Yesterday Catholicgauze linked me to an Amazon offer, giving a free MP3 album of a live concert by an old favorite of mine, Dispatch. I picked it up, and was happy to see that Amazon now has an “Amazon Cloud Player” app for Windows 8:
The screnshot also shows a free album by another favorite of mine, French Teen Idol.
I recently passed 8000 plays on my Zune account, but my days in Zune player may be limited!
We’ve moved most of our computers to Windows 8 Consumer Preview, which includes a metro “Music” app for desktops, notebooks, tablets, and other devices. Below I’m listening to Jonathan Coulton, while I flip thru apps that are running the Classic app
I’ve now listened to seven thousand songs with the Zune Desktop Software.
I heard of the singer of the song played as a took the screenshot, Ingrid Michaelson, from Brendan Grant. I was playing “Nola” by Thao and Mirah, and he said “that reminds me of someone!” I’m glad, because Ingrid is quite the musician!
I love music, and my employer offers an interesting service called “Zune” which combines very good visualization software with the ability to use a music rental service. While I probably wouldn’t be using Zune to ‘rent’ music if I didn’t work here, I still would think it’s the best music visualization software I’ve encountered. Right now I’m listening to Silence! – The Musical, but as I listened to by 6,000th track on Zune, I was listening to Thao & Mirah, by Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn and Thao Nguyen.
Rock on!
Because of the variety of music I listen to with my ZunePass recent “heart songs” don’t show up in the visualitaion as quickly as they used to, but it’s still cool to catch these glimpses of some of what I’ve been listening to.
These day’s its mostly Christmas songs, by Mannheim Steamroller, Sufjan Stevens, and the McGarrigle Sisters, especailly. As I wrote this I’m listening to Winners Never Quit, a hard-to-categorize (reflective Christian post-rock?) album by Pedro the Lion.
A thousand more songs listened to with the beautiful Zune Player. Major contributions that appear for the first time because of the last 1,000 listens include:
Also be sure to check out the free album, Nettwerk Fall Music Sampler 2011, from Amazon.com.
This is a screenshot from my office’s Zune music player, as it played its 3,000th song.
Notable additiosn to Zune’s tile-based display since song 2000 including (the very easy on the eyes) Tata Young, Justin McRoberts, and multiple references to Jonathan Coulton’s work on the Portal video game series.
Another month, another thousand listens, apprently.
Immediately after I took this screenshot All Eternals Dark, Thing-a-Week Three, and Of the Blue Colour of the Sky came up in the visualization, but this is what it looked like during the 2,001st song, so this screenshot is what I’m going with!
After finishing my goal of listening to every song in my iTunes library this year, I’ve transitioned over to Zune. Zune and iTunes are comparable in their experience, and the choice of software depends on your choice of portalble music player (XBOX / Windows Phone 7 v. iPod / iPhone). In any case, I’ve now listened to 1,000 songs on the Zune desktop software, and thought I would share the visualization at the time:
Some of the better albums on the visualization are Departing, by The Rural Alberta Advantage, Easy Wonderful, by Guster, and The Age of Adz, by Sufjan Stevens. (Guiltier pleasures on the list are A Brief History of Rhyme by M.C. Hawking and I Love You by Tila Tequila.)