Music
 

Music

Think music and most people think iPod or iTunes, which given the popularity of Apple’s music player is hardly surprising. However I’m amazed by the sheer number of music videos on YouTube, and often people just upload the song with a still photograph of the artist so you can still listen to the track. What surprises me is that it’s very easy to then download that track by capturing the audio part of the uploaded file. The best site for doing this is video2mp3, which is a free site that converts the audio stream of the flv file on YouTube to an mp3 file that can be played on your iPod or other music player; marvellous!

So I thought I’d spent a little time scouring You Tube looking for tracks worthy of inclusion in a playlist that I can put here. Well, a lot of time and three playlists later, I think I’m there.

Music: A number of tunes, new and old, covering all types of music that I’ve enjoyed over the years.
Dance Remixes: Some well know, and not so well know tunes, remixed into some of the best mixes and remixes I've heard.
Old Skool: A playlist of tracks that I grew up listening too in the 1980’s.

I can’t put together a page on music and not mention Sonos, the wireless music streaming system which I was fortunate enough to get for Christmas in 2008. If you are looking for a way to stream music from you computer all over your house, then this is the definitive solution. It’s very slick, the connection is robust and the synchronisation between rooms is perfect. I use iTunes to rip all my music and if you use the superior ACC format at a high bit rate not only do you get a really good quality sound but you also get perfect playback of  mix albums without the jumps between tracks. Also, if you embed the album art in each track, which is easy to do in iTunes, you will always have album art on you Sonos controller or in fact your iPod or any other music player you use. My music is a stored on a low power NAS drive (Buffalo Link Station Mini) so I don’t even need my computer on to access and play music on my Sonos system. In addition to all of this Sonos allows you to listen to radio stations from all over the world, which it accesses through the internet; brilliant!

Old Skool

Dance Remixes

This page was last updated on 18/03/10