I was playing a dope mixtape the other day and a friend asked me where I get such dope mixtapes.

I answered Datpiff.com.

There is a ton of free material on there and it’s always changing. Find hip hop classics, old and new, mainstream and undaground.

“Inception” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Now making music under the name Starschreck and working on new project called Raised in a Spaceship. I’m putting some stuff on Last.fm, check it out!

Round One: The Scope

Pandora plays music in the Music Genome Project. Each song is tagged with musical characteristics by special people called “trained music analysts.”

Last.fm plays music that is uploaded by individual artists or labels. This means that there is a mixture of both big and small labels, signed and unsigned musicians.

Winner: Last.fm. The trained music analysts thing is cool, but it is not as scalable as user data.

Round Two: The Radio Interface

Pandora and Last.fm both have a stripped down feel to them when it comes to listening to their internet radio. Pandora shows album artwork and previous songs played. Last.fm shows user uploaded photos in a slideshow.

Winner: Tie. This is good because when I’m listening to music I’m usually doing other things as well. I’m in it for the auditory experience.

Round Three: Easy access to information about the song I’m hearing right now.

With Pandora you can click a link and open up a new window on your browser to view artist biography information.

With Last.fm you can instantly comment on any track you are listening to and see what others have written. With the Last.fm Scrobbler, artist biography information automatically comes up for every song played, even those not through Last.fm’s internet radio.

Winner: Last.fm. I like the idea that biographical information is already there for me to see. It’s almost like Last.fm is ready for me to be interested in what it plays for me.

Round Four: Bells & Whistles

Pandora is pretty lean. It works well at it’s most basic level.

Last.fm has a lot of information that can at times be overwhelming. Additional features like the Scrobbler are awesome, however at times it can seem bulky. This may have more to do with how music programs allow outside services like Pandora or Last.fm to integrate with them.

Winner: Pandora. I prefer the extra information of Last.fm, but if you are not used to parsing through it, it will seem like noise. Oh yeh, Scrobble is also a dumb word.

Post Fight Discussion

Scalability, interface, information, and clunkiness are issues that I am concerned with when it comes to internet radio. Last.fm beats Pandora here 3 to 2. I would hope so, because I prefer to use Last.fm when I want to listen to internet radio. I do not use it exclusively, but I wanted to take a look at why I am more interested in it.

Last.fm keeps track of what you play. I’ll admit that there is a big brother aspect to this. I’ll also admit that there are some songs I’d rather people not know that I listen to. There is one reason why it’s worth it, Last.fm gives you suggestions based on what sorts of songs you play. The more information you give it, the more information it gives you.

If you are still interested in iPod playcount information but do not use automatic sync, one way to do this is to use Last.fm. Sign up for a Last.fm account and download the Last.fm scrobbler to be used in conjunction with the iPod. Note that this does not record playcount information into iTunes, the scrobbler software pulls the information from the iPod and asks permission to pipe the information to the Last.fm server. The scrobbler also records plays in iTunes, so in the end all plays are sent to Last.fm. If you are not an iTunes user, the software can be used with other programs like winamp or windows media player.

Side note to the above point, if you do not ‘eject’ iPod from within iTunes, playcount information will not be pulled. If this happens the information is not lost, however it will stay on iPod until it is properly ejected.

It’s been an exiting year, a much more mature year of blogging than the first year.

Let’s take a look at some of the popular posts.

Distinguishing Features: What Kinds of Tags Does Pandora Use?. The most poplular post this year has been about Pandora, taking a look under the hood of Pandora’s Music Genome Project. You may know that you can type in the name of a artist/song and Pandora will generate a playlist of like music. Those decisions are based off of tags that are associated with each artist/song.

Touch Typing: Building Muscle Memory. Touch Typing is a free online typing class, full with lessons and typing games. There are many different typing methods, one of the slowest is the hunt and peck method, which method do you use?

The First Report of Injury. Official announcement of my 2nd solo EP released through the test tube netlabel.

Starschreck Meets Blagojevich. Just another casual encounter with one of the many famous people this blog is associated with.

What Kind of Music Website Do You Have? How do musicians present themselves online? What sort of directions do they chose to take and how do they utilize the internet for their purposes or nonpurposes? Starschreck takes a look at 150 websites and sees some patterns.

Thanks everyone for your support and let’s have another good year!

thanks to cyberdees on Flickr for the photo.

I just couldn’t figure out the assignment. I went back and forth, starting on a topic and working with a few bullet points and then throwing it out and thinking of a new topic. And then again. That’s when I learned an important lesson: Ask yourself Why?

Why was I having trouble with the topic? I gave the question some thought. It felt more than the usual “because it’s stupid.” Silence. Then it hit me… “because it’s not that simple.” It was the assignment itself that was the problem.

Why wasn’t it so simple? Well, I could write for hours about that…

I had my paper.

I’d like to flip that stat to this: Robots Digg Starschreck!

Sometimes I’ll see a SPAM comment that triggers pity. I start to think “hey this guy really tried to sneak past my SPAM filters, I mean he really put some effort into this, maybe I could authorize a SPAM post just this once.”

I think we all know that once you authorize one, then everyone is going to start knocking at your door asking you to authorize theirs. I mean I think some of these guys are just trying to SPAM blog writers and don’t even expect anything to get approved, wouldn’t want to confuse them.