Grooving with the Sharks
-or- How I got a Grooveshark account
I caught a blurb about Grooveshark Lite this morning and decided to give it a look (see, Twitter can provide value). While I know very little about Grooveshark itself, I have to say that the Lite version is very cool!
Grooveshark Lite
Got a song or group stuck in your head? Head over to the Lite site, use the search and start streaming. Just that simple and easy. Kinda like Pandora, but with the ability to actually specify what you want to hear.
As you find songs, add ‘em to a queue or playlist and before you know it you have a day’s worth of music queued up and playing. With the shuffle option, this alone is reason to come back. I heard all sorts of good stuff today!
While clicking around, check out the “Popular” section to see what other folks are up to. I clearly listen to different radio stations than most Grooveshark Lite users 
but I found some good stuff there all the same.
Oh, and I wasn’t knocking Pandora earlier, mind you. That little gem has helped me discover tons of new bands and songs.
Grooveshark (full)
Since I was having so much fun with Grooveshark Lite, I thought I might have a look at Grooveshark (not lite). With a tag line of “Listen to any song in the world for free” it certainly looks interesting. Here’s the pitch:
Grooveshark is an online music sharing community that rewards you for sharing your music.
- Grooveshark allows you to safely and legally download high quality MP3s.
- Grooveshark is a peer to peer program with a massive library of songs.
- Grooveshark allows you to interact with other music lovers like yourself.
- Grooveshark rewards you for sharing your music, and gives you a cut of the profits for songs you sell.
I tried to sign up, but I didn’t have a invite code so nothing happened. However, I did manage to find a little work-around to that… I popped back over to the Lite site and registered over there. Then, back to the main site, I was able to login with that newly created userid and password. Clever, no?
Ok, I really have no idea if it was clever or not. Maybe that “welcome” email will show up soon (but not yet, as of 3 hours later) so maybe that was a useful tip. I felt clever at the time…
Next, I downloaded Sharkbyte and turned it loose on my music library. Honestly, I dunno what it is up to yet — still running and looks like it’ll be busy for a while.
[later]
Ah ha! Sharkbyte needs to be running if I want to actually play my music from anywhere/any browser. Well that beats the heck out of syncing my MP3 library to my work laptop! Granted, it is yet another client to have sitting in the tray on the home machine…
Did you catch that? Play your music library from anywhere, as long as the “host” machine is online and running Sharkbyte. Create playlists and play right from the browser. Yeah, that’s actually cool.
And that’s as far as I’ve gone so far. Later I’ll need to explore the social and profits aspects. If you’ve been using either of these services, drop a note with your comments — I’m curious to hear what other people think about GS compared to Pandora and Last.FM.
Summarized
Grooveshark Lite = slick online player. Search and play, no account necessary, no install, no fuss.
Grooveshark = social music, remote access to your library, some sort of legal profit model.
Zune Angst
We gave my daughter a 30GB Zune for Christmas. We spotted it on Woot.com back in September — smoking deal, was under $90 for a refurbished brown. Well, they oversold those so we got bumped up to a refurb’d black along with the fancy-schmancy accessory kit (nicer headphones, a case, a wall charger, etc). Pretty sweet deal and nice customer service from the Woot folks.
Originally it was going to be mine, but just before it showed up I got my HTC Mogul phone… I figured I could use the phone for my mp3 needs so we showed it to the girl. She’s wanted more storage and immediately fell in love with the idea of having 30GB of storage and video, so we stored it away until last week. It was amazing how quickly she was ready to toss her iPod under the bus.
Ya know? The thing is pretty slick. From what I saw I of it, I liked it. Putting videos and such on it was pretty cool and the interface seemed useable. However, after 4 days of use by a teenage girl, it appears to now be bricked.
(sorry for pic quality…) Seriously, isn’t that the lamest error screen you could imagine on a consumer device? Contact Support?!? How about a frickin’ URL or phone number or (dare I say) instructions on how to soft reset? I mean really — how about something useful on the screen instead? Who thought putting that screen in front of their target audience was a good idea?
So yeah: A goofy logo, the number 5 in a circle and “Contact support” helpfully displayed in 3 languages is what we get. I’ve done some searches for issue resolution and the general consensus is to completely reset. Not a bad idea, I wanted to flash it to the new Zune software anyways…
If only I could get it to fully reset though! I can get it to soft-reset (back button + up). Once that starts, you’re supposed to immediately do the finger-tangler of back button + left + center button. No matter how many different ways I try, nothing happens.
I completely drained the battery. No difference. As near as I can tell, there’s not a way to pull the battery either.
I guess we’ll see if we can exchange it somehow, unless I can find a surefire way to reset it. Bummer.
Gym’tronics
As it is once again Fall, and I haven’t been in a gym since Spring, I figured this was the month to saddle back up and return to world of fitness and strength training again.
Since I was a shameless pig all summer, that training will begin as almost pure running/jogging/cross-training. I like to run for 30 – 45 minute segments, depending on if I’m on a machine or track (ok, and how my old knees are doing) and I think it is time to take stock of my entertainment options.
I carry a hand-me-down (from my kids) MP3 player called “the cube”. It’s nifty little thing that holds 1GB and takes very little space. However, it has tiny little buttons that my sausage-like fingers don’t relate well with. It’s going to have to be replaced soon before I bounce it off a window in frustration…
It does have an FM tuner though. That’s quite handy when there are games on.
I could use my iPAQ as the player, but that’s almost on the complete other end of the scale for size. It’s not going to be in my pocket while on the weights, that’s for sure. I’ve tried it in the past for running. It can work, but I have to carry it, too big to be in shorts pockets unless I want them loooow. No FM tuner either.
I tried eBook reading while on a cross-trainer once. It wasn’t pretty, but I think that gym will let me back in again some day.
However, something like the iPAQ does open up the option for video when on the stationary machines. A nice mp3/video player combo would be pretty sweet, if I had the storage to keep a couple shows on it. Right now I only have a 1GB SD card. So I’m back to the size thing — this is awfully big for just 1GB of storage.
Hell, if I’m going to carry something the size of my iPAQ around, I’m going to have to upgrade to the Archos 605 unit. I don’t know much about it yet, but it sure looks sweet! The heck with listening to podcasts, I’ll be watching my shows while on the treadmill
I see a lot of iPods at the gym. While I don’t hate ‘em, I do have to confess I loathe iTunes. For some reason it causes me to (almost) break out into a rash. Thus, no iPod in my future.
Any suggestions or ideas? What do you use at the gym or when exercising? How about audio books?
Windows Media Player 11 Released
Have you tried the latest flavor of Windows Media Player? Version 11 is generally available and seems to be worth a look. To be honest, I didn’t think V10 was all that bad; I’ve been using it for quite some time to manage my music library because, frankly, it just seems to get the job done. Version 11 seems to be more of the same and (arguably) a bit prettier to boot.
You may want to wait a day before downloading. It was rather slow tonight… Like under 12KB/sec slow. Guess I wasn’t the only one who was curious. While waiting for the download, admire the design changes page, pick out a new skin (some incredible skins offset by some truly goofy stuff…), and scope out the media player plug-ins site.
The new interface is nice. Heck, even browsing the library is pleasant with the default icon view. Menus are re-arranged a bit and, in general, finding options is a bit more obvious than it used to be. Granted, like previous versions of Windows Media Player, “standard” User Interface conventions pretty much go out the window… but in most cases stuff is easily figured out.
I’ve read several places that say it’s using much less RAM than WMP 10. Unfortunately, I never paid much attention to v10 memory usage, so can’t confirm that… I can tell you that right now, with WMP 11 minimized and the toolbar thingy going, it is using 11MB. Seems tolerable. And speaking of the toolbar controls — much easier on the eyes than previous versions.
In general, I’d say this is worth the look. The installer will suggest some music stores to you, but you can skip ‘em, so don’t get too stressed about the marketing angle.
[via slashdot, where you can always enjoy the anti-Microsoft rants in the comments]
So I Get My Kid’s MP3 Hand-me-Downs…
Oh, the irony. I get my kids’ mp3 players when they upgrade. Well, ok — there’s a bit more to the story…
I recently took a survey for a vendor that we use at the day job. Part of the incentive to take the survey was the “some random survey taker will win an iPod” message. Ok, so I took 10 or 15 minutes and plowed through it. And lo and behold…. a few weeks later I am notified that I’ve won an iPod shuffle.
Back last Christmas, the daughter was hinting that she’d really like an iPod as a gift. As a tightwad father, I have to confess I didn’t see the need to spend gobs more money on one brand of mp3 player than other brands that did more, held more and were cheaper. Sorry, I’m just not quite ready to spend extra money for the logo. In discussing this with daughter, it turned out she was also quite interested in “the cube.” Looked at it, seemed like a great value and it became her present.
Turns out she hadn’t quite given up the dream of having an iPod… once she heard that I’d won the shuffle, she called dibs on it! On my shuffle. Oh, for shame… Well, the shuffle was 512 and her cube was 1GB. We toyed around with the notion of trying to return the shuffle at a large nationwide retailer and trade up to the Nano but frankly, the ethics of the thing bothered us all. So this afternoon we swapped.
I plug the thing into my laptop and suddenly realize I now have a 1GB USB drive. This thing holds a bunch of tunes but I can also throw all my utilities on it too. Now I have room to look into more of the portable apps too. Ok, I didn’t need the iPod that badly…
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