Chopstork

Fridays After Five is a concert series during the summer in downtown Charlottesville, with concerts taking place every Friday (obviously) after work. For SFers, think Stern Grove, but much smaller/local acts and more mingling.

We decided we couldn’t wait for the season to start, so we put on our own rock concert. With Rock Band. At the Pavilion. “One Friday After Four-thirty.” The band is Panty Zamboni.

Prefuncing in the green room.

The roadies setting up.

Off to a rough start. The wind gave us some problems and the lyrics were illegible. Band manager: For our next gig we need sandbags and static lyrics mode on our rider.

Rocking out.

This would be Tea Bags’ final performance before his fatal heroin overdose.

Tea Bags. Almost passed out. Eating grass. If Bloc Party was on Rock Band, I could understand the confusion (”like eating glass” / “like eating grass”), but I’m not sure how this happened. …And then he passed out, like a true rock star.

Fans show up.

And we let them play. Cuz he can actually sing.

ROCK!!!!

Remember that Mitsubishi commercial with that girl in a pink burret pop-and-locking in the passenger seat to Days Go By? There was a whole series of those Mitsubishi commercials, but it turns out most of them weren’t new songs like that one. Oh well, here they are anyway.

A couple years ago I heard about C89.5 somehow. It’s a dance station up in Seattle run out of a high school by high school students. Luke can probably tell you all about it. I was bored that weekend so I downloaded some songs that were on their “top songs of 2004″ or something. Most were too “techno-ish” for my taste, but these are more mellow ones that I liked. Since I’ve had it sitting on my iTunes, I figured I’d put it up here. I think I threw in a couple random older songs too.

Since it’s the debut of streaming music on Chopstork—and because it’s just fun—here is some more music. Turbo Hero comes to us from the DC area with such hits as The Night, The Itch, and The Rose that are The Raaawwwwk!!! You can pick up their debut album at… you can’t. Here’s their demo.

Sweet. The bulk uploader for Faces’ TuneFeed works in Safari. Guess I should update my Firefox. Since Faces is the only one I’ve gotten to work so far, here’s a TuneFeed for the Kooks album I just got. I digg.

Don’t be shy. Don’t be lazy. Share your music with the rest of us!

Dammit, gotta figure out how to keep it from playing automatically. That’s gonna get old really fast. I hate websites with sounds.

[update]: Just set “autoplay=1″ to “autoplay=0″ in two places in the huge code they give you.

…or not. MediaMaster.com and Faces.com are sites that let you upload your (unprotected) music, create playlists, and put them on a web page using a widget (same way you embed YouTube movies in a site). I had grand plans for the Chopstork—I want to hear what you all listen to and discover me some new music.

I’ve started trying out the sites this weekend, but too bad they both have problems…at least for now. I haven’t been able to upload a single damn album yet. The problems with both are just bugs - they’ll be fixed eventually, so maybe we’ll try this again later.

From what I can tell, Faces has the better embedable widget. Anyone can listen to the playlists and skip tracks (but you can’t rewind). MediaMaster’s widget only let’s you pause and resume, and I haven’t figured out if the song order is always random. It let’s you see someone’s entire album collection, but not listen to it—you can only listen to playlists they’ve created—really confusing.

On the flip side, when you’re looking at your own account, MediaMaster acts as an online music player (looks very similar to iTunes). You can see and listen to all your albums plus easily create playlists. Faces is really a social-networking site and the music is just part of it. Music is stored in a “locker”—you can only listen to one song at a time from the locker. The only way to listen to an album in Face is is to explicitly create playlists and listen through the widgets (”TuneFeeds”).

The othe problem with Faces is it only takes MP3 files. If you use AAC, WMA, OGG, FLAC, or whatever, you have to convert them all to MP3 before upload—sucks.

In case you’re curious, or want to try it yourself and see if you get different results:

• MediaMaster fails to recognize when an upload is complete. When I try to play a song, it tells me it’s still waiting on the upload and can’t play it. Some songs work, some don’t.
• Faces’ bulk uploader just plain doesn’t work. It won’t let me drop any files into it.