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Dennis P. Osorio’s Blog

Technology, E-Activism, and Other Items of Interest

Archive for music

YouTube and Zamzar

This is my latest obsession for free music consumption. Zamzar.com is a free online service that does file conversions. Like doc to pdf, jpg to png, flac to mp3. You get the picture. Well, they now do videos from YouTube and Google Video.

Why is this cool? Let’s say you like a song (from the public domain, of course), but not enough to go get an album. You’ll probably be able to find it on YouTube. You can listen to it and grab the url. Go to Zamzar.com. Enter the url. Ask that it convert the video to mp3. Boom! There you go. You can now listen to it on your mp3 player.

Pandora, the radio, not the box

Here´s a cool free service. Free, streaming radio available online. Why is this cool? Well, they have a ton of music for starts. What you do is pick an artist or a song that you like. This creates a “station”. Then, it will find artists kind of like the one you started off with. As if Prince and all similar artists had a dedicated radio station. In fact, it´s kind of interesting to read the description of what you´ve entered. I entered Patrice Rushen and received a description of harmonies and vamping.

You can create a ton of stations. You can even shuffle among them all. When a song comes on, you can give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. This will refine the station to your tastes.

There´s ample opportunity to click on a link for a commercial transaction if you desire. This is easily ignored too, so it´s not like you´re bombarded with advertisements. This is, I´ve found, a nice way to hear music I wouldn´t have heard otherwise.

It all appears to be Flash-based. I haven´t found any urls for the music, so I haven´t made any attempts to download it.