Summer is almost upon on us! It’s a time for picnics, hiking, sports, water parks, and, for those with the time, boundless fun. More importantly, where I am concerned, it’s music festival season. From now until the last leaf falls from the trees, all over the northern hemisphere, millions of music fans will travel long…
We’ve just received word of a promising-looking new online music outfit out of Australia whose main premise is to help bands sell tickets to online shows, which they can then webcast using their own equipment to fans worldwide, or just in specific regions. PlayFi is a fairly standard online music store that lets fans set…
(This is a guest post by James Martin of Midemblog.) The winners of TNW Conference’s hackathon in late April tackled a common, but as-yet-unaddressed problem for format-shifting music lovers: What do I do with all those CDs on the shelf that I don’t listen to anymore? Covify’s solution: rather than laboriously enter each album name into Spotify, why not show my…
At first glance, This American Life and OK Go don’t have much in common. The former is a talk radio show known for its funny and touching stories about human connection, and the latter is a rock band known for its sugary hooks and music videos about dancing on treadmills. A closer look reveals a…
At its San Francisco headquarters, Rdio recently held its first-ever hack day — a marathon event where coders build stuff that works, fast. Most hack days, including the one our editor just attended in Sydney, are open to the public and consist of programming wizards getting together over a 24-hour period and building a slew…
Yes, it’s true: I flew about 25 hours each way from New York to attend Music Hack Day Sydney last weekend, and have written up just about every app and hack to emerge from it over the course of the week. These Aussies and the occasional New Zealander or Englishman produced some really great hacks,…
If you’ve already heard of the social cross-service music app for the desktop, Tomahawk, you already know how cool it is. Freelance developer Syd Lawrence, the same man who brought us the frivolous This Was My Jam, donned his thinking cap to build Toma.hk, a simple-to-use web app that lets anyone embed music on blogs or link…
First, let us note that you cannot yet use Soundtastic, built by Eric Bae at Music Hack Day Sydney this past weekend. But we witnessed a fully-functional demonstration, and it was pretty impressive. Bae likens his creation to “StumbleUpon for music,” and in a way, he’s right. Soundtastic mines your Facebook page for your Likes, then starts…
Dylan Wood of Serato, which makes the industry-standard DJ setup that lets people the playback of MP3s as if they were vinyl records, put together this show-stopping music hardware hack at Sydney Music Hack Day in a single weekend: 8Bit Serato VJ. Once again, a Music Hack Day has made me wonder why I became…
It’s a problem that exists all around the world: Radio stations can only play on song at a time, and those songs tend to be the ones that a person or algorithm has already decided is worthy of airplay. We all know there’s plenty of great new stuff sitting there, but it’s not always easy…
Nobody likes missing out on the big gig, whether due to a prior commitment, lack of funds, or scarcity of tickets, as with the recent tours by Kraftwerk and Pulp. Wish You Were Here, developed at Music Hack Day Sydney, is a simple web app that promises to alleviate some pain on the part of…
We were mightily impressed with the music apps created at Music Hack Day Sydney — the first such hackathon ever to be held in the southwestern hemisphere. The latest to float our boat: Ivy, a web app that lets friends or coworkers add songs to a group playlist that they can all hear at the same…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — The sound designers who make our videogames, plays, movies, television shows, and so on face a Herculean task when it comes to finding the right door slams, thunderclaps, and so on: They have to trawl through massive sonic databases looking just the right scream or creaky door sound, to enhance scenes on…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Most Twitter bots drive us insane with demands to buy tooth whitener or win free iPads. This one just wants to play you the music you want to hear. It really couldn’t be much simpler: just enter an artist name, or some text with the artist name in it, and send that to…
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — Raspberry Pi is a fairly raw computer that a bit larger than a credit-card that costs $25, and which hackers can turn into a wide variety of things. It’s a blank canvas, making it perfectly suited to the hardware hackers at Music Hack Days such as the one happening today here in…
