I was a pretty big lala evangelist; I told just about everyone I thought would care all about it. I really liked their approach to music, especially:

1. Unlimited space and streaming. You could upload and listen to as much as you like.
2. The music matcher. You didn’t have to upload every file you had. It would scan your files and match them to ones existing on the server. This saved you from having to upload GBs of music and had the added benefit of making the service better the more that people used it.
3. Listening to any track once for free. I’ve never listened to more new releases (or bought more) than I did through lala.
4. Web-only songs. 10 cents bought you the right to play a song as much as you wanted to but only through the web. I usually have an Internet connection wherever I’m listening, so that was just great. Would I have bought Looking Glass’ “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” for more than 10 cents?

There were some drawbacks, of course:

1. The music matcher sometimes mismatched. I have some artists in my collection that have extensive live catalogs (if you know what I mean) and often, trying to play the studio version of the song, I would get the live version instead. Nothing to do about it.
2. The player itself was Flash-based. So, absolutely no mobile support on iPhone or Android.
3. Limited catalog. There were plenty of songs that were available on iTunes or Amazon MP3 store that just couldn’t be bought from lala. Of course, you could upload them after you bought them elsewhere.

Anyway, Steve Jobs said, “Enough of people not buying music through iTunes!” and here we are without lala. What’s the criteria for its replacement?

1. Enough space. I have a lot of music. Around 90GB worth. Though, a lot of that pretty much never gets listened to.
2. Price. Lala was free to use and had cheap rates on songs if you wanted to buy some.
3. Interface. I’m a developer, so it had to have a well tuned and usable interface.
4. Mobile support. I don’t travel as much as I would like, but I do get out of town. I wanted something that would play my music over 3G (or 4 when it comes to town).
5. Ability to upload my own songs. They just don’t have enough Kleenex Girl Wonder on Rhapsody.

Here’s my thoughts on what I saw in my search for a site that would stream my music. I’m going to list them in what I think is the chronological order I tried them in.

First of all, some overall notes:

• Nobody else has the web-only song agreement with the record companies. Just get that out of your hopes bucket right now. It ain’t happening (at least not yet).
• Nobody seems to have worked out the “start loading the next song as the last one ends” thing that let the lala player roll through songs continuously. Must be a bandwidth thing, but it seems like something someone could figure out.
• Nobody’s going to give it all to you for free anymore. Take your lumps.
• None of the services have a store attached to them at this point. You’ll have to go back to iTunes or Amazon.

Maestro.fm

Maestro.fm is a service that allows you to stream your music from your home library to another machine. Meaning, it doesn’t keep copies of them and if your home computer or home Internet connection is down, your music is unavailable. Or, if your home connection is slow or spotty, so is your stream.

That said, there are no space limitations and it is free to use. But, my upstream connection is not that reliable and, really, that seems un-green to have my machine on all the time just to serve songs.

It has some interesting ideas and some cool social networking built in. The player is pretty good and there is a iPhone app.

MusicPlayer.fm

Don’t bother. #underconstruction

mSpot.com

The new guys, mSpot was featured at Google I/O this year. Seems like a promising service, but the don’t have a lot of the site working yet or even the service levels set, so I’m going to have to come back to it. For now, it is for beta testers only. It is hard to tell if Google is behind them or just cheering them on, but hopefully the big G comes up with music service or gets on board with one. Especially since they had eyes for lala before Apple did.

The player is OK, but could use a little Information Architecture and a little more contrast. They do have an Android app, which is nice.

The installable uploader and the web player have a trick, which is that the system only uploads songs you have requested. So, you can see your whole library, but the first time you try to play a particular song it will have to be uploaded (automatically) from your home machine. This paradigm could be nice since you have only a little space right now (2-4GB) and, theoretically, it would just keep the top 2-4GB or songs you have played recently. You know what, I haven’t made up my mind about this feature(?) yet.

mp3tunes.com

The old guys, these guys have been around for a while: Five years. But I’m not sure if that serves them well or not. I stuck with this fairly long, like two weeks, and I mostly liked it. It has the ability to upload video and stream that back, which feels like a great idea but I never used it.

The default player wastes absolutely acres of space with too-big fonts and too much padding. It is hard to see much once you have more than a few artists in there. They make a nice effort by having several player skins (well, they’re more complex than skins, really) but they kind of all have this whitespace problem. I mean, I’m not using the site for readability—I want to see the lists. And, if I started and stopped too much it quit queuing songs.

They do have mobile apps and an installable uploader which is nice. Plus, 10GB of space for free holds a pretty fair amount of music, or you can upgrade 50GB for $40 per year.

Grooveshark.com

This one’s got some press, too, and it is pretty good. The player and queuing system is solid but, like mp3tunes, the designers got to take too much control of this one and there is lots and lots of wasted space. So much that if you have a smaller monitor you can’t read the full names of songs. They claim that this particular problem is fixed for VIPs (paid customers) but I had a hard time believing that them based on my free account.

They have apps for most mobile platforms, but only for VIPs. The uploader is a java applet that needs a little more work, especially when getting music off a network share.

Psonar.com

I can’t remember why I left them. And, now their site is erroring to MySpace. Maybe they are connected. Oh, wait, I remembered. No mobile streaming support. If that isn’t important to you, it seems like a promising service. The player needs a lot a work and a little double-click-ability.

AudioBox.fm

And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: an acceptable service. First off, it ain’t free, like I said it wouldn’t be. Well, there is a free 1GB plan, but that’s not really enough, is it?

First off: no Flash. This mother is HTML 5 though and through and therefore after my own heart. It is just getting started, feature-wise, but seems to actually be in development (which not all of the others are). The marketplace may or may not ever be coming as wells as the installable uploader. For now, you have to upload a folder at a time (which is a real pain). But the reliability of the the player, the layout of the the library, the editablity of tracks all make up for it for me. Especially after all the other sites.

It needs a viewable queue and a real uploader / syncronizer. But it has an Android streaming app that is pretty usable. It also has a full API so if you are an enterprising iPhone app developer you could make one.

The plan prices are pretty reasonable with the Basic at just $4 a month.

In the end…

I’m still looking but more slowly. I’m pretty happy with audiobox.fm at this point and don’t feel like I need to keep the full-on search.

Also, that Amanda Hankerson (http://www.amandahankerson.com)is a wonderful photographer. (She took the photos for the EEE site and has a great photo blog.)

The setup is a group of about fifteen towers; plain welded tripods with a cross beam on top. They are not particularly polished and the wires show. A variable motor connects the beam to the tripod so the beam can spin. At each end of the beam is a variable speaker that throws out a sine wave sound. The performers can control the frequency of the wave. Each speaker has a red LED on its top. An imaginable contraption.

There are, like I said, fifteen or so of these; some with bigger speakers for lower frequencies dome with smaller. The performers turn them on one-by-one tuning each speaker individually as they go. Soon, the beams start spinning giving each tower its own beat as the arms swing around to face you.

At a distance, the whole thing sounds a giant, dissonant chord, most near to an arm laid across a Rhodes. Moving nearer to a specific tower, the Doppler and the rhythm start to focus its sound. This one is a tuba oompah, that one is a trumpet pattern. Behind it all is a field of 60-cycle-hum violins and violas. It is a siren, but a beautiful siren.

The lights go out and the room is filled with red LED fireflies circling each other somehow there are fewer people in the room and moving around the stage is easier. Gears and incalculable harmony.

Slowly, the towers get tired and slow down their spin, eventually closing their LED eyes and drifting off to sleep. As the last tower stops the silence is forceful and thick.

When Joe E. took me to the Mates Of State show at the Varsity I really liked how grating the keyboard was. I thought my ears would explode. So, I was eagerly awaiting the new record after consuming the old ones.

During the wait they said their producer was making them sound like Queen, which I guess means using piano instead of keyboard, but it sounds like them to me.

You can’t get the standing-in-a-crowded-room-after-some-crappy-band-holding-a-tallboy-hearing-new-awesome-stuff feeling on a record, so you have to appreciate the separate for the separate, but it is good. There’s some baby stuff and guest stars and what not, but it really feels like a continuation from the last record.

I just thought, as your friend, that I should let you know. I think he is just frustrated ’cause sometimes you can be hard to work with. But can’t we all.

I mean, he didn’t really mean it. He’s just stressed out.

"Here were my middle of the night (hypnagogic or hypnopompic?) musings. The image of the floating brush was left unexplored as a device to trigger my associations. The brush relates to the skater’s defenses, his narcissism (perfectly balanced- not quite it turns out,as these defenses often are), with significance to his physical appearance (aging skater)and demeanor (macho man-reflection of fear of unmasculine impulses, a fear likely unfathomable when he holds his partner’s crotch). Threatened in his virility (gold medals,or big nuggets) by an effeminate figure (graceful swan… actually peacock), he ends up paired up with, and attracted to his competitor-turned-partner (never mind the absence of a mother figure in the story). Clearly, his recognition of his sex addiction begins to reveal a crack (no pun) in his perfectly balanced defenses, with evidence of some distress (ego-dystonic). Ultimately, the floating brush reflects the death by drowning of his self-absorbed, macho persona, and the emergence of warmth (from the frigid waters, a rebirth if you will), and a real attachment to another person (would die for him, or forgo a sexual encounter). Instead of the burning phoenix, we have the thawing of a frozen Chaz (chaztity not his previous virtue) The central figure- none other than Napoleons Dynamite- presents as an effeminate, sweet figure, molded in achievement after his also self-absorbed, narcissistic father (thereby the attraction and competition with the other skater), who uses him solely for his displaced need for greatness (return to the golden nuggets). His capacity for affection and attachment more intact, he shows early on his willingness to assume the ‘female’ role in the pair, only to reveal later on his real strength and capacity to effect the death-defying stunt. Faced with his misperception of the replay of an altered oedipal-like encounter (which he likely did not process in his motherless life), with his friend seemingly seducing his girlfriend, he is devastated, but acclimates (being used to adapting to his always victorious, abusive parent) and survives. However, the discovery of his friend’s faithfulness and affection, is likely the source of his capacity to metamorphose from the peacock to the performer of a death defying feat, where his partner, once his rival, must offer up his trust, and depend totally on his strength. He therefore achieves mastery, as well as manages to assume in a healthier way some of the persona of his friend and father figure (Chaz, the tattoo man). We assume Chaz has reached a new level of relatedness, in touch with his capacity for guilt/remorse and affection, having controlled his sexual urge, and experienced the ability to allow himself to soar, no longer driven by castration anxiety. such a thing of beauty… "

From Salon.com: “Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point. A child can now grow up with eight or nine or 10 grandparents — Gampa, Gammy, Goopa, Gumby, Papa, Poopsy, Goofy, Gaga and Chuck — and need a program to keep track of the actors.

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men — sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show. “

Oh, Garrison, why can’t you stick with the annoyingly saccharine and keep your stupidly bigoted nose out of social issues?

I mean, how many intentionally hurtful stereotypes can you fit inside three paragraphs? Doesn’t this feel so obviously wrong to say? It seems like he must have got some help from Ann Coulter for this piece. Oh, and by the way Garrison himself has been married three times and has had children from two of those arrangements. Which he fails to mention.

I haven’t been able to stomach the drippy nostalgia (Who’s for emotional repression and relentless conformity? How obout throwing the rest of your life away on the first person you ever have sex with?) but I was a little happy that he was so outspoken about the idiocracy of the Right; which is preaching to the choir on NPR anyway. Now, what is there?

Go away, Garrison.

Last night Miss Richardson and I attended the third installment of the Walker’s 2007 Out There performances and the series finally redeemed itself.

I won’t mention the first two performances except to say that they were ‘daring’ in a way that dares you to actually sit through them.

Anyhow, a few months ago Miss Richardson and I saw a one-woman show about what it is to be queer, adopted, artistic and Asian in the U.S. It was hammy and overwrought.

Young Jean Lee, who directed last night’s “Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A show about white people in love)“, would have hated that show, too. She is mostly in the same boat but has the artistic ability to actually make an interesting work that, in the end, went much deeper into racism, identity and relations.

In the promo material, Young Jean said that she had written a play based on what she felt was the worst premise imaginable: identity politics. I mean, like, on purpose. The end result was funny and uncomfortable in a good way.

I know it’s short notice but the last performance starts in about four hours. If you can make it, go.

Maybe blogging about someone else’s blog is too much chasing the dragon, but you gotta hand it to Ze. He’s making a five-minute video everyday with thoughtful commentary. I can’t agree with everything he’s ever said but he brings to mind that famous thing Voltaire is supposed to have said.

Today, he talked about branding and the guy who tried to get in on the Jon Benet brand. He suggested that absolutely everything is a potential brand but, of course, when everything is something, nothing is that something. Does it mean that branding is essentially useless? If you can attach yourself to anything does that association still hold water?

His vlog is always worth a view (I tune in everyday), so go over there and check it out. And, thanks to Nick Richter for turning me on to him.

Hard to believe, right? The laws of thermodynamics implicitly outlaw this sort of thing. The company is promoting the findings using a Shaw quote, "All great truths begin as blasphemies."

They are asking for a jury of 12 scientists to independently study the technology and publicly publish the results. They are inviting cynicism, which is usually a good sign.

They published the challenge in The Economist in an effort, they say, to promote the idea to a wider audience than just the scientific community.

They have published a video about themselves. Watch it on YouTube, ’cause their site is getting hit hard today.