, treble at the top. The notes are arranged in modal intervals so you can't play a wrong note.

Once you've built a pattern, they repeat at an interval, which you can control with a slider. It's polyphonic, so you can add additional notes each time you go through the sequence.

If you take your hands off the screen entirely, it'll improvise on what you've created. Check out the YouTube demo.

It's the perfect iPhone app because it takes full advantage of its most salient feature, the beautiful, bright touch screen. Hopefully, it'll take advantage of another great iPhone feature, the ability to update applications, and add new sounds--some Frippertronic guitar distortion would be lovely.

The low notes aren't very clear through the iPhone's built-in speakers, so use headphones or plug it into a stereo. Or guitar amp. With a delay pedal.

I'll see you in a few hours.