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Music Streaming Snapshot
Monthly Users According to Facebook - January 2012 Service Launch Date Monthly Users Spotify Oct 2008 13,200,000 Pandora Jan 2000 8,900,000 SoundCloud Oct 2008 2,500,000 Grooveshark Jan 2006 1,100,000 Bandcamp Sep 2008 990,000 MOG Dec 2009 200,000 Slacker Jun 2007 150,000 Rdio Aug 2010 70,000 Rhapsody Dec 2001 50,000 Google Music Nov 2011 1 (again, [...]
Universal's Audible Watermark
A while ago I posted my confusion about Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts. It turns out the artifacts are not due to compression, but a result of audio watermarks that Universal Music Group embeds in all of their digitally distributed tracks. This includes tracks resold in lossless formats. The artifacts appear on UMG tracks at Rdio, [...]
Google Latitude is Cool
Google Latitude is starting to look a lot like my original Stractor location tracking concept work. They have pie charts that illustrate where you spend your time; work, home, out and about. Google Latitude: Stractor: Okay, that's nice. Here are some other Stractor concepts...maybe we'll see some of these soon: http://www.butterscotch.com/news/168/Google-Continues-To-Improve-And-Streamline-Maps-In-New-Update
Music Smasher: Streaming Music API Mashup
Music Smasher is a smash up of popular music streaming service APIs. I developed it to simplify the task of searching across Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, and other catalogs to find out who has the music you love, giving you more information for choosing a streaming service. Music Smasher is currently hosted at mattmontag.com/smasher. Note that [...]
Weird Spotify Compression Artifacts
Spotify Artifacts Showcase I love Spotify. But I've noticed some weird artifacts on a few albums. It sounds like a fluttery warble noise in the midrange. It's most noticeable during big string or choir sections with broad spectral content. The problem seems limited to certain albums. The worst album I've come across is this Pascal [...]
Pandora and Flash Player, a CPU Hog? Really?
OK. I am using a Pentium 4 2.2 GHz machine, Chrome browser, and playing some Pandora tunes. When Pandora is in the foreground, Flash Plugin is using 50% CPU time. When I switch to another tab, Flash cools down to 10% CPU time. So just a tip there, hide that Pandora if you want your [...]
What’s Wrong with the University of Miami IT Policy
The University of Miami campus network and IT policy has problems. It's a big part of life for college students and faculty, so this is a call to action. Here are a few frustrating things that the IT department at Miami should try to improve. 1) University e-mail forwarding is prohibited You aren't allowed to [...]
A note to Digsby developers: Fix file transfers
Re: Digsby Blog - Striving for Perfection No Gtalk File Transfer = No Perfection. In order to revolutionize chat, Digsby must create a working file transfer solution for Gtalk. Trillian, Meebo, Adium. Many have attempted and many have Failed to answer the call for cross-protocol Instant File Sharing. Some more miserably than others. Whoever can [...]
Hacking Picasa Web Album URLs
I was messing around with Picasa Web Albums trying to get an embed URL for an image at just the right size. It turns out you can do some weird stuff just by messing around with the URL. Here's the format: http://[photo server].com/[unique image code]/[options]/[image name].jpg You can tweak the options to your liking and [...]
Chrome OS
When I first heard about Chrome OS, Google's browser-oriented operating system, I dismissed the idea. I thought it was stupid to build your computer architecture around Internet browsing. But my opinion is slowly changing. We are in a transitional period. All our favorite desktop applications have been creeping into the browser: www.hobnox.com - A Reason-like [...]
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