Blip reminds me of Twitter a fair amount, although it's not really a conversational platform like Twitter can be. Blip is touted as a DJ platform, though I must admit, for me it's even more personal than that, I'm not that bothered about what you are listening to, if you catch my drift?

The thing is with Blip, you can search for singular songs, which once found are able to be streamed immediately, which does gives instant gratification, no doubt.

I've not come up with that many empty requests or "not founds" yet either, pretty impressive. The "Songs are hosted all over the internet by different servers and websites" which basically means you'll find just about everything.

I have found that a few songs I have "Blipped" have been removed a day later or so, more than likely that the website from where it has been streamed from noticed some leaching going on and removed it, or blocked access from Blip, I guess.

Each "Blipped" song contains a "Buy Now" link which is a standard Amazon affiliate link. It's a noble gesture to want to go off and buy a track, but I have to say many of the buy now options lead to something which is not what I am hearing. This may be due to some of my more varied musical tastes mind you.

I've not found a mobile portal for this yet, but then again, it is a Flash based interface which isn't going to cut the moby world, but if they or a similar service gets the moby market sorted this could be golden golden!

I do wonder how long this service will last, unless there is some hand shaking done between vested interests, as essentially we can listen to all the music we need to with a few clicks of a button, who needs to "own" music any more anyway?

Here is me Blip embed code, by all means "friend" me up, but I'll probably not friend you back, I'm too busy listening to my favourite songs.

Let me know what you think of the service.

Technorati Tags: amazon blip blip fm fm mobile music streaming blip fm fm blip music streaming mobile amazon

I’ve recently be spending a few moments here and there getting the schedule ready for The Summer Of Love Festival 07 in SecondLife, of course not entirely alone, I must extend gratitude to some wonderful helpers too.

What I have found during these couple of weeks is that there seems to be a number of musicians in need of some help when it comes to streaming music into SecondLife.

I thought that a posted video here on my blog would be the best place for that help, for those people who want a free solution who use the windows operating system.

The set up I use is Windows XP, Winamp and a Shoutcast Plugin, all free of charge, which of course is wonderful!

The concept is surprisingly simple, you simply capture the sound on your machine through Winamp, which sends the data (using the plugin) to a streaming server (you need to borrow one), and then that streaming server information is broadcast into a land parcel in SecondLife – simple eh?

Hope the video helps.

Technorati Tags: dsp land music musicians parcel secondlife shoutcast SL streaming tutorial winamp shoutcast secondlife streaming music

Net casting (in recent years known as podcasting), started for me, way back in the 90s.

I first had a web domain back in the 90s which was an audio service catering for musicians, classical and jazz mostly, I used to record a variety of performances and make them available on the internet for download, and some of these were to “show-off” new violin builds for example, by way of comparative recordings, kind of like A/B recordings. Of course back then this was a fairly time-consuming process due to restrictive speed connections.

Around 2000 I started Audiocourses.com as a post-graduate research project, as distance learning school for music production, sound engineering, and immediately made recorded voice content avaliable for download and streaming. Most of this audio was me giving tutorials in the RealAudio format, on topics such as music production, mixing etc. Being RealAudio format meant listeners could stream fairly easily from the site, RealAudio would select the bandwidth setting automatically for the user. Incidentally these early streams are still available on the Audiocourses.com downloads section and are dated to autumn 2002!

Throughout the early 90’s I uploaded more and more audio content, including such things as drum samples, sound effects and complete 24 track recording studio sessions. I then started audio blogging, which saw me using the telephone as an audio-blogging tool, I also rolled this service out for students, which enabled them to blog their thoughts simply by using a telephone, this was very popular, was quite a buzz chatting into a cell phone back in 2003 and having the content appear on a site as an audio file.

It is since the addition of the enclosure tag in RSS feeds that the concept of “podcasting” (a misguided name, in my opinion) somewhat “popularised” the concept of internet audio and video, but in essence the only thing that had changed (albeit an excellent change) was that content could be downloaded automatically. The fact is that audio/video content had been cast over the net for many years before this.

Having been “waist-deep” in audio content over the web for a number of years I had always toyed with the idea of a “radio show” for sometime (I did a number of radio style streams back in 98/99), but it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that perhaps a regular show might be damn good therapy for myself and provide added value to the Audiocourses.com site visitors. I’ve always been very keen to ensure clients and students have plenty of virtual community building tools, a distance learning school is all about a sense of something virtually powered, so AC Radio (formally AC Podcast) was born.

Since then I have also introduced some other audio casting services including a text to speech service on SLEDucating, and a soon to be active cast on Audana (both called podcasts, but yes I have issues with that). I also have pro-audio news converted to aggregated audio on AC.

Whilst Podcasting seems to be a current popular term I have now decided to come full circle and reject it, basically just using net cast, or radio, or stream, as to be frank 50% of my current listener’s just stream right off the websites, as they have for years. The other issue is that the word Podcasting is very confusing for non-tech people, (no pod needed). I'm not alone in thinking the term podcasting will be dropped in the future, I of course may be wrong, but Radio, or cast, is far more widespread and understandable which is my excuse for sticking with it, plus I may also actually broadcast some of my shows live, which gives some more validity to using the term radio, even though technically I'll probably not use radio waves, in the electromagnetic sense.

Recently I have been capturing sound in my car and calling these Car Casts, as well as a new fun brain dump called the Running Man Radio show, where I take a portable recorder out on my road roads.

Technorati Tags: audio broadcast casting casts ipod music podcasts radio recording streaming