For those who wish to enjoy online the potent mix of glory and humiliation that karaoke brings, tokStar represents a promising new development. Choose your song, enter your name, enable your camera and microphone, wait your turn, and you’re up and running on its virtual stage, singing your heart out for the voting pleasure of…
Have you ever wondered what goes on at a Music Hack Day? We’ve covered plenty of them — including some of the stunning variety of music apps created at these events — but this video from Eric Steinhardt of The Echo Nest will give you an idea of what they’re all about far more quickly: Disclosure:…
What if someone sliced Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” into tiny little pieces which you could sort, play with your mouse, or assign to computer keys, thereby allowing the entire song to be reconfigured at will? Wonder no more. Bohemian Rhapsichord, created at Music Hack Day Boston this past weekend by Paul Lamere, director of developer platform for…
One of the odder apps to emerge from Music Hack Day Boston this past weekend is Mustachiness, which turns any song into a mustache as part of an effort to raise money to fight prostate cancer. Clearly, this requires explanation. First, the user searches the site by artist or song, after which this web app…
(We’re reposting this one in advance of Valentine’s Day, just in case you’re looking for someone.) Are you dating? More specifically, are you dating a music fan? Don’t talk about your undying fealty to Nickelback, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, or any of the other artists mentioned above. Tastebuds.fm, which promises to match people based on…
Facebook’s big push into digital music could be a boon to music services, artists, and the fans, because it can provide the “connective tissue” that has been sorely missing from the industry for well over 10 years. Microsoft’s Zune promised us “The Social,” but nobody bought the hardware and now it’s gone. With Facebook music,…
The big digital music news of this season is clearly that Spotify and other music service integrated with Facebook to create something like a legal version of Napster, where friends can listen to what their friends are listening to without a lot of friction (now with more privacy controls). But Spotify is itself a platform on…
We were mightily impressed by The Wub Machine the first time around, but now that its creator Peter Sobot spent his 24 hours at Music Hack Day Montreal creating a new version, we’re even more tickled with the way this web app remixes any MP3 on our hard drive automatically in seconds. The Wub Machine…
From the “Because You Can, That’s Why” department comes a web app from Music Hack Day Montreal that lets you draw a line by dragging dots around on a nice-looking graph, indicating the loudness (basically, volume level) of the song you want to hear. By matching your drawing against the loudness profiles of one million…
It’s a popular debate among digital music insiders: Which is better at suggesting music, humans or machines? On the 100-percent-human side, you’ll find Pandora and iTunes Genius. The former relies on musicologists to assign characteristics to songs to create its popular user-customizable artist stations. Apple’s iTunes Genius, like Netflix’s movie recommendation algorithm, relies on collaborative filtering….
Ringtones, once thought to be the salvation of a beleaguered record industry, are no longer huge business, in part because people can make their own ringtones now. Yes, anyone can make a ringtone in iTunes. But you really have to be somebody to remix your own custom ringtone — somebody who has Mashtone, that is. Released on…
Depending on who you ask, the musical genre known as “dub step” is either an ingenious synthesis of drum n’ bass and two-step garage or horrible noise. Either way, it’s fun to talk about. “I like dubstep,” admits The Wub Machine creator Peter Sobot. “There, I said it.” The Wub Machine, an open-source Python app (code…
“If you like X, you might like Y.” So say today’s recommendation algorithms, which guide our movie rentals, the music we buy or stream, the books we read, and so on. Recommendation is big business, because it takes the data trail we leave behind as we wend our ways through the world of media, and…
We tried to think of a way to talk about the new SwingIt app without invoking the old saying, “It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing,” but we failed. If you want the songs on your iPhone to “mean” something under the aegis of that saying, we have just the app…
As anti-government protests rage in Bahrain, the mood of its citizens is “triumphant” and “warlike,” if the music they are listening to is any indication. The most popular song in Bahrain within the past hour or so according to Last.fm is Fates Warning’s “The Ivory Gate of Dreams pt. 3,” a heavy metal song that…
