Dragontape – When it comes to video playlists, YouTube has always been my first choice. But that’s until they’ve decided to change their user interface yet again (about a month ago), and then all hell broke loose. Sure, it looks nice, but I still haven’t figured out how to set a continuous play mode for my playlist -they had it before but decided to take it out this time around- and this is not what I’d expect of YouTube.
Luckily there’s Dragontape, a swanky new video playlist maker/player on the scene, offering great service plus added stuff YouTube is currently lacking. Simply type in your artist name, song or other keyword into the site’s search box, find the video you’d like to add to the list and drag it to the desired location along the playlist row (see screen shot). Needless to say, everything here is dragabble, you can re-order the videos on the playlist, drag the entire playlist back and forth to rewind or forward the videos and loads more.
Dragontape has superseded YouTube in my video playlist book, and from this day forward, this is the service I’ll be using to enjoy online music videos. Highly recommended.
Bandcamp – Where do new music artists and bands go to publish their music online? MySpace for the most part. It’s not a bad service; there’s the textual content you can publish as a band or a performer, chat with fans, and upload your music using the MySpace music player. However now there is a much, much better alternative. I dare call it the best online solution available for upcoming musicians, singers and bands.
Bandcamp truly is the ultimate virtual stage for musicians, bands and singers seeking professional and effective publicity, not to mention interaction with their fans. The music advertisment dominance by MySpace has come to an end, succeeded by a comprehensive multi-functional, multi-opportunity, beautiful music hub for artists and bands. Bands are provided with an array of tools including visitor statistics, excellent sound quality music player, music sales platform, different music download formats your fans can choose from, mailing list and loads, loads more.
Why settle for the mediocre when you can get the absolute best in every possible aspect? Bandcamp should be your 1st choice. Actually, your only choice. See the screen shot of a featured band called Mars Argo I came across Bandcamp, and also be sure to check out the site’s video which shows Bancamp’s power in a nutshell.
Rdio – Web radio is a field All My Faves is quite familiar with because we listen to lots of music while we work at the office, and we make extensive use out of the web radios out there. See our Web Radio faveline on the homepage to explore the best ones. Rdio can also be classified under this category, but it offers so much more than what its counterparts do. In addition to creating your own playlists, you can explore music collections of other users, add these users to your page, see what artists are currently hot on the site, and loads more.
What makes it all very fun and creative on Rdio is the beautifully designed and well executed interface. To get started, provide your email to get a sign up invite (signing up is free). Once you’ve signed up find a random user profile and check out his or her Heavy Rotation list. Not sure what that means? It will all become clear in a matter of seconds.
P.S. Rdio also offers a mobile app which makes music on the go as easy as hitting the play button. Be sure to take advantage of it.
YouTube to MP3 Converter – Get any song you want on your PC, Mac or mobile device with the cool YouTube to MP3 Converter. This site has found a way to make it easy for you to get whatever song you like, using YouTube videos. All you have to do is go to YouTube, copy the URL of your favorite video, and paste it on the MP3 Converter site. Wait for some 20 seconds and the MP3 file will be ready for download. It’s as simple as that.
I gave it a try with a lesser known yet just as amazing Jonny Cash song Tennessee Stud. It worked wonderfully.
Muziic – Music and surfing online have practically become one and the same to me. I spend hours on the Web on a daily basis, and unless I’m watching a video, there’s always music playing in the background. When I learned that a music hub was joining last week’s Weekly Faves, I was excited to check Muziic out. So, what’s my verdict? I think Muziic is a great music center worth exploring; it has an easy to use interface, a nice stack of music consumption options, and the advertisements’ presence on the site is kept to a minimum.
On the other hand, there are some major downsides to Muziic. The first and most important in my opinion is the inability to browse songs or artists by genre. The same applies to the radio stations listed on the site. The second hitch I was surprised to find was that all the radio stations you can listen to on Muziic are from the US only (Caribbean and Puerto Rican stations included). I feel that’s a shame because the Muziic community has much to gain from being able to tune in to foreign stations as well.
All in all, Muziic is a great music stop, but I think in terms of personal use, I’ll stick to Blip.fm and my YouTube playlist. Sure, Muziic offers cool features like web/desktop players and a cool Facebook app, but these didn’t persuade me to change my online music consumption channels.
Hands Symphony – This ingenious website by the American Heart Association has come up with an uber-cool way of advertising hands-only CPR. Soon as you enter the site you will see thumbnails of different hand actions, each producing a unique sound or rhythm. Called the Hand Symphony, this low tech music mixing platform lets you create cool tracks by choosing any combination of the hand sounds. Choose between the Dance, Hip-Hop and Latin effects on the right to get a nice background tone that suits your mixed creation.
So what’s the point of having this Heart Association site, showing the wonderful sounds made by human hands? Well, if you think about, another wonderful thing hands can do is Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation or CPR. It’s a great way to raise awareness of helping out by learning a simple life saving procedure, using no other tool than both of your hands. Here’s how.
Back a while ago i wrote about a useful music service called SeeqPod. Ever since i have been using Seeqpod for all my music discovering needs.
Then came Blogmusik (Version 2)! Blogmusik has been around for a while now (and featured on AllMyFaves ever since we launched). It is another ad-supported streaming music service.
Recently, Blogmusik launched a new version of their site that allows you to search for music and play songs and albums on demand. The selection is amazing – that’s because all the music in the service is uploaded by their community. The legality of the service is a little skatchy but Blogmusik claim to be completely legal by saying.
“All tracks abailable to the user of the Blogmusik have been thoroughly analyzed by our song recognition engine. Each title you’ll upload will be analyzed, if a track matches an official release then it will be available to the community. This process takes a bit of time and is mandatory to pay the artists. If a track is not recogized, it’ll only be available for you through the ‘My MP3’ section. You’ll be able to share these songs through the ‘Blog Share’ section.”
 The flash user interface is very intuitive and elegant. In order to search your favorite artist just type in the name of the artist/song into the search box and a nice comprehensive list will be available for immediate listen. After selecting the song you can interact with the service by viewing the full details of the artist, listen to the complete discography or just make yourself a playlist with all your favorite songs. If you can’t find your favorite song you can always upload it to the site and have it on your playlist.
Blogmusik is an amazing music service which i strongly recommend. Below i added myfaves playlist for your listening pleasure. Let me know what you think about the service or the playlist in the comments. Enjoy.
Although SeeqPod has been listed on our web radio category ever since AllMyFaves was launched. We found it more then appropriate to list it as one of our Weekly Faves. As well as adding a blog post about this amazing service.
SeeqPod is a great music service that lets you search for any song and stream it in a fair quality. If you sign up to the site you can save any song you find to a playlist and share it with your friends or embed it to your website (As you can see at the bottom of this post).
I love the fact that i don’t have to download a song, and that my playlists are accessible from any place in the world. If you love music you should give SeeqPod a try, you won’t regret it. SeeqPod
Enjoy
Here is my recently discovered songs playlist: