B. Mann Consulting

After being really happy with the Nokia Multimedia Transfer app for OS X to get music onto my phone, and photos off it onto iPhoto, I started looking to solve the "where to get new music" problem.

Around the same time, I was playing with the Nokia Podcasting app. Put simply, it is a podcast browser / downloader, which you can set to automatically connect to a network connection and download new podcast updates at a specified time. I set my phone to charge overnight, and set it up so that it would auto connect to my home wi-fi network.

Then I found Hypemachine. Yeah, yeah, I'm not really a cool trendy new music guy, and I *had* heard about it before, I just never really used it: it's a giant blog aggregator that tracks mentions of music and links to MP3s. It also exposes all this music blog aggregation as a podcast, with enclosures to the MP3 links. Not a traditional podcast at all -- it's whatever the Hypemachine has auto aggregated during that time period.

So, every morning, my phone is loaded with brand new music. It's eclectic to say the least -- last Friday featured lots of 4th of July-themed songs. The first time I set it up, I got some nice Catholic-rock-band tunes. Last night, I copied that music back to my computer after about 2 weeks of doing this. 63 songs survived my listening over that period, and I cut that down to about 40 that I would keep / give at least 3 stars to.

I'm listening to a lot more music on the go with this setup, and am being exposed to lots of "new stuff". So far, I bought the new Cold Play "Viva la Vida" album (definitely not a "long tail" band), as well as Ra Ra Riot both as iTunes Plus downloads. But the majority of the bands seem to be ones that I need to point you to their MySpace page to listen to their songs -- see Hooded Fang for one example.

It's been a fun experience so far, and I always look forward to what the next night of downloading will bring me. This whole listening to music on the go thing might really take off one of these days :P

Where do you find new music? Where do you listen to it? Where do you buy it?

It's been great to be sharing an office with the folks at Raincity Studios -- they're now in the other side of our office, since NowPublic moved out so they could grow their team.

Raincity has been adding new people, including long time social media generator Dave Olson. Dave sat down with me in the office and captured a podcast about the Drupal Association, Drupalcon Barcelona, and the Free The Net.ca project.

Dave's a master of podcasts, and Raincity Studios is now part of Planet Drupal, so expect lots more quality Drupal-related content from there.

Over at TorCamp, Alec Saunders hears that Rogers and Shaw may be blocking podcast downloads:

While at Torcamp I have heard from several sources that Rogers and Shaw are blocking podcast downloads.  After two to three downloads, the data stops.

I highly doubt this is true: I subscribe to several podcasts here in Vancouver, and am connected to Shaw. No blockage here. If this *is* true, it would be a major issue (kind of like throttling BitTorrent traffic). Alec, let's get confirmation on this, because it doesn't sound realistic right now.

Update: Patrick Dinnen left a comment, pointing especially to Apple forums where this is being discussed. Virtually all of the complaints seem to be limited to Rogers customers back east. The factor seems to be anything that downloads the same file from multiple servers -- which is consistent with Apple's use of Akamai, as well as P2P programs that use multiple download sources.