Musical Holocron

2015/10/08

LilyPond – Music notation for everyone: LilyPond... music notation for everyone

Learn more: LilyPond – Music notation for everyone: LilyPond... music notation for everyone

Labels: Delicious, download, free, music, music/artists, music/notation, technology, technology/software, technology/software/open-source

# posted by ArcoJedi : 01:38 0 comments

2013/10/01

ID3 Tag Suggestions Available from Google Music

Photo credit: Claudia A. De La Garza

One of the things that has always bothered me since the early days of mp3s (Napster era), I'd constantly find music files that were improperly or incompletely labeled. Sometimes the lookup service finds the wrong information at the time the CD is ripped. Sometimes a user types something by hand that is inaccurate. Sometimes the information is technically "correct" but has capitalization or situational issues. As a music collection grows and grows, it can get pretty difficult for us music fans with slightly particular preferences regarding accuracy. There have been services for this kind of thing, but I've never trusted any of them far enough to actually test them. What sounds promising is some that acoustically tag stuff in a method similar to Shazam or SoundHound, and then apply some filtering. But to my point of view, there's just no way to do this 100% heuristically (yet) and I don't want to devote huge swaths of time to organizing my music collection.

You know who should step up to get this right? Google. And lo and behold, they appear to be taking steps in that direction on Google Music. I noticed these "suggestions" started popping up recently and thought I'd verify they were widely available. See this post on an unofficial blog writing about Google: Google Play Music Offers Tag Suggestions. It is still quite time-consuming and prone to possible inaccuracies. But since a large portion of my music collection is migrating to Google Music anyhow, it is worth using.

Labels: free, music, music/artists, news

# posted by ArcoJedi : 00:51 2 comments

2008/11/24

Guns N' Roses Bring A Free Dr Pepper

My old school friends and I were big Guns N' Roses fans from 6^th grade on. I probably head-banged for the first time to Appetite for Destruction on a boy scout camp out. Later would come Helloween, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith and many others. But first and foremost for several years was GN'R.

You probably know the story. The band has been in and out of the limelight's edge for the last fifteen years. Only one of the original band members --the very personable and friendly Axl Rose-- is still active. But it's been long years since the release of a new album of original material. There has been one in the works the whole time, but it has been many times delayed from being released. Until yesterday.

All that you probably knew. What you might not have known was that the senior marketing team at Dr. Pepper made a promise that they'd give a free can of their soda to every American if GN'R released their album before the end of 2008. And I don't think they honestly thought it would happen. But it has! You can learn more information at the article on MTV Newsroom. However, if you want to sign up for your coupon you only have a few hours left. Originally, the coupon sign-up form was only going to be available for 24 hours. But they've extended it until 6PM EST today. Go!

Found via my friend Nikomas.

Labels: articles, free, friends, genre/classic-rock, genre/rock, history, music, music/artists, music/artists/guns-n-roses

# posted by ArcoJedi : 14:34 0 comments

2008/05/28

Play Music Catch

Here is an interesting mix of music into the action of a video game. In Music Catch, the notes of the piano ballad cause little star shapes, triangles and little flowers to shoot out of a rotating plane line. The player controls a circle icon with the mouse and gathers the dots by rolling over them. The blue or green shapes are worth a small bit of points, but the yellow shapes are worth a lot and also increase a point modifier. As the modifier increases, the player's icon increases in size. Red shapes are to be avoided, as they halve the point modifier.

This sounds pretty basic and infantile, but the game is fun and challenging. It could be good for kids but there is something simple here for everyone. The whole game lasts about five minutes, so give it a try today. Play Music Catch at Reflexive Arcade.

[ Reflexive.com - Arcade - Music Catch ]

My only mild complaint about this game is that there is really only one song. I think with more variety, the re-playability of this web game would be amazing. Still it's pretty cool as it is. Oh, and something surprising and fast happens for purple shapes but I'll let this be discovered rather than ruin it.

Labels: free, genre/ballad, kids, music, music/artists, video-games

# posted by ArcoJedi : 23:34 0 comments