As I do on most Saturdays, I went to my local record store, Newbury Comics. They were having a moving sale which meant there was less to choose from but I could buy twice as much as I normally do. What a good start to the day.

As I browsed around, I began to think about how I choose the music that I buy. In most cases it is based on recommendations from friends, songs I have heard on the radio, or MP3 blogs I have read. Sometimes though I walk into a store, as I did this morning, with no set list of music in mind. What drives these types of purchases?

Personally I think it is instinct. This innate knowledge of what music you will like is based an unlimited number of factors that blends your own life experiences with the music genre’s that are laid out before you. This powerful combination of memories, images, sounds, emotions, and curiosity in conjunction with how music is inherently categorized helps guide you through the sea of artists and ultimately deliver you what you want, or more importantly, what you need. What’s great is that your needs could change every time depending on the moods or thoughts that are following you around on that specific day.

Try it out sometime. Go to a record store without a game plan and let go. Of course you will end up with some duds every once in a while, but in most cased I bet you will be surprised at the great things you end up with.

The albums that I bought today represent what happens when I let my instinct take over. Today it all worked out nicely.

So what factors going into the music purchases that you make?

Enjoy.

Listen to enough music online and you will inevitably come across cool little tips and tricks that make the experience a whole lot better. I posted about some of these a few years ago on akaraff.com and I am glad to see they are all still working.

m3u2iTunes – If you are an iTunes user and ever tried to play an M3U playlist, you certainly know it does a horrible job. Instead of loading the M3U as a seperate playlist, iTunes adds individual links to the songs all over your library. You have to play each song individually and of course things quickly become a mess. That’s where m3u2iTunes comes in. Install this little bugger, click on a M3U playlist, and watch it go to work. m3u2iTunes will create a seperate playlist, aply named M3U Internet Stream, within iTunes for you to stream. No more mess, just pure M3U goodness. p.s. – I would love to know why Apple hasn’t fixed this yet. (Here’s an sample M3U playlist if you want to play around with it)

LastFM Proxy – Simply put, this application will allow you to stream any Last.FM playlist through your iTunes. This is key for those folks who used an Airport Express to listen to iTunes streamed music through your Hifi. I don’t use this anymore because I ponied up the cash for AirFoil (see below) but it is still a great, free alternative for letting your Last.FM breath a bit.

Playlist Greasemonkey Script -Internet Explorer users need not apply. This simple greasemonkey script will scan every web page you browse in search of MP3 links. When links are found you will see a little speaker icon in the corner of your browser. Click on the icon and a M3U playlist containing the found tracks will be generated and downloaded. Install m3u3iTunes and the playlist will automatically flow into iTunes. This is a very handy tool for those who frequent MP3 blogs and want a quick way to sample the goods.

Rogue Amoeba’s AirFoil – Airfoil is great. It is targetted for folks who use an Airport Express or Apple TV for streaming audio to their Hifi. Normally you can only stream iTunes sourced tracks to these devices but AirFoil changes all that. Install the application and it will allow you to stream sound from any application running on your PC. That means if you are listening to tracks on the Hype Machine, Airfoil will seemlessly stream the audio to your Airport Express/Apple TV. Very slick and well worth the investment.

Give me more! I am always looking for cool and innovative ways people are listening to music online so please do share.

Enjoy.

Thanks to Griizzly_Lightning to the picture.

I listen to music all day at work. In most cases I am listening to songs via MP3 blogs that allow me to download the mp3’s that I am listening to. On good days I download 5 to 10 MP3’s, at a minimum, to my work PC. Unfortunately my work PC is not where I manage my music library. I have a lovely Mac Book Pro at home that I use to manage my music collection, load my iPod, stream music through my apartment, etc. I do not want to manage another music library but I do want to get the songs I download at work to my house without it being a chore.

Prior to today I had 3 options for getting my music back to home base:

1. Load them into iTunes on my work machine and burn a data CD
2. Email myself the MP3 link(s) so I could download them again when I got home
3. FTP the files to my ftp server and then download them when I got home.

All these options worked but, to be honest, they were circa 1998 solutions and were even a pain to manage 10 years ago. I needed a up to date solution so I decided to piece one together with what I could find. I hope you find the result as cool as I do. The following components have solved my music “portability” issue and has made the art of finding new music while I work a much more seamless adventure.

3. Open your Dropbox folder on your work PC and add a folder called MyMusic or something that pleases you. (Check your local documents folder on Windows and Mac if you are having issues locating it)

4. On your work PC, go to Songbird and open the preferences window. Under the Music Downloads section of the Main preference page, set the “Save files to” directory path so that it points to the new MyMusic Dropbox folder you created in step #3.

5. Open Songbird and type the address of your favorite MP3 blog in the browser address bar. If you need a good MP3 blog to start off with I highly recommend Motel de Moka. You should now see Moka’s blog in the browser window and in about 20 seconds a playlist will show up at the bottom of the screen. Songbird has searched the page, stripped out the MP3 links, and created a nice playlist for you.

6. Press play and start listening to the playlist. When you get to a song that you like click the download button next to the song and the MP3 will start downloading to your machine.

7. Check the Dropbox MyMusic folder on your work PC. You should now see the MP3 file that you just downloaded. The file will have a little blue recycling icon attached to it until Dropbox finishes syncing it to the mothership. Once it is synced the icon will change to a green check mark.

8. Go to your home PC and open your Dropbox folder. This is where the magic happens. You will see the Dropbox has not only created your MyMusic folder automatically but it has also synced the contents of that folder with your work PC. The MP3 you downloaded on your work PC should be now sitting in your home PC folder. You have now successfully sent a MP3 from work to your home with absolutely no effort at all.

9. Now for the advanced, and Mac only, portion of this tutorial. Up to this point you are still forced to manually import the MP3’s from your MyMusic folder into your iTunes. This didn’t sit well with me so I decided to leverage some Applescript and Mac OS’s Folder actions capabilities in order to automate the process.

10. Download the “add files to iTunes” Applescript and save it to the following location – Macintosh HDLibraryScriptsFolder Action Scripts – Make sure it is placed in the Folder Action Scripts directory and not the Folder Actions directory. It won’t work otherwise.

11. Go back to your MyMusic Dropbox folder, right click the folder to view the context menu, and then select MORE->Attach Folder Action…

12. In the Finder window go to Macintosh HDLibraryScriptsFolder Action Scripts, select the “add files to iTunes” script, and hit choose to attach the script to the directory.

13. Now when Dropbox downloads a file to your home PC MyMusic directory, the Folder Action will call the script which will in turn import the MP3 file into your iTunes and then delete the file from the directory. The deletion portion of the script is important because Dropbox’s free version only allows you to store 2GB at a time. If you don’t delete the file your 2GB will be gone in no time.

14. Test. Download a song on your work pc through Songbird and within minutes it will be automatically imported into your home PC’s iTunes.

15. Start exploring.

Enjoy.

The Skinny:
This morning I was listening to Hype Machine team’s “love feed” and I got the urge to drop something. Since I was at work, it was important that I could easily find some new tracks, which the Hype Machine took care of, and more importantly be able to get them back to my home machine. Luckily I had everything I needed right on my work pc. Compared to back in 2005 when it took me 2 days to put one of these together, solving problems like this and putting together a drop is now as easy as tying my shoes.

Songbird and Dropbox are a duo made for this job. The first thing I did was change my download directory in Songbird to one of my Dropbox directories. Then I spent the day listening to my favorite mp3 blogs using Songbird and every time I heard a song I liked I would just click download next to the track. The file would end up in my local Dropbox directory and was auto-synced up to Dropbox’s site. When I got home all I have to do was go to my home machine’s local Dropbox directory and all of the mp3’s I downloaded were waiting for me. I couldn’t have scripted it any better.

I love music but I think I love technology advances that make music hunting easier a whole lot more.

Enjoy.

Please support all of the great audio bloggers of the world. The sidebar lists some of my favorites. Without them, the new art of music discovery would never be this exciting and easy. If you like these tracks, click on the Artist’s name to explore the Hype Machine. You will find all you need to help support the artists and this crazy new world of music discovery.