First things first: to use Facebook Connect you must already have a Facebook account. Next, simply visit any album page while you are logged into eMusic, and look for the Connect button right above “Download All.” Would a picture help? K. Here it is:

Click that. When the dialogue opens up, click “Connect With Facebook.” Login and voila! You’re done!

OK great. Now what?
Integrating Facebook Connect and eMusic allows you to post cool things to your Facebook wall and activity feed. Next time you’re feeling pumped about some amazing discovery on eMusic and want to tell the world about it? Do this.

We’ve enabled you to share five things:

1) You can post an album.

2) You can post an artist.
3) You can post an album rating.
4) You can tell a friend.
5) You can post an album review. (Note the checkbox.)

Before it posts, you can see exactly what it will look like. It’s clean and subtle. Here’s an album post:

Use this opportunity to show your friends how much better your taste is, to recommend a record to a buddy or just to get the word out. Whatever you want.

Cool! I get it. Is that all there is, though?
For now, yes. But the beauty of Facebook Connect is its flexibility. Future integrations could include things like being able to see which of your Facebook friends are also eMusic members, setting up an automatic feed so that whenever you download something your friends know about it, sharing lists, etc. There are many options, all of them great for the eMusic community. So start checking it out, and let us know what features you’d like to use, and what you think. Thanks!

1) You subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. As of now, 17 Dots on EVR is not officially in the iTunes podcast library, so to listen, simply click on the “Advanced” menu in iTunes, choose “Subscribe to podcasts” and then paste in this URL:

http://www.eastvillageradio.com/podcasts/19925/125.xml

Hit OK, and you’ll start downloading the show.

2) The second way is you click on the following m3u link, which will open up a stream in your media player: LINK! Be warned that for the first show, the show before ran long, so our set doesn’t begin until about six or seven minutes in, and is cut off prematurely. The podcast is just fine, though.

3) If you don’t like fancy podcasting or streaming, you can download the sucker by right-clicking this link. You’ll start downloading a rather large file that has the same timing issues as the m3u, but it’s another option.

4) You can also hit the EVR site on Friday’s between 6am – 8am EST and listen live! Any and all means are welcome, and so easy thanks to East Village Radio, who are rad x infinity.

Hope ya’ll dig it!

On Tuesday, eMusic released a beta version of the download manager, a slick new incarnation that automatically syncs your music to any player, among a few other bells and whistles. Best of all? It has an incredibly small footprint, and won’t hog your machine. Instead, it largely runs in the background, and seamlessly gets you your music. We’re very happy with it, and we want all of you to be as well. If you haven’t yet downloaded it, head here and give it a spin. And if you have any feedback you’d like to share, you can do that there as well.

Before jumping into the technical stuff, we want to reemphasize that customer satisfaction is of the highest importance to us, and even one user having problems with our product is one more than we would like. Our engineers and customer service team are reading the message boards and the comments sent to our developer site very closely, and are responding to the issues they are seeing. It also seems worth pointing out that the actual number of people having issues with Remote is relatively small — the majority have installed just fine, and are downloading and syncing without any problems. Those that are having trouble are just more vocal about it, and understandably so.

Below are a list of the more common issues facing eMusic Remote and some temporary solutions. If you are having a problem that is not listed here, you can either consult this list or contact customer service, who will be glad to help.

iTunes Syncing Bug

PROBLEM: eMusic Remote crashes when you download a file.

SOLUTION: eMusic Remote is crashing because of a communication error between Remote and your iTunes. To allow your downloads to process as usual in this case, you need to disable syncing. To do that:

01 Open eMusic Remote.
02 Look for the Media Library Sync section and click Change Settings.
03 Under the Your Media Library section, select Disable Syncing.

However, in some instances Remote will be stuck trying to download content, and won’t allow you to update your syncing options. In cases like that, you will need to change your downloading profile.

To do this on a Windows 2000 or XP machine, go to:

C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR ACCOUNT NAME\Application Data

In the Application Data folder, simply rename the folder “eMusic” to “eMusic.bak” or anything like that. Now, relaunch eMusic Remote, disable syncing and download away.

For non-2000 or XP operating systems, click here for exact details.

Installing on a Mac

PROBLEM: If you do not have an administrator account on your Mac, eMusic Remote will not have permission to complete its installation due to file permission problems.

SOLUTION: DJAdequate very elegantly posted the fix for this one on the message boards. Quoting him:

You can fix this by right clicking on the programs icon, choosing show package contents. Then select get info on the contents folder and changing the owner and permission to your account, or all accounts. Choose apply to enclosed items, and voila.

Windows Install Prompt

PROBLEM: When installing Remote on Windows machines, a prompt will tell you to close out of Firefox or IE while displaying an “OK” button that seemingly does nothing.

SOLUTION: Simply close out of all your browser windows. Once they are shut, the Remote installation will commence.

Once again, we’d like to apologize for the trouble, and we are grateful for your patience. eMusic Remote offers many advantages to the old Download Manager, and we are confident that once we get through this 1.0 period, you will be as excited about them as we are. Extensions, plugins and a whole host of other opportunities are now possible due to the open-source coding, as well as the new .emx extension, which offers flexibility for the many tech-savvy folks in our ranks. We will have a patch ready for launch in the near future, and merely ask that you please bear with us until then. Thank you.

By now you have heard about the plight of internet radio (if you haven’t, check out this 17 Dots post or Save Net Radio). It’s a serious and urgent issue that will have dramatic consequences for the future of free, legal music on the web.

We also wanted to take this chance to debut a cool new mash-up developed by one of our senior product managers, Jon Strunk. Check it out here. This syncs streams of various internet radio stations — KEXP, KCRW, WOXY, etc — with the eMusic catalogue, providing you with the opportunity to download music as you listen to it. It’s an awesome application, and one that will undoubtedly help you discover new artists.

As eMusic’s CEO David Pakman noted in his 17 Dots post about the future of DRM-free music, eMusic is a music retailer. Our job is to provide consumers with an easy, pleasant and affordable way to help people purchase music that they like, thereby supporting the artists who create music and the labels who distribute it. The key to this exchange perhaps more than any other is discovery: people need to be able to find ways to download the music that they like. Without proper venues of discovery and access, music would die. How else would we find stuff that we like?

There are many ways to discover artists, and one of the biggest is in serious danger. We are speaking, of course, about internet radio, one of the most vital ways for music consumers to discover music that they love. Due to a decision by the Copyright Royalties Board that will increase the cost of running an internet radio station anywhere from 300 to 1200 percent, its future is in serious doubt. Yesterday, Save Net Radio organized a national Day of Silence to raise awareness about this potentially disastrous decision. Here’s how they describe it:

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). To protest these rates and encourage the millions of net radio listeners to take action and contact their Congressional representatives, today is a national Day of Silence. Webcasters across the country have dedicated this day to increasing awareness of this looming threat and gathering support for the SaveNetRadio collation and our campaign to preserve music diversity on-line. For an updated list of the participants in this national day of silence, visit http://www.kurthanson.com/dos/. Net radio listeners, please excuse the interruption of your normal programming and take action to ensure this silence is not permanent. Call your Congressional Representatives today.

Everything from Pandora to SomaFM will be seriously hurt by the decision. Here’s what Pandora founder Tim Westergren had to say on his company’s site:

Ignoring all rationality and responding only to the lobbying of the RIAA, an arbitration committee in Washington DC has drastically increased the licensing fees Internet radio sites must pay to stream songs. Pandora’s fees will triple, and are retroactive for eighteen months! Left unchanged by Congress, every day will be like today as internet radio sites start shutting down and the music dies.

A bill called the “Internet Radio Equality Act” has already been introduced in both the Senate (S. 1353) and House of Representatives (H.R. 2060) to fix the problem and save Internet radio — and Pandora — from obliteration.

In light of all of this, eMusic has made donations to Save Net Radio, KEXP, SomaFM and KCRW to help in this fight, as well as to support some of our favorite internet radio stations. But the real onus is on each of us music fans to call their congressional representative and ask them to pass the Internet Radio Equality Act. You can find your own representative here.

This is not a bunch of Chicken Little-ing. This is a real and urgent problem that will go into effect July 15th, and without the votes in place, one of the best ways to discover music will die. Please do your part and call your representative today.

]]> http://17dots.com/2007/06/27/save-internet-radio/feed/ 3 http://17dots.com/2007/05/10/music-you-watch/ http://17dots.com/2007/05/10/music-you-watch/#comments Thu, 10 May 2007 21:00:24 +0000 bryan http://17dots.com/2007/05/10/music-you-watch/

As multimedia convergence becomes reality, new forms of entertainment continue to develop in unexpected ways. Consider the case of the young Lasse Gjertsen, who has created music videos using nothing but a video camera and video editing software. Then go watch your favorite album in 5.1.

These videos are an interesting take on music. You wouldn’t really care to listen to them without the visual element. Its not really electronic, but it is created in a similar manner. And it has spawned probably hundreds of imitators. But what exactly is it?

It is also possible now to find music that is mixed in 5.1 for play in your entertainment center. Some of these albums, such as BT‘s This Binary Universe and Plaid’s Greedy Baby also provide a visual experience. Even though performances and video collections have existed for some time in, it still feels like another form of music entertainment altogether.

With music this immersive, can anyone imagine whats next? What will music be like when you can jack it straight into your brain? Maybe music will directly interface with unused potential in the human brain. Perhaps we will be able to store our entire music collections there too.

]]> http://17dots.com/2007/05/10/music-you-watch/feed/ 0 http://17dots.com/2007/04/25/mp3hosen/ http://17dots.com/2007/04/25/mp3hosen/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:27:15 +0000 bryan http://17dots.com/2007/04/25/mp3hosen/

I think we need something other than new releases posted today. How bout some lederhosen with a built-in MP3 player? You can see the transport controls built into the side of the garment. Now we just need some traditional German music to crank. Here is a fairly useless translation of the linked site done via Babelfish.

It occurs, even if one is resident in Munich, rarely that one gets written press releases in Bavarian skillfully. I know the language of the local natives only in fragments, however nevertheless picked out from the message that (among other things.) Cattle fur fashion manufacturer Lodenfrey to the ISPO a electronics collection opened yesterday in Munich to show wants. Those consists, about which I convinced myself evenly in the only moderately visited halls, of a Janker (for Preissn: Trachtenjacke) and leather trousers (by the “greetings of aus” films country widely admits in the best way). The special to it is the special in it, or like that. Both articles of clothing contain a free speech mechanism for mobile phone and a MP3-Player with 512 megabyte of memory, which one can steer via a textile keyboard. The technology behind it came originally from Infineon and in the past year into the company Interactive Wear had been paged out. Whether the technology integrated into the clothes is really practical, I cannot say yet: About still another Octoberfest beer tent test is missing to the leather trousers (one can telephone with the noise, really even with a Headset? And one wants that at all, in view of the usually high alcohol level?). The fact that one can wash portable electronics does not play with a genuinly Bavarian “noise-leather” eh a role.

I’d like to thank my friend William for pointing these snazzy duds out.

]]> http://17dots.com/2007/04/25/mp3hosen/feed/ 1 http://17dots.com/2007/04/17/music-video-games-star-power/ http://17dots.com/2007/04/17/music-video-games-star-power/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:06:51 +0000 bryan http://17dots.com/2007/04/17/music-video-games-star-power/

Star Power

Occasionally a video game company might bring in a “celebrity” to help on a games soundtrack or audio. This is not always a good thing. BT‘s contribution for Tiger Woods Golf feels phoned in and dull compared to his solo work, Paul Oakenfold’s FIFA theme sounds like it could have been written by anyone. However, there are those rare occasions when you can tell the artist connected with the game on some level and the end result is something really worth listening to.

One of the first game soundtracks that got me excited was the original Quake. Not only was Trent Reznor one of the first mainstream musicians to compose original material for video games, but he defied expectations by creating mostly unnerving ambient soundscapes instead of something decidedly more Nine Inch Nails sounding. You could also use any CD from your collection to provide the music in place of Reznor’s score. I used to love experimenting with different albums to change the mood in the game, Fear Factory and Dead Voices On Air were a few of my favorites to use.

Often times music in games is not a linear affair, tracks can be created on the fly based on the situation the gamer is in at any point in time. Although I have not played it, I can imagine that Amon Tobin‘s soundtrack for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory used this strategy. It seems to me like the song versions included on the album may be arrangements created out of the ambient, mid and high intensity sections of the music for given levels. It’s all pretty typical Amon Tobin sounding, which ultimately means this is some of the most intricate sounding game music I have heard.

Initially I was sceptical of Junkie XL’s soundtrack for SSX Blur as the samples seemed a little uneven. But the mix of funky guitars, big beats and chopped up samples is just too much fun to be angry that it sounds a little hastily put together. Or a little too cut and paste. Overall, this is a fantastic game soundtrack and a pretty decent fun loving electronic album to boot.

Chris Vrenna’s (Tweaker, ex-NIN) freakishly creepy, somewhat cartoony soundtrack for American McGee’s Alice is found here mixed as one continuous piece with brief clips of dialog taken from the game. Jack off Jill’s vocalist Jessicka provided the sampled female vocals that appear all over the soundtrack. At the time, I remember being very excited that much of the soundtrack was made available by the game studio as non-DRM mp3 files prior to the release date.

next up: odds n ends

previously: themes/scores, song libraries

]]> http://17dots.com/2007/04/17/music-video-games-star-power/feed/ 0 http://17dots.com/2007/04/15/meet-your-neighbors/ http://17dots.com/2007/04/15/meet-your-neighbors/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2007 02:59:28 +0000 brett http://17dots.com/2007/04/15/meet-your-neighbors/

Over at eMusic.com, we just re-launched an (unfortunately) seldom-used feature: the Neighbors page (or check out my neighbors if you’re not an eMusic user). “Neighbors” are eMusic users who have shown they have similar tastes to you, through shared downloads and ratings. We take a handful of these users, and show you a few of the artists they’ve been downloading recently. Here’s how it works.

The old Neighbors page had a drab layout, with user nicknames arranged in a grid, and artist names underneath each. It was hard to extract much useful information from this page — you never knew where to look, and your best hope was to kind of randomly scan around looking for an artist you recognized. We’ve spruced it up and aimed to make it more interactive, fun, and hopefully useful.

The new format emphasizes the connections between users and artists. Now neighbors are arranged in a column on the left, with columns of artists in the center and on the right. The center list shows artists that you share with your neighbors, and the one on the right includes artists that your neighbors have downloaded but you haven’t (recommendations of a sort). Artists that are more popular with your neighbors have a larger font. The fun part is that when you move your mouse over any user or artist, you’ll see the connections between them: hovering over a user name will reveal the artists that user has recently downloaded, while an artist name will connect to users who’ve downloaded that artist, as well as other artists they also downloaded. It’s a more visual way of presenting the information, and the center column of “shared” artists gives you a logical place to start browsing your neighbors.

We also used the new Neighbors page to start experimenting with an oft-requested feature from users: sound samples that play within the browser (through Flash), rather than requiring an external media player. Clicking on an artist name displays a mini-playlist of their most popular songs (like on the artist page), and plays the 30-second samples of each. The intent is to get people listening fast, rather than making them wade through additional pages (and lose track of their neighbors).

As our astute users have pointed out, just because your neighbor has downloaded an artist, it doesn’t necessarily mean they like it. Nor does it indicate that artist bears any similarity to other artists they’ve downloaded in the past. Neighbors (as they exist right now anyway) don’t show you true “recommendations,” but they are an interesting pulse on your surrounding eMusic users, and a testament to their variety of taste. Check them out.

Love it? Hate it? Improvements you’d like to see? Tell us here or on the message boards.

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