jamendo - music how it should be
: free easy fast open :
I am not really the music freak - in fact I have only ONE Mp3 on my computer (yes one). Searching for music never appealed to me (lost time) and I am not so much into big bands to justify any "stealing" or such. Mostly I hear some webradio here and there or just enjoy the silence.
But occasionally I have been craving for that special music - that music that would make a bad mood better or bring back old memories or would set me up for a specific task. So where would you go for that?
I stumbled across last.fm. There you can specify what you wanna listen to and they make a playlist for you. Sadly the "smart" playlist thing that I was really interested is only available to subscribers who pay money and there desktop app sucks bad enough (crashes, kernel panic and stuff) to make me not endorse this.
Today I looked for Creative Commons Punk Music and through some obscure spanish websites I ended up on jamendo. So the name sounds like a bad dot com memory (wasn´t there something called jumundo ones?) the website ROCKS. So the design is not the most beautiful of all it does actually work and is quite simple enough. EVERY music on there is under Creative Commons. You can listen to tracks and albums, put together playlists without downloading a single song (thats cutting it for me!) or download whole albums through bittorrent (direct download would be better but at least ALL the albums I downloaded worked out of the box). It has the whole w3b.two.point.x integration with making friends publish you playlist to blogs (thats actually quite cool!) clouds of tags and all teh other stuff that you would expect in a community site - at least all this is very unobtrusive and the main thing of listening to music in the first place is middlecenter so you are not getting too distracted. Also you do not have to create an account to use the service! Also there seems to be LOT of music on there! Not just one genre but everything you can imagine.
I think this will be a site you will hear much more about in the short future - best one so far in my opinion from a non musiclover perspective that is.
Comments
Hi ! This is Laurent from Jamendo !
Your blog entry rocks ! I'm happy that a non musiclover find his second mp3 on Jamendo ...
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Laurent
Posted by: lkratz | 2.11.07 16:35