Songza and it’s alternate friends
So I think I may have posted about Songza here before, and if I haven't, I think I meant to. You see sometimes you're working and thinking to yourself, 'man I really want to hear that song, if only I had it in my extensive mp3/aac collection'. Well Songza is the website for you, as it fills the gaps in your music collection. It's a music search engine so you just type in the band or song name you want to hear and by using some ajax'ery, a list shows up on the page and you can listen to your requested song (it streams through flash, so you need that installed). It is good to point out that Songza does search through YouTube, Google-Video, and the like, so some of the songs will be either live or crappy (read low-bit rate) versions of what you are looking for, but it's great to find that song that you don't have but would really like to listen to.
What makes me post about Songza today? Well this morning I had some Monty Python stuck in my head and I really wanted to hear it ('the bright side of life'). So I tried to go to songza, and it was down! It's back up now, but I really needed to hear that song, so a quick trip to google gave me two alternative sites (the funny thing about this is that songza has merged with both of these sites in its search results, so if songza is down you can get roughly the same selection by visiting these other two sites).
SeeqPod - Pretty much like songza, only I like the light-colors and flash implementation of the player is by far better than songza, and did I mention the lighter colors? I suppose white and orange (heavy on the orange) can grate the nerves every once in a while.
SkreemR - Again pretty much the same thing, only it claims to only carry only non-copyrighted materials... so I suppose you *should* use that one only. I did notice that they employed pop-unders (dirty!) and have quite a few ads. But it's a fairly decent set up, each song result is in its own container with links to find the song on amazon, youtube, etc. The player is a built-in flash player (similar to the one employed here on this site), with a play and mute button.
Of course it's enough for another post, but I highly recommend Pandora and last.fm (not from work, of course, as both sites destroy bandwidth, and IT will cut you off - they had pandora disabled a few months ago) as they will play pretty much what you want to hear (you pick a song/band, then it plays similar songs/bands) or are in the mood for.
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