There's a new music startup in town: Slacker
According to the AP, it is supposed to be somewhat similar to Pandora. However, they intend to produce portable Wi-Fi devices and car kits (both of which will store music so a network connection isn't always necessary), de-tethering the music from the PC.

Sounds like something to watch.

I admit it: I've had some musical obsessions recently.

One is Cake Or Death, a side project of the leader of the band Black Lab. Black Lab is decent, but not nearly as interesting to me. (I heard both on podcasts, and first heard Cake Or Death on the TPN Rock podcast.) I love the haunting quality from the mixed male/female harmonies and the ( Read more... )

As noted at LWN, Adobe has finally announced the official release of the Flash 9 player for Linux. The last release for Linux was Flash 7; there was no Flash 8 for Linux, so much of the modern Flash-based web content, especially videos, has been unavailable to Linux people for a long time. (There were a couple of betas of the Flash 9 player in ( Read more... )

I've been intending for a while to mention Last.fm and comparisons between that and Pandora for purposes of discovering new music and generally listening to music you like.

The short version is that with Pandora, you tell it what you like, and it uses musicological traits and mysterious algorithms to determine similar-sounding music. While with ( Read more... )

A few months ago I mentioned Pandora, the really cool streaming music service that plays music that it decides is similar to what you've told it you like.

I'm not sure whether I've mentioned my SliMP3, the device I bought a few years ago from the then-embryonic Slim Devices. The SliMP3 connects to my stereo in the living room, as well as to my ( Read more... )

Just a quick note to point at that Neil Gaiman is right: Pandora is addictive and really cool. It's like getting a personalized streaming radio station, wherever you are on the net ( Read more... )