Free Candy For Everyone

Since we can never get enough Guitar Hero, Harmonix and Activision are releasing an 80s themed Guitar Hero game next month - Rocks the 80s. It’s only coming out for PS2, however. I’m hoping that the songs will be available for download on Xbox Live, since that’s the whole reason I bought the X360 version.

But then again, the song selection isn’t all that exciting to me. I thought I was a big fan of 80s music. I love my cheesy a-ha with the best of them. But I guess I have a limited view into what is 80s music because I don’t remember a lot of the songs that they’ve announced. At least not all that fondly. The list as culled from Gamespot:

“Round and Round” by Ratt, “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, “Metal Health” by Quiet Riot, “Holy Diver” by Ronnie James Dio, and “Heat of the Moment” by Asia. Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” and “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister. Skid Row’s “18 and Life,” Faster Pussycat’s “Bathroom Wall,” Billy Squier’s “Lonely is the Night,” Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time,” Extreme’s “Play With Me,” Eddie Money’s “Shakin’,” and “Synchronicity II” by the Police.

I love the Police, so Synchronicity II is a welcome song, but where’s “Africa”, “Take On Me”, “Come on Eileen”, and anything by Pat Benatar? Maybe those aren’t guitar songs, I guess, but they’re my idea of the 80s! Sadness.

I’ve talked about different music discovery sites, but somehow I neglected to mention Pandora. I first heard about it when it was in beta in August of 2005. At the time I was much enamored of Last.fm/Audioscrobbler (which I still like for it’s music tracking capabilities, I love being able to see charts of my most listened to songs, artists, etc.) and wasn’t as into Pandora. Both offer streaming music stations, but I wanted more control over what I was listening to than Pandora provided. You could make a music station and specify a few artists or songs that you wanted to hear more like, then it would stream you songs. I found it didn’t do a very good job of providing me with music I actually wanted to listen to.

While, I was catching up on my backlog of blog reading today and there was a post about Pandora at Zatz Not Funny so I decided to go see how it’s changed in the year+ since I last looked. I started up a radio station I’d created last year and to my surprise, I liked almost everything it played. I knew maybe a third of the songs they were playing, but of the rest I found many pleasant surprises of people I’d never heard of but where quite excellent.

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For those who missed it, last.fm is a music site that builds a radio station based on what you’ve listened to in the past. I love it because once you install their plugin, it tracks everything you listen to. Yes, that’s why I love it! Because then I get to look at the lovely charts of what I’m listening to. Anyways, they’ve been suffering some technical difficulties in the past, and I just clicked over to their site and saw this, which is a pretty funny message:

We are in fact the least lucky web site on the internet. We’ve suffered some database issues; please bear with us while we try to piece everything back together. Again.

Tell Them About The Audioscrobbler, Mummy

I just thought I’d share my hopes that they resolve their difficulties soon so I can continue to enjoy viewing charts of my music viewing habits.

To continue talking about Audioscrobbler/Last.fm (which is still really slow right now), it computes neighbors for you - other listeners who are most like you. Well, apparently I have some extremely odd tastes, because my closest neighbor is only 13% like me. Taking a look at my brother’s neighbors, for example, his closest neighbor is 66% like him! How’d I get so strange? … Don’t answer that.

Some of you might have noticed the “What I’m listening to” link over on the sidebar. That’s a link to a pretty cool site called last.fm. The idea behind the project is to let you listen to internet radio that is your music, whether you have access to your music or not. You can install a plugin so it watches what you listen to, and builds a profile up of what music you like. Then using techniques similar to what Amazon uses to determine recommendations, it figures out what other music you’d like. And you can hear it streaming for free.

For me, an obsessive organizer, I love it because it tracks what music I’m listening to. Then I can look at all sorts of lovely graphs and lists showing what I listen to and how much. How much other people listen to a given song as a percentage of all a particular artists songs, etc. That is super cool. If you are a geek. Which I am. Check out my page to get an idea of what it does! And then signup and link me as a friend.

Audioscrobbler is the name for the backend support, where the plugins are and other techie stuff like that. Last.fm is the radio station part of the deal-eo.

Oh. And they just completely redid the website. It looks much better now, but they seem to be having technical difficulties because it can take up to a minute for a page to load as of right now. Hopefully they’ll work these problems out soon.

Ha ha. You thought I wasn’t going to talk about World of Warcraft. But I can’t resist. Here’s my character with my pet cat. Gotta love my furry boots. I’m at level 13 and I still can’t stop playing. Though I did. Stop, I mean. At least for long enough to write this post.