The RubeTube

When it comes to music, I feel like an old person already. My idea of an awesome song is stuck in the Eraserheads era, back when they still made good music. I play the guitar, but my repertoire has not expanded by any significant amount since my high school days. The "golden age of music" for me is the late 90's (seriously, they don't make music like they used to). I get an odd feeling when my favorite songs are playing on the "rewind" programs on the radio and on MTV.

That's just not supposed to happen when you're 21. A 21-year old is still supposed to be "in" when it comes to the latest in the music scene. I'm supposed to know who the hottest artists are. I shouldn't feel left out when someone mentions the latest song that's hitting the airwaves.

Enter Pandora Internet Radio. It's a totally awesome tool for discovering new songs! I first checked it out when Cricket did a plug for it on his blog. I became an instant fan after just one song. (Because I'm lazy) I'll let Cricket describe how Pandora works:

Here’s how it works: first, you are asked to give a song title, or an artist name. The engine will then search for your query and look for songs which are similar to that artist or song. For instance, when I search for Jason Mraz, Pandora will give me a play list with songs “that exemplifies the musical style of Jason Mraz which feature minor key tonality and acoustic rhythm guitars”. It’s smart enough to recognize patterns in the songs and search for music similar to what you inputted, and creates a play list for that particular genre. And all of this is happening right at your Internet browser, so you can just leave that window open to listen to songs.

What makes Pandora so cool? For one thing, if you're not feeling picky about a particular song you want to hear, all you need to know is the name of just one song or artist that you know you like. Pandora will do the work in finding music that suit your tastes. In other words, it's perfect for people like me looking to broaden their musical horizons. Pandora has over 400,000 songs from 20,000 artists so I'm confident that I won't have trouble finding songs similar to The Corrs' or even The Beatles'. (You can take a look at my Pandora stations here.) And the best part of Pandora is that it's free (and it works just fine on a 384 kbps broadband connection).

For being a godsend to this musically deprived blogger, Pandora Internet Radio is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.

As a bonus, here are some tools that will enhance your Pandora listening experience:

• OpenPandora allows you to listen to Pandora without an open browser window (although it technically still uses IE). This is what I use all the time to tune in to Pandora. Features I like: global keyboard shortcuts, and auto-updating of my last.fm playlist. It eats up a fair amount of memory though. Check out a screenshot below:
  
  
  
  
  
• Pandora's Jar is a Java-based client that works similar to OpenPandora. As an added feature, it allows you to rip the songs as MP3s as you listen to them. I think this feature as great (albeit unethical) but I don't use Pandora's Jar simply because it uses Java (sorry to Java fans). Instructions on how to rip songs here.
  
• FoxyTunes is a Firefox and IE plugin that allows you to control your music player from your browser. The latest version supports Pandora. I don't use it though because it lacks the controls that OpenPandora does, and I don't want to leave Firefox open just to listen to music, with the memory leaks and all.

Labels: Internet radio, music, Pandora, PoW, Web 2.0

After five days of continuous Wget-ing, I have finally managed to download the entire Mozart collection: 2578 songs, 7.3 GB, and 7.5 days worth of music. That is sick. That's two DVDs worth of music from a single person.

Who wants a copy?

Labels: classical music, Mozart, music, WTF

Think of the phrase "circus music". What's the first tune that comes to mind? Undoubtedly, you thought of this piece: "Entrance of the Gladiators".

Entrance of the gladiators? You don't believe me? Listen to a MIDI of the tune first. That's the one you were thinking of, right? It is the "circus music" or the "clown music" (much like Jean Reno is the "French guy").

Written by the Czech composer Julius Fučík, "Entrance of the Gladiators" was originally written as a military march. Its original title and composer has faded into obscurity as people all over the world have become accustomed to associating the tune (particularly the first third of the song) with circuses and clowns. Nobody knows what could have led to this tragedy. Rather ironic considering that Fučík (left) looks like he could have made an awesome ringmaster with that mustache of his.


The next time you hear the tune, remember the title. Entrance of the Gladiators.

Labels: circus, classical music, music

I learned about this site a few months back on digg. It has a complete collection of MP3s of all of Mozart's compositions. I'm not really a fan of Mozart or of classical music in general, but I am trying to broaden my musical horizons.

I told myself back then that I'd download all of this some day, when our broadband connection at home got fixed. Well, it's finally fixed (yahoo!). So my next problem was: how do I download all of the MP3s on the site automatically? I surely wasn't going to manually crawl the site to download every link.

Luckily, there's a tool for situations like this: Wget. Linux/Unix users are more likely to be familiar with Wget, but I'm betting that the more recent *nix adopters don't know about Wget or what it's really capable of. Most Linux distros should already have Wget, but Windows users can download the binaries here. The nice thing about Wget is that you can use it to download entires sites, i.e., create an offline mirror of everything on a site: pages, links, images, files. You can read the documentation yourself and figure out how to do this, but I'm telling you right now how to download the entire Mozart collection:

wget http://www.mozart-weltweit.de/mozart00.htm -m

The "-m" switch basically tells Wget to crawl the entire site and download everything on it. Use "wget --help" to see all the neat options that you can use with Wget. The great thing about mirroring the Mozart music site is that you also get the HTML pages which give you a nice little directory that you can use to browse the selection.

It'll take some time to get all the MP3s. I'm not even done yet and I've been downloading the whole day. Mozart is a freakishly prolific musical genius; even he would be surprised to learn how many gigabytes of music he's created. I've only downloaded 1 gig and I don't think I'm even at one-tenth of the entire collection.

The more recognizable Mozart pieces are "Symphony No. 40 (Allegro vivace)" under "Later Symphonies" and "Eine kleine Nachtmusik (Allegro)" under "Serenades for Orchestra". Happy listening (and Wget-ing)!

(Where can I find the complete Beethoven collection?)

(Addendum: After five days of continuous Wget-ing, I have finally managed to download the entire collection.)

Labels: classical music, Mozart, music, tips, Wget