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Gnomoradio: Creative Commons Music Sharing 147

Posted by michael from the share-the-love dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I just stumbled upon Gnomoradio, a file sharing jukebox based on Creative Commons licenses. This program looks like a garage band's dream come true! It recommends songs based on each user's ratings, and has the capability to share them. Announced less than a year ago, the program has already made a great deal of progress, as can be seen from these screenshots. I downloaded the Debian package, and aside from a few interface quirks, the program works flawlessly. Is this the future of digital music, or should we be looking for something less centralized?"
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Gnomoradio: Creative Commons Music Sharing More

Gnomoradio: Creative Commons Music Sharing

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  • similar to irate (Score:5, Informative)

    by iamplupp ( 728943 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:51AM (#10213290) Homepage
    This seem to be based on the same concept as irate [sourceforge.net]

    • The real problem is splintering (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dpilot ( 134227 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @12:31PM (#10214253) Homepage Journal
      Now we have gnomoradio, irate, and somewhere else they mention magnatune.

      Forget the programs, we need the standards. Isn't that what we've been saying about the Web and file exchange.

      These buggers all need to interoperate. I haven't looked in detail at all of them, but let's say that gnomoradio has hit the key points:
      1: publish the music
      2: publish the license - keep it legal
      3: ratings feedback
      I'd say we also need
      4: option to send money/payment/exchange to the artist

      We need standards, and let gnomoradio, irate, and magnatune all run on those standards. Then pick the one you like, that runs on your platform.

      3 disparate systems splits the catalog, and it's going to be tough enough to reach critical mass, as it is.

      Some sort of license check is necessary as a fundamental part of the infrastructure, to keep the ??AA of their backs.

      Provisions to pay the artist are a good idea. I wonder if percentage-wise voluntary payment works better or worse than spam.
      • With Magnatune & e-gold, we have 4. (Others are welcome too! I'll click some e-gold to anyone who sends me an account number to show Slashdot users how it works.) What I like about Magnatune is the deal for artists is SO much better than the RIAA quintopoly's deal it's not even funny... It's my sincere hope that voluntary payment can work, but I need programmers' help to achieve this goal. Thanks.
        JMR

      • One standard we do have: Creative Commons. Through CC licenses, iRATE radio (the unstable build, at least) recognizes music from Magnatune, displays the logo, and that way the users can know that it's not only legal to listen to this music, they can also legally burn it and share it with friends :)

        I agree, we need more standards, but I think progress will be done in that direction. We all will benefit from it.

  • How long will this last? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nizo ( 81281 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:52AM (#10213302) Homepage Journal
    This looks awesome, but how long before the RIAA starts feeding copyrighted music into the system and then gets it shut down? Things like this have to be their worst nightmare.

    • Re:How long will this last? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bizpile ( 758055 ) * on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:00AM (#10213378) Homepage
      This looks awesome, but how long before the RIAA starts feeding copyrighted music into the system and then gets it shut down? Things like this have to be their worst nightmare.

      Even for /. that statement seems a bit paranoid. I doubt that the RIAA would try to entrap people that are legally trading music the RIAA doesn't own when they have plenty of people actually illegally trading music they can go after.

      • Re:How long will this last? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tolan-b ( 230077 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:07AM (#10213436)
        It threatens their ditribution monopo^H model.
        • Yeah, because I'm sure that use of Gnomoradio is going to cut a huge dent in the number of people listening to RIAA music. After all, if history has shown us anything, it's that when given the choice, the teeming masses have always chosen to listen to free independent music rather than illegally downloading the latest Britney song.

      • Re:How long will this last? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tsg ( 262138 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:08AM (#10213439)
        Even for /. that statement seems a bit paranoid. I doubt that the RIAA would try to entrap people that are legally trading music the RIAA doesn't own when they have plenty of people actually illegally trading music they can go after.

        Unless their primary goal is to protect their obsolete business model, but they wouldn't do that....
        • Unless their primary goal is to protect their obsolete business model, but they wouldn't do that....

          I think the RIAA is not really concerned about online communities like this one. Things like GarageBand.com [garageband.com] have been around for a long time and the RIAA is not sweating it. Things like this make it easier for an RIAA label to sign a band. The band will be more professional, will already have some knowledge of marketing itself, and will have some sort of proven success to show that they can create a "bu

          • I think the RIAA is not really concerned about online communities like this one.

            They will be if this becomes popular.

            Things like this make it easier for an RIAA label to sign a band.

            Things like this make it unnecessary for a band to sign with a label. And that's really the crux of the matter. The recording industries business model has been the creation/promotion of superstars and the selling of plastic disks. The plastic disks are no longer needed and sites like this make promotion available to b

      • Re:How long will this last? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gcaseye6677 ( 694805 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:19AM (#10213552)
        The RIAA has a history of trying their hardest to stop ALL online music distribution. Remember the early suits against the makers of Diamond RIO MP3 player? The thing couldn't even copy music, but they sued simply because they wanted to stall digital music. Then there were all of the lawsuits against MP3.com which didn't even carry RIAA music, but it was theoretically possible that it could be used for copyright infringement, so their lawsuit said. Like I've said all along, the record labels aren't so much bothered by kids downloading Britney Spears songs; what scares them is a digital distribution model so efficient that a band decides to use it rather than sign over their souls to a record company.
      • Even for /. that statement seems a bit paranoid. I doubt that the RIAA would try to entrap people that are legally trading music the RIAA doesn't own when they have plenty of people actually illegally trading music they can go after.

        It's not a matter of legal; it's a matter of might.

        RIAA can pour money and resources into shutting it down and going after users, as long as they insinuate that there *must* be some copyright material being traded.
      • I would think this is worse for the RIAA, if it catches on. Like Microsoft, who turns a blind eye to widespread piracy but has secret Hallowe'eny-type meetings on how to covertly kill One-Percent-Of-The-Market Linux (through SCO, etc.), the RIAA knows that piracy of their music is not as bad as people ditching them completely to pirate OTHER people's music. Irrelevancy is their greatest worry right now, not piracy. And rightly so; they're easily replaced. At least piracy means they're still relevant.
    • ...but how long before the RIAA starts feeding copyrighted music into the system and then gets it shut down?

      More likely some twitwit publishing a song full of samples. Gnomoradio is set apart in that they don't offer any content directly, it's merely a pointer to material hosted on other web servers. And it does a license check for a CreativeCommons license, although I don't know how thorough that check is yet. I'll find out when they spider my music site.

      Even RIAA would have to tread carefully. Th

    • Maybe I'm naïve but seems like they can't get away with that. Every song has its license encoded in RDF. From the announcement [gnomoradio.org]: "This will be based on the great work that the Creative Commons project has done in machine-readable licensing in the open RDF/XML formats. (A step closer to the semantic web? Kewl =)

      <riaa:masterPlan><![CDATA[

      Put bogus license information on songs;

      Track the song's spread by unsuspecting users [muuuhahaha];
      Sue people who thought they were downloading free music

  • Only time... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StevenHenderson ( 806391 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [nosrednehevets]> on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:52AM (#10213304)
    Sure this is fine for the garage bands, but it will never catch on with the "mainstream" bands. This is for one reason. No money.

    Just as mp3.com used to be a great resource for me to find bands, the bigger artists tried to get in on it, but would never allow songs for download. Especially with the widespread adoption of "legit" music stores, I doubt this will catch on outside of indie groups (which is where I will continue to get my music).

    • Make it airborne, as in radio (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's great as an "incubator". It can serve the same purpose as local gigs with small audience, which is still a major step in order to become mainstream.

      Bands could publish here not complitely polished versions of their songs to test audience reaction and feedback.

      However, the major breakthrough could be to get a P2P filesharing system "airborne/wireless" so that people could listen to the song with the same way as they do it now with FM radio.

      It's still really the FM radio - beside MTV and clones - whic
    • Well, it certainly won't fly for me, because it won't play on my Deb unstable default config.

      • I was already pissed that it was going to be so tightly tied to GNOME, and I tried to build it anyway. No go, even after installing *every* package it requires. Something's wrong somewhere, obviously.

        What I'd like to see is their backend factored out into a cross-platform library (note when I say cross-platform that does not mean it can require GNOME on Linux and still be cross-platform, because GNOME is a platform and depending on GNOME libraries means you're tied to a platform). It would be trivial at

    • Sure this is fine for the garage bands, but it will never catch on with the "mainstream" bands. This is for one reason. No money.

      Some bands would like to share music freely ( == advertisements) and make money on concerts.

    • Sure this is fine for the garage bands, but it will never catch on with the "mainstream" bands. This is for one reason. No money.

      I agree that this will likely be a backwater of smallish bands without some kind of payment scheme. What would be cool would be something like a $10/month subscription where 1-5% of the money went to the groups running the software/servers and the rest of the cash went to the artists based some kind of (number of downloads)*(average listener rating) scheme. Everyone gets paid, an

      • I agree - this is an excellent idea. Something such as if the top 40 songs on mp3.com paid out to their artists would have worked well. However, if you introduce fees, then you are no longer competing with other free sources and downloading, but also online music stores. Unfortunately, even though people like you and I would pay for something like this to actually get good music, the vast majority would rather spend the money on a Napster streaming subscription to get their precious Britney and such.

  • Centralized is good if content is legal (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jonesboy_damnit ( 773676 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:53AM (#10213312)
    As per topic: it seems to me that centralization is a good thing when no copyright violations are taking place. It allows easy sorting/searching/etc. based on data that is easy to find (the central server) - I think this is a great thing for indy/garage/etc artists looking for another place to promote themselves.
    -Matt
    • As per topic: it seems to me that centralization is a good thing when no copyright violations are taking place. It allows easy sorting/searching/etc. based on data that is easy to find (the central server) - I think this is a great thing for indy/garage/etc artists looking for another place to promote themselves.

      Funny how now we now assume something is illegal unless proven otherwise, instead of the opposite.

  • ...yes, this does sound pretty cool. Maybe we'll finally be able to make it out of the garage!

  • Asked and answered (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @10:55AM (#10213336) Journal
    Is this the future of digital music..?

    No, because few people want to listen to indy music.

    The future of digital music is giving the RIAA another buck, via Apple or Napster or whoever, to listen to your favorite songs in yet another proprietary format. One for your portable player, one for your PC, one for your car.

    That's just the way it is, like it or not.
    • Thats the future, and it is here. Just because Uncle Tim and Aunt Martha buy iTunes for .99 a song, doesn't mean I can't still get all of my music free from eMule, BitTorrent, etc. The p2p community will always be a step ahead.

    • Re:Asked and answered (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Thunderstruck ( 210399 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:02AM (#10213402)
      History is nothing if not cyclical. I've often lamented that local music is so hard to find now-a-days, and I honestly can't believe I'm the only one. For all but the last 200 years of human history, music was played live by local talent. Now, we have better technology and more people... there should be more local music rather than 10,000 radio staions all owned by clear channel with the same 35 song playlist. I for one welcome our new music source.
      • "I for one welcome our new music source."
        You forgot "loverlords"
      • http://www.localband.net/
      • Actually history goes through periods of being cyclical, then periods of not being cyclical, then periods of being ...

    • Re:Asked and answered (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ignignot ( 782335 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:10AM (#10213455) Journal
      I think a better way to look at this is to say "is this the future of radio." Instead of the broad sweeping "...future of digital music." Ultimately the RIAA doesn't like things like this, but clearchannel must be sweating hard. They can see the chopping block, and maybe someday their head will go on it. Same thing goes for virgin records stores, sam goody, etc. The whole distribution network is getting beat up.
      • ClearChannel is already shaking because of a new radio format with disc jockeys who don't scream, who actually know about music, don't talk over songs, don't play songs on top of one another, play 5 minutes of commercials an hour, and have 2000+ song playlists.

        • You listen to KLBJ too? ;)

          Seriously, the two interesting complaints I've seen are "Not enough local bands" and "ClearChannel". Try living in Austin sometime. KLBJ has a good, solid mix of local bands, and they aren't clearchannel and never will be. (If they become clearchannel, expect rednecks to develop suicide bombing tactics)

          The soul of a Texan is independence.

          • You listen to KLBJ too? ;)

            Actually, I'm in PA. I heard a story about them on NPR. The sample playlists they gave sounded like they had hacked into my computer and stole my iTunes library, so I was intrigued. A true 'driveway moment.'

            • :) KLBJ is awesome. They had an internet stream at one point, you might be able to find it if you hit their website. My only real caveat with it is that it required internet explorer to work.

              Ok, I checked, and they don't stream over the internet any more. :( Sucks, but you can at least visit their website [klbjfm.com]. Naturally I recommend visiting their lame website so you don't promote excessive usage of flash.

              And a slight political word: KLBJ better represents Texans than the president. In fact, you can con

    • Re:Asked and answered (Score:4, Interesting)

      by joabj ( 91819 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:18AM (#10213539) Homepage
      >No, because few people want to listen to indy music.

      Hate to say it but there is something to be said for this. And for good reason.

      Part of popular music's appeal is that it is, duh, enjoyed by a lot of people. That is the *primarily* purpose of the major labels, with their huge marketing budgets. They buy consensus along the lines of "Yes this is a song that we, the people, like."

      This allows a sort of cultural bonding to take place over certain songs--the producers of "Garden State" can put Cold Play's "Don't Panic" in the begginning of that movie and we'll all understand its shared meaning. It becomes a generational thing.

      Music companies buy consensus, and we all need that consensus to build a music community. (Whether we need this done in the way that music companies now do this is another matter entirely--I'd rather have 100 world music bands sell 100,000 copies each of their songs than Fleetwood Mac sell 10 million copies of their latest tired joint. But I digress).

      I noticed this back in the early 90s when I was a reviewer for a heavy metal mag. We got *lots* of fantastic CDs in (Along with loads of dross) that, over time, became some of my favorite music. But I feela loss because no one today would know what a great band, say, Antic Hay, was. The music is just as good as what was popular, but something is lost nonetheless.

      So Yay! for the major labels!

      joab

      • I don't think you're taking into account the effects of new technologies, some of which are already exploited by Gnomoradio (the internet, for example).

        Why do music companies market inane girl and boy bands instead of good indy music? Because their business model is based on the idea of high marginal costs for distribution. If there are 10,000 people in the world who will like a song enough to pay $1 for it, and it takes me two days in the studio and other two on my Mac to make the song, at a total cost o

      • This allows a sort of cultural bonding to take place over certain songs--the producers of "Garden State" can put Cold Play's "Don't Panic" in the begginning of that movie and we'll all understand its shared meaning. It becomes a generational thing.

        ...or a radio station can play a song by SoulHat every Friday at 5pm and we all understand it's the weekend, time to party down, woo hoo!

        Um, oh yeah, er, what was I saying?

        I noticed this back in the early 90s when I was a reviewer for a heavy metal mag. We go

      • This may be partly because I'm spoiled enough to be able to participate in the New York City music scene, but you do NOT need a major label to build a music community. There are mod communities, R&B communities, funk communities, britpop communities...and those are just the ones that I've been in! What the big labels do is to make certain song available and, yes, people do build communities based on those songs. But there are hundreds and hundres of smaller communities all over the U.S. listening to

    • I give Apple one buck, and I can play a song on any device that supports the format an unlimited number of times, burn it to unlimited CDs (10X for the same playlist), and store it on five different computers, or stream it to unlimited computers on my network, or stream it to an Airport Express and play it on my home stereo, or listen to it on my iPod.

      I don't know where people come up with the idea that Apple's DRM is in any way more restrictive than, say, a CD. Sure, it's not supported by *every* MP3 play

      • Not as long as your player has to contact Apple (or whoever) to find out if you can play it still.

        DRM is completely and irrevocably incompatible with copyright law due to the fact that copyright is supposed to expire, and DRM makes it possible to prevent that. Or rather, the copyright may expire, but DRM makes it possible to require you still pay for the song.

        Whatever rights DRM may leave intact, it's still wrong unless it can completely conform to copyright law. In my not-so-humble-but-completely-hones

    • I agree with your prophecy about the future of music, I can't see the RIAA lockin going away any time soon, but I take minor exception with your statement that "few people want to listen to indy music." I remember a kickass indy band from Florida I discovered one time called Marilyn Manson that I really liked, and another called Nirvana. Later, of course, they were picked up by the majors, but at the time, they were just like the bands on Gnomoradio... The next big star is probably playing on there right no
  • What a coincidence - I've just teamed up with a friend a few weeks ago to make some electronic music. Right now we're in the getting gear/arranging things stage.

    I can't believe it - we have a distribution channel already before we even have gotten a song finished!

    • You already had a distribution channel, silly. It's called OpenNap, Kazaa, GNUtella, Grokster, Audiogalaxy, and a whole slew of others.

      As a musician, don't shy away from the P2P that the RIAA hates. As a matter of fact, if you want to see those places survive, use them. Give your permission on your recordings to be distributed over them, don't hold anything back. Every single musician that puts up files on their P2P app of choice and gives permission to distribute them does more to legitimize those net

    • I just submitted 3 of my songs (the rest are over 10 minutes...i don't want to kill my bandwidth). Rock on!

  • The name (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MikeMacK ( 788889 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:01AM (#10213390)
    Perhaps the biggest stumbling block to wide-spread adoption - the name, "Gnomoradio". Come on guys, we can be a little more creative than that - not everything that is created for Gnome needs to use "Gnome" or a derivative there of in it's title.

    • Re:The name (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MaestroSartori ( 146297 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:10AM (#10213454) Homepage
      I quite like the name - "No More Radio"...

      • Re:The name (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Damek ( 515688 )
        So why not just call it "No More Radio"? "Gnomoradio" is far from clear, especially for people who might never have heard of "Gnome" the destop environment.

        It may be clever in context, but unless the goal was to create a new program so they could give it a clever name, they're really just undermining their own efforts.
        • and how many people stopped using Gnutella because it has a clever in-context use of GNU, referring to it's license, in it's name? I doubt people will not use it simply because it has G-n-o-m in it's name. They'll think, "Ohhhh Gnomes. That's kinda cool. I'm scared of Gnomes, though...they can hide in places I can't and spring up behind me with a blowdart gun. On second thought...I'll stick with Kazaa and it's spyware. I don't like poisoned blowdarts in the back of my neck."

          Actually, you're right.
    • It's probably a much bigger stumbling block to widespread adoption if it doesn't have a Windows port.

    • Re:The name (Score:4, Funny)

      by fritter ( 27792 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:39AM (#10213769)
      You should try my KDE-based music sharing service for hip hop, K-Rapper.

  • The Classics (Score:3, Insightful)

    by KrackHouse ( 628313 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:08AM (#10213437) Homepage
    Correct me if I'm wrong but nobody owns the works of Mozart. Now if all songs were incoded in Ogg format wouldn't it be feasible to create a legitamate radio station or stations based on Classical music that would be totally legal?

    • Performance is owned (Score:5, Informative)

      by Otto ( 17870 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:11AM (#10213464) Homepage Journal
      Correct me if I'm wrong but nobody owns the works of Mozart.

      You're right, however the works of Mozart need to be performed. And those performances are owned by the people who performed them.
      • "those performances are owned by the people who performed them."

        Yes, but why? Most, at least, of the major classical orchestras in the USA are heavily subsidized by federal grants and other forms of funding for the arts. (And I'm only saying "most" because its possible a few privately formed ones like the NBC symphony may be exceptions for at least some of their performing years - EVERY orchestra that has a place name in its title is on the grant system.
        Why didn't our tax dollars buy us any rights? WE

        • Copyright is already supposed to secure this stuff for the public, through the mechanism commonly referred to as expiration.

          So, uh, your point isn't totally defeated, just that we need to focus on a different problem.

          not that I disagree with you, just pointing out how recordings of the performances are already secured for the public domain. ;)

    • Re:The Classics (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bill_Mische ( 253534 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:12AM (#10213481)
      er...only if the orchestra were also long dead. Otherwise they would hold the copyright to their performance. Nice try though.

      • Re:The Classics (Score:4, Informative)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:22AM (#10213574) Homepage Journal
        oh but that's the beauty! there's OLD recordings that can be transferred to digital in damn fine quality, too.

        one of the national stations over here used to play classical music from some 20-30's recordings all night long some years ago, as they didn't have to pay for playing them at all.

        now they just play pop.. trying to compete with commercial channels I suppose but whats the point for them(they're not a commercial channel, yet they try to act like one for some weird reason - taking all the bad bits from commercial stations like braindead hosts)..

        and in addition to that there's quite many classical orchestras that don't really make the recordings for profit(you can find good classical music cd's in the discount bin always).
      • Well that's a given but couldn't a group of musicians perform it Pro-Bono? I mean it's not like there are only 3 people in the world that know how to play the piano.
    • The performers don't pay Mozart to "cover" his music, but the performances are copyrighted. You have to pay the symphony to play their cover of Mozart.
    • Only if you were listening to the version Mozart recorded himself.
    • That's what MIDI is for. Click here for Mozart MIDI files. [midifilearchive.com] Hear exactly what Mozart wrote.

      For classical piano works, MIDI is almost tolerable.

    • i may be wrong on this one too but the grateful dead and phish have already given permission for all of their music to be freely shared however you like...

      so if you don't want to be a total p2p leech, just rip all of their cd's to put in your shared folder
    • Yes, if performances were created which were themselves unencumbered (or Creative Commonsed).

      Now, while there will be a paid for market for top notch polished performances, I would have thought that there are student performers - pianists, violinists, organists, and choirs and orchestras - who would be dead chuffed to have their performances recorded and shared. As a youngling I played in various youth orchestras, and we would give a concert each school holidays to which our parents and friends would come.

  • Good Start (Score:5, Informative)

    by jim_nanney ( 757896 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:10AM (#10213460)
    But really, I prefer http://www.magnatune.com/ [magnatune.com] . Its uses allow for free download of music and yet still promotes licensing music (paying the actual artist for thier creations) It is a perfect blend of free for public consumption, and paying musicians royalties.
  • http://irate.sourceforge.net/

    Built with gcj and runs on any (popular) platform.
  • When I manage to be satisfied with material I have written and recorded I will share it on all of the sites. The idea is to get the songs out there and acquire as much feedback, both positive and negative, as possible.

    I highly doubt the RIAA would even attempt to stop me from distibuting my own works. If they did I would have no problem holding fundraisers to cover the legal cost of lawsuit against them. Clearly, if the indies own the rights then they can distribute it any way they like.

    We can't all be

  • it will die to its own popularity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Agrippa ( 111029 ) on Friday September 10, 2004 @11:39AM (#10213762)
    From my experience from being a programmer at MP3.com from 1999 until its sale to CNET in 2003, the independant artist community is one of the biggest bunch of cheating assholes I have ever witnessed. Not all, but enough independant artists will utilize any number of underhanded ways to boost their exposure on a network. I see nothing in this system that prevents what artists did at MP3.com - user ratings are a joke, because many artists will do anything possible to whore themselves out among their community to get a higher rating. What you will end up seeing is that if this get popular enough, it will become fully corrupted by crappy music being highly rated , which will then turn off the average user, and become yet another circle jerk for talentless artists and basically a waste of time for legitimate ones.

    .agrippa.
    • If it's anything like iRate, it doesn't use absolute rating to decide whether artists are "good" or "bad." It uses your ratings to find people who have SIMILAR interests to you, and gives you songs that THEY rate highly. Problem solved.
      • No, that doesn't solve the problem. You seriously don't understand many in the independant artist community. If this gets popular enough, its abolutely trivial to, and someone will, write a program that creates a wide variety of dummy "interests", but also include their own music and the music of the people they agreed to promote. Thusly the system will have been corrupted.

        This has similarities to the application I wrote for MP3.com called Stations, which a few months after it was released was abused al
        • If this gets popular enough, its abolutely trivial to, and someone will, write a program that creates a wide variety of dummy "interests", but also include their own music and the music of the people they agreed to promote. Thusly the system will have been corrupted.

          Not necessarily. iRate uses a collaborative filtering [weblogs.com] rating system, which results are computationally personalized for every user. This means that, even if there are people creating dummy profiles, that if you don't like the music promoted by

  • Hmm, it looks nice, at least in theory, but I haven't gotten it to play anything yet. Every time I add my music directory, it slowly builds up to 100% CPU and then seems to crash. I have only 5000 or so files in that directory (and 3000 on another partition, but I haven't gotten the chance to try to add them yet.) That's not an absurd amount for a normal playlist to handle IMO.

    Also it took me a while to see how to add a directory. You have to take te file-browser inside the directory to add it. Kind of cou

  • It's nice that people are out there building platforms for artists to get their music out to the masses. But doesn't this just increase the signal to noise ratio? The problem with every artist-centric solution means that us music appreciators have to wade through bad tune after bad tune before we find a good one. I don't have much time to waste when i am looking for new music, but I enjoy new music more than anything. So for now, I am sticking to MP3 4U [mp34u.com], mp3jackpot [mp3jackpot.com], and my other miscellaneous favorite m
  • WWOZ [wwoz.org], the greatest station in the Universe. Sure, it's WMA, but it ain't N'awlins 'til it's at least a little broke.
  • Programs like this and Irate are getting closer to what I would like to see, but they are not there yet. I really would like to see a product that also did this...

    Intelligently decides what to download, not based on preferences, but based on what you have in your current playlist (presumably all the commercial music you have when you start). Once they get enough users they can compare lists to predict what you would like based on your playlists and songs you've voted on.

    The other thing that should happe
  • Perhaps this technology isn't the future of digital music, and maybe not even digital radio (although it certainly could be) -- but I believe it will play an important part in music discovery.

    And it might not be iRate or Gnomeradio in particular, but the idea behind them.

    Even when just applied to indie artists, I've found dozens of bands who are fantastic using iRate. In the process I've thrown out even more music that I didn't find enjoyable at all, but in a reasonably short time I was discovering music

  • There is also iRate (Score:2, Informative)

    by thelizman ( 304517 )
    irate.sourceforge.net

    I used it, but the GTK client was buggy as shit. However, I discovered quite a few good tunes once I got a working version installed. Clients for Win/Mac/Linux available.
  • Not trying to start a flame war here, but is there a Windows or Java version available? I'd love to have something like this on my desktop (I run Windows XP, sue me).

    I tried a similar program recently for Windows, but it never seemed to queue more than one particular song (though others were listed).

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