Musical Taste Blog

spotify.com/

Kind of like the Itunes store except you can stream tracks all the way through. Nice!

I’m sure I’m way behind the curve on this one but have you seen this 8tracks.com

It kind of sounds gimmicky (make a mix with 8tracks) and looks generic in a kind of boring web 2.0-ey type way.

But the site is totally amazing!  Check it!

My first mix is embedded below.

Happy new year. They have quite a nice thing going on The Guardian website called Reader Recommends.  Nice idea - people recommend their favourite songs!  It’s kind of themed - so they’ll ask for recommendations on a particular topic.

There’s a list here of all the songs ever recommended (I guess up to that moment in time). A lot of familiar stuff here and a few things recommended at musicaltaste.com.

Just spotted this site. Kind of cool - music that’s apparently not available digitally anywhere else. Some nice stuff. MP3 format (320 kbps) with no Digital Rights Management.

Sounds OK right? It is, except it seems on the pricey side. You can by individual tracks for GBP 0.99. Whole albums seem to be priced the same way - ie an 8 track album will cost you GBP 7.92, but if you want a double album it will cost a bomb! Unless the site has recognised where I am via my IP address, it would appear to be a UK only thing, but I can’t verify this because the ‘About’ etc stuff on the site hasn’t been built yet!

Worth a look though. There’s clearly not really enough there yet for it to be useful, but with a more serious amount of music it could be pretty amazing.

Following a bunch of nasty attacks, I’ve had to disable the uploading of MP3 clips on musicaltaste.com

Even having done that I still get a lot of jokers/spambots signing up. 

The internet just isn’t the cuddly friendly place it used to be - it’s all about the cash! Very much at odds with this site…

I have a bit of a run of gigs coming up, which should be fun. Next up is Paul Haig, who recently started his first tour for 18 years with a gig in Edinburgh.  Sounds like it was a great gig and I’m looking forward to seeing him.

I meant to say, saw the great man at the Barbican last night and was suitably blown away. We had seats right at the front pretty much which made for some intense moments while the trumpet soloist really went for it!

There was Lalo (piano and conducting) along with the trumpet/trombone guy, a bassist, a drummer and a huge orchestra (the London symphony orchestra).  They played a mixture of latin jazz and soundtrack music.  Much of it had that amazing slightly scary discordent feel that a lot of Lalo’s string arrangements feature.  Hearing that close up was pretty special and the sound really surrounded us.

I was curious to see what kind of crowd would be at this sold out gig but it was hard to generalise really - I guess Lalo is so popular that it was just a mix of young and old. There were definitely a handful of beard stroking guys around my age and some 60s freaks, but a lot of soundtrack fans as well I guess.

Soundtrack-wise he played the Dirty Harry suite, an Enter the Dragon suite, and also a great The Fox.

Definitely one to remember…

Wow- I guess more and more people are getting time and/or money to do interesting stuff with music.  Mixwit is kind of like the muxtape thing I mentioned the other day but not quite as nice looking. Nice cassette turning animation as you listen though!  The link above is to a tasty latin jazz/afro funk mix that I happened on totally at random as the first thing I clicked on, which could be a good sign!

Jorge Ben’s ‘Mas Que Nada’ (1963) has been recorded a lot. I love the Sergio Mendes version but the Tamba Trio one is pretty great too. I also get a real kick out of hearing versions in other languages. Here are a few- one in French and one in German, and finally, a highlight, Astrud Gilberto’s version in Japanese!

 

 Isabelle Aubret - La Ville Est La [2:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 Astrud Gilberto - Mas Que Nada [2:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

 

 Blauer Montag - Mary Roos [2:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup

Isabelle Aubret apparently won the Eurovision song contest for France in 1963

An explosion of interest and blogging in the last couple of days for http://muxtape.com/, and you can see why.

It’s a simple idea (make an online mixtape) that takes advantage of some nice accessible technologies and makes you think - sure - I’ll do that.  Hey presto, you have a really nice music site up and running within a few days!  I made one but there are only a few tracks on it now.

The owner is doing some really quick development, adding new features daily.  The front page currently has some randomly (?) picked links to users, much like the first Musical Taste homepage did.  Except on Musical Taste you couldn’t listen to tracks, which is a big difference!

Muxtape is so elegant and appealing that it’s hard to imagine anyone kicking up a stink about it, but hang on a minute - 99% of the MP3s people are uploading are copyrighted!  So - it remains to be seen if Muxtape can pull off a YouTube and somehow deal with the legal problems later. I hope it can. I guess the more users it gets, the more likely that is…

Footnote: I had a similar idea once!: compare Radio Delicado with my muxtape…