AnyWhere.FM is relatively new on the scene, I stumbled upon this online music player / organizer / community tool, which I'm finding to be fairly worthwhile. It's like Windows Media Player, but online. You upload your mp3s and can then play them from almost any computer in the world. Other users can play them too, but only in "radio-station" style from your playlists. That is, the song order within a playlist is random, and one can only skip 6 songs in a list, to stay within the licensing agreements. This is much like Live 365, a "be your own DJ" site, but a lot easier to use. Live 365 has more DJ tools, but for simple playlist publishing, it's easy.
The site is a little buggy, some of the flash controls quit working (e.g. column sorting) and you have to refresh the page. About once an hour, the site will refresh itself ("update") and you have to resume what you were doing.
I've been slowly working on the tags for my mp3s, but you can do so with this online player as well. Unfortunately, you can't download your songs, so your local copies can't me updated.
Adding playlists couldn't be easier, and adding *to* playlists is simple drag n drop.
And finally, there are community features, including a matching function, to see who else has a significant number of the same songs in their collections. You can browse the other users and listen to their playlists.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
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The funny thing is I came across Anywhere.FM thanks to stumbling over it as well. In fact - it was one of the first things I came across stumbling - lucky me :)
ReplyDeleteI personally haven't had many problems with it refreshing and stopping me every hour, I've been able to play my music 6 hours straight without it hiccuping, although I have had my browser freeze on me once ;)
When it comes to tagging... I HIGHLY recommend Musicbrainz Picard Tagger. Its helped me tag some 7,000 mp3s of mine successfully (about 70% of my music library). You should certainly look into that.
There's some easter eggs throughout the program if you care to take the time to check it out ;) For example, click the red "beta" block at the top.
Anyhow, I'll see you back at your Anywhere.FM pad :)
-Zathman (http://anywhere.fm/zathman)
Also have you seen a service called MediaMaster, www.mediamaster.com. Like Anywhere, you can access you collection from anywhere, plus you can publish a widget streaming your music and publish to anywhere that you can embed HTML. There is also a Facebook app, and they just announced support that enables you to stream for free your playlists to any Palm OS Treo or Windows Mobile Phone. Check it out at http://www.mediamaster.com
ReplyDeleteCool! I'll check MediaMaster out. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteUPDATE: Anywhere.fm was bought out by imeem.com, and in November 2008 is being merged out of existence into imeem. They are still buggy as hell. The migrate process doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid that I will lose all the work I put into my playlists, and I've linked heavily to them.
Too bad their programmers are so incompetent...
OK, they fixed the migrate tool. I'm only partially disappointed. imeem has lots of new stuff, but I've lost some of the things that made anywhere.fm pretty good.
ReplyDeleteI could do without a lot of the social networking crap. There's so much of it, it's really hard to find your own damn playlists, let alone to play them.
(click on your name in the upper right, then scroll down the "music playlists" section and click on its title. You can't see all the playlists at once any more.
The familiar anywhere.fm playlist window is still somewhat availabe, with a lot of its better features gone. :(
It's under the "Create" option. You can no longer edit tags. When you upload a song, it looks to match it with something that has already been uploaded by somone else, and you are stuck with whatever stupid tags *they* gave it.
Not all my songs migrated. There's no way to now which ones are missing and have to be uploaded again.
Linking to your playlists is more full-featured, and probably less buggy. The URL is more complex and contains data that is unique to each instance, so you can't just edit a master copy. You have to generate one for every link.
And of course there a tons of commercials, including a ringtones one that doesn't make it clear that by clicking on its "steps", you are signing up for a $10/mo service on your phone bill. (It's in tiny grey print in a huge paragraph on non-descript text that is probably un-noticeable below the main screen on your browser.
Visitors can see all the song data in your playlists and choose which ones to play. Unforunately, not if they haven't registered with imeem. So linking from blogs isn't much of an option.
Once you are logged in, you can search the common pool of everyone's music and should be able to find almost anything and play it.