May | 2016 | Every Moment Has A Song

George Martin and the Beatles: A Producer’s Impact, in Five Songs

18 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: george martin, the beatles

(via The New York Times Music)

March 9, 2016

When we hear a great recording, we tend to think of the music as having sprung fully developed from the imagination of the musician or band that cut the tracks. But that ignores the role of the producer, who translates the musician’s vision into the sound we experience.

The contributions that George Martin , who died Tuesday at 90, made to the Beatles’ recorded catalog were crucial, and although he was the first to say that most of the credit belongs to the band, many of the group’s greatest songs owe their sound and character to his inspired behind-the-scenes work. Here are a few of his most telling musical fingerprints:

Music-Map: The Tourist Map of Music

13 May 2016 2 Comments

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts, Recommended Sites Tags: music map

Obsessive music fans, we think we’ve found your next rabbit hole.

Music-Map is a music discovery visualization tool which, when an artist or band name is entered, presents a network of other artists mapped out based (presumably) on proximity of relationship or similarity.

The flaw? It almost certainly lacks the authoritative credibility of, for example, the ambitious Music Genome Project® which powers Pandora’s music recommendation service. In fact (though the site provides little or no info on the sources of its recommendations) the suspicion here is that it is merely plugged into the “related searches” from a site such as Amazon.com.

This would explain why KC and the Sunshine Band cozy right up against The Mamas & The Papas and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are the closest band on the map when you search The Beatles. Also, the cosmos surrounding The Mills Brothers contains the Texas Tornados and Donovan, yet the Ames Brothers are nowhere to be found. And Queen really doesn’t come to mind as the closest thing to Pink Floyd. And so on.

Methinks this is just another way to use Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought” feature. But it does lay searches/recommendations out in visual terms, and splashes lots of artists on the page. So in that sense it’s arguably more practical, and definitely more fun.

http://www.music-map.com/

Amazon Cloud Player’s Major Fail

13 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: amazon cloud

Just a week ago we reprinted this article calling out Apple’s iCloud Music Library for its failings as a custodian of your music collection. Now Amazon Cloud Player is evaluated by Music Plasma and, similarly, deficiencies arise:

(via Music Plasma)

MusicPlasma.com has been diligently watching the heated competition between Apple, Amazon, and Google as each tries to provide their best “music in the cloud” offering. Each has its own pros and cons. After a thorough analysis of all of the available reviews and specifications, MusicPlasma.com decided to test out Amazon’s Cloud Player Premium since it appeared to offer the best solution for the majority of our visitors. For $25/Yr, Amazon claims to do the following:

Store 250,000 of your songs online
Stream all of your songs from a web browser or iPhone/Android app
Allow you to download and or stream any of your matched songs in MP3 format at 256K bit rate
Upgrade any low quality songs it can match to 256Kb bit rate quality
Import songs and playlists from Windows Media Player and iTunes

If Amazon could execute on these tasks, it would surely be the superior cloud music offering. Unfortunately, it comes up woefully short on the last 2 bullet items. We conducted a very realistic test which involved importing a typical user’s music library consisting of about 12000 songs and 50 playlists into Amazon’s Cloud Player Premium. Here are the results…

Kick Ass Covers

13 May 2016 Leave a comment

by Ed Cyphers in General Posts Tags: cover songs

(via CultureSonar) by Al Cattabiani

More often than not, the definitive version of a song is recorded by its writer(s), or at least the artist who did it first.

That’s not always the case, of course. Sometimes covers surpass the original. Or sometimes a great cover adds a whole new dimension to a song.

So, in the spirit of music geeks’ endless appetite for lists, let us humbly suggest a few covers that are, if not definitive, completely successful on their own.

We’re just getting the proverbial ball rolling. We’d love to add your own commentary. Read through to the end, and you’ll see a pretty cool new way to add to the playlist.

So let’s kick things off with a half-dozen nominees: