Music Genres on Google Squared

Google Squared is a new Google Labs application for displaying search data in a more organized fashion than those regular ol’ search results.  For music collectors, this tool has the potential of being very useful for discovering musical genres.

Let’s say, for example, that you want to add more Rock to your collection.  A Google Squared search results for “Rock Music Genres” returns with many suggestions in a very organized view.

Having this detailed view saves you some time in cherry-picking through search results.  In a well-organized view you get to see all Rock sub-genres.  You’ll be able to tell from this view which genres you are missing from your music collection.

Good Music is Good Music

From time to time, I may have my music player on shuffle while a group of people listen to it.  Every so often, a song will come up that will make everybody in the room look at me with a quizzical look.  What just happened?  All of a sudden a song considered by many as “not cool” or “cheezy” happened to be next in the shuffle.  My reaction is always the same: hey “good music is good music”.  This is something I have learned to expect when playing my music of every single genre in random fashion for groups of people.

Here is someone else explaining the same situation:

Death Row Albums Now on eMusic

With Death Row record label now on eMusic, west-coast hip-hop classic albums such as Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (4x platinum), 2 Pac’s All Eyez On Me (9x platinum), and Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle (4x platinum) are now available at relatively cheap prices (as low as a quarter per song).

Death Row, specifically The Chronic, is responsible for establishing the west coast in hip-hop and popularizing the distinctive style of g-funk.

A good definition of the term “Music Genre”

A music genre is a category (or genre) of pieces of music that share a certain style or “basic musical language” (van der Merwe 1989, p.3). Music may also be categorised by non-musical criteria such as geographical origin though a single geographical category will often include a wide variety of sub-genres

The article explains the different attributes that make up a music genre.  The post continues to explain the subjectivity in separating music into genres.  Finally, the article also explains the necessity by some organizations, such as record labels, to cluster music into genres.

Read the complete article here.

musicgenretree.com update

After finding a suitable home/host/server for musicgenretree.com, I am ready to offer a sneak peek at the very first incarnations of the site.  Send me a note if you would like an invitation.

These first few versions of the application will simply offer the ability to traverse the genre tree.  In a few months, I will add the ability to get information on each genre and possibly add a community around the site.

One of the reasons I am offering an advanced sneak-peek is to get feedback regarding the overall look-and-feel and to get suggestions on the genre tree itself.

Vinyl to MP3s even easier

About a year ago, I posted my intentions to rip all my vinyl into mp3s using the ionAudio – Vinyl Recording USB Turntable.  Needless to say, I haven’t even started ripping my first vinyl record.  That might change in the near future thanks to a new turntable that makes it even easier and less time consuming to transfer all your vinyl into MP3s: The LP 2 Flash Turntable made by the same company, ion.  With this new generation of turntable, you simply set the record and forget it.  The turntable will automatically rip and will seperate the record in tracks when it senses silence between tracks.  All I need to do is add the MP3 tags afterwards to all the tracks.

After ripping all my vinyl into MP3s, all that will be left to do is to get rid of it.  I might sell all my vinyl records on eBay.  It seems that there is still a market for them.

soundunwound: good for artist information, that’s about it.

soundunwound is a new Amazon.com music site that has been curated with information from Amazon’s own music database, imdb, and musicbrainz.  This is a great site to find all the information you need on a certain musical artist.  Soundwound is artist-focused, not enough emphasis is placed on genres.

Genres appear on each artist’s page to describe them.  This site breaks down the genres in three levels (mainly, quite, hints of), as you will see in the following screenshot for Calexico.

clicking on a genre takes you to a description and top artists on that genre.  These are a few criticisms that I have come up with after playing around for a while:

• there is not one page where we can take a look at all the genres together in an organized fashion.  It seems that the only way to get to a genre page is to search for an artist, then click on a genre describing that genre.
• many of the genres seem to have no descriptions.  Really ? how much would it have cost Amazon to pay somebody to simply copy-n-paste from wikipedia ? It seems that the information for the populated genres has been retrieved from wikipedia – so why not complete them all, or most of ‘em ?

For finding artist information this site has potential – maybe even calling it the imdb for music.  However as a site for finding information about genres and discovering music based on genres it lacks some points.

120GB Zune

When it came time to purchase an MP3 player, I invested quite some time in researching which was the best player for me.  These were my requirements (in order of importance):

1. Large Capacity

2. Fast Desktop Software (one that will respond quickly even with a large collection.

The only two players I really took into concideration were the iPod 160GB Classic and the 80GB 2nd Generation Zune.  I ended up picking the Zune.   Even though, both players were similar in pricing, I ended up with the lower capacity Zune 80GB.  What really convinced me was Zune’s desktop software more than the player itself.  The desktop software is very fast with my current collection size (at about 70GB, I have way more than that, but i only import to the Zune player my tagged files).  It is also easier to import songs into the Zune software than the iTunes.  You merely place the file into the Zune folder and the software will automatically import it.

My current dilemma is that I am about 6GB shy of filling up my 80GB Zune.  I prefer to have *all* my files with me all the time.  Therefore, I will have to upgrade to a higher capacity player.  Just in time, I hear news that Zunes will come in 120GB in the near future.  Not a really big jump from 80GB, but at least it shows that they’re working towards higher capacity players.  I probably won’t invest in a new player for just 40GB – so I still have the problem in excluding some tunes from being synchronized with my player.  I will just have to wait to at least a 160GB Zune player before I concider replacing my 80GB one.

The Digital Music Lexicon

Over at Out Digital Music blog, they have started a series of blog entries to define the most commonly used terms revolving around digital music.  Yesterday’s term was “AAC” and today’s term was “Bitrate“, for example.  I highly recommend to anybody starting to collect digital music to follow this blog to get acquainted with the Digital Music lexicon.

Not one genre for Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.

I was randomly listening to my music collection when the next song in the queue came up to be: Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy.  I currently have this song under my “Rock” genre.  I don’t know what I was thinking when I assigned “Rock” for this song.  Anyways, my first reaction was to move it from rock to …. – then, i froze.  What genre is this song, really ? It has a dance groove, but the vocals are heavy on R&B, hmm…

After a quick google search, I found an article that decomposes this song and mentions its genre:

“Crazy” is not really gospel, that “Ha ha ha, bless your soul” line notwithstanding. Nor is it disco (despite the undeniable groove), or hip-hop (despite the presence of a rapper and a DJ), or a pure pop song (despite the monumentally catchy chorus). In fact, “Crazy” seems to float outside genre altogether, which helps explain its wide appeal—most every musical constituency feels comfortable claiming it. “Crazy” has landed on the pop, R&B/hip-hop, adult contemporary, and modern-rock charts. No other hit in recent memory has crashed as many radio formats.

heh.  I knew I wasn’t alone.  There are very few songs that are released nowadays that have a great appeal to audiences from multiple genres.  Popular music is more than 50 years old and many music variations have been tried.  It takes songs like “Crazy” to prove that there is still room for uniqueness in the music industry.  It’s no surprise this song made a huge impact in 2006  (#7 top song of the year).

As to my personal dilemma in assigning a genre to “Crazy”, well I just left it at Rock, for the moment.  As I have mentioned before, I don’t place much emphasis/time in genre associations in my digital music collection – I just pick whatever makes sense at that moment.