We had a plan to have brunch at Flurries this one Sunday this summer. I quashed the plans out of my laziness.The effort to dislodge yaself out of the bed on a Sunday morning is massive. There can be a lot of cliched stuff that you can do on a Summer afternoon. Every year the media showcases - what to wear in the summer time, what to drink in summer days, or where to visit.The options are all the same and retarded only by different people. None of them exciting enough. Out of boredom sinister thoughts of getting married also waved across my mind ( man!!) . Thank God! there is Music or else, I would have slit my wrists. The whole day, I spent browsing through some of the favorite sites that I resort to for music. I present to you my favorite music den:
1. You Tube: Beats the crap outta anything. Almost everything is available here. Steve Jobs would have realised it later, but google had long back started destroying its domain. It is bigger than appstore or itune store. You can find 10s of 1000s of versions of any song you can imagine. The true spirit of Open Source is exemplified here. If I create my own Jay Z version of Vande Mataram or Shakira's waka waka, it will be available for all tomorrow.
How to Download You Tube video: Go to gazzump.com, paste the link of the youtube video you want to download and enter. Wait for some time, it will ask you the format in which you want the link to be converted and downloaded. That's cool. .avi or .mp3 is much cooler than .flv that we used to get earlier.
2. Last.fm: Back when facebook, myspace and orkut had just started as the social media - last.fm also started as a cool hangout place for the music lovers. So, you can read reviews, write some, have friends with similar music tastes.
Compatibility meter tells the compatibility between you and another user according to the songs that you two listen. It has some other killer features:
The last.fm radio: It can expose you to lot of new good music. Alas! its no longer free.
Scrobbler: With the plugin the songs that you listen on your windows media player and winamp would directly be scrobbled to your profile in the last.fm.
Music Charts like Top artists, Top Songs and so on. All of which can be embedded into your blog/site.
I no longer use it a lot but once a while it is fun but if your seriously into music, this can be the place.
3. Blip.fm: I discovered it last year. Well what twitter is to facebook, blip is to last.fm in music.I have not explored it much it seems good. You can broadcast your music or listen to someone else's broadcast.
4. Rolling Stones: I am not much of reader/critic in music. However, if one place I trust and resort to read something genuine - it is rolling stones. The Top 100/ Top 10 charts are very very good.
5. Raaga.com: All the above don't give a lot of options when it comes to Hindi/Indian Music. Raaga has remained the grand old man among all the websites for Indian Music. A lot of NRIs or non indians with an itch to check out Indian music used to go to Raaga. But, with a lot music available on the net
(read torrent and crap sites like muskurahat.com - hi hi) - Raaga was long forgotten. Last year, I checked it out again and found a lot of new features been added. The people behind it have kept up with the pace of changes.
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