AVINASH 2.0

SeeqPod – A Mind-blowing, Playable Music Search Engine

SeeqPod is a new kid in the Web 2.0 city, highly focused on the music niche. It’s a music search and recommendation engine for the people who spend hours listening to and discovering new music tracks.

SeeqPod travels the web indexing all the music files it finds, and then offers them for playback direct from the original location. I’m afraid that because of this feature, SeeqPod is gonna teach all the website owners a good lesson who store music files on their domains.

The home page is simple and easy to navigate. SeeqPod has a flash widget on its homepage that displays a sample of current music being indexed by its engine. I gotta say that SeeqPod is all Flashy inside. I enjoyed my 1/2 hr trying its many cool features that I’ll discuss about in this post.

SeeqPod Homepage

Now let me show you something that I found inside the member’s area:

SeeqPod Member’s Area

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the SeeqPod Member’s area is Flash powered but I really liked the way my Firefox browser stayed calm. Normally, Firefox starts acting up if you feed it any heavy Flash-food.

SeeqPod member’s area has two columns. You’ll be using the left column to either search your favorite music tracks or discover new music. The right area hosts audio and video players as well as your music playlists. It seems like you can create unlimited playlists.

If you have an account, you can create, save and share playlists. SeeqPod also allows you to add all music tracks included in the search results to a playlist. Later if you don’t like any music track, you can remove it from your playlists. Cool, eh?

SeeqPod Music Search

SeeqPod Search Results

This ‘Playable Search’ is made possible through biomimetic search & discovery technology, a method that mimics the way the human mind might use context to make and recall associations, an approach which relies on context by finding the hidden relationships in digital content and data.

There are so many options available for music tracks that you might faint! SeeqPod offers numerous options for interacting with a track. You can share your playlists with others. Whenever you want to add the playlist on your blog, just click the ‘Embed’ button available in the right column and SeeqPod will present you the code. You can also buy some tracks on Amazon.

SeeqPod Music Track Options

Add to Playlist

Easy, no?

SeeqPod not only indexes music files, it also tracks music videos hosted on many video sharing sites like YouTube, Veoh, etc.

SeeqPod Video Player Screenshots

Press the video button to watch the music video of any particular track. If video is available for any track, SeeqPod will let you enjoy it.

Videos from two different video sharing sites. You can expect videos from many more video sharing sites.

If that was not enough, SeeqPod also has a SeeqPod Media Search, Recommendation and Discovery Services (SMSRDS) API that offers public access to its technologies. SMSRDS enables third-party developers to easily integrate SeeqPod technologies into social networks, ad networks, and other consumer applications, and improve their user’s experience in new and novel ways.

Now, see this:

SeeqPod Audio Player

I’ve collected 8+ songs in my playlist while I was writing this post. If this site doesn’t get sued for helping the music piracy rate grow, many people will be spending more time downloading music tracks than listening to last.fm radio.

[tags]SeeqPod, Music, Music Discovery, Music Download, Web 2.0[/tags]

Living Outside the United States? No Pandora For You!

As Michael Arrington wrote over at TechCrunch, international access to Pandora Internet Radio has been blocked. Though I’m not worried or sad because of this access restriction, a few people in my friend circle are a bit sad who were regular users of Pandora Internet Radio.

Today, one of my regular readers tried to visit Pandora and found this:

Sue RIAA! Well, if you can’t do that, I’ll suggest to use Finetune. It’s an awesome Internet radio service and so far, it’s available worldwide.

[tags]Pandora, RIAA, Internet Radio, Pandora Access Restriction[/tags]

Finetune Desktop, Music and Adobe Apollo Awesomeness

For all the Finetune fans out there, Finetune Desktop has been released. It’s a cool music player developed as the first commercial music application using the new Adobe Apollo platform.

With Finetune Desktop, you can do all these things without touching your browser:

• Listen to playlists created by you or your friends.
• Listen to playlists inspired by your favorite artists.
• Listen to playlists from your favorite genre.
• Rediscover your favorite artists in your iTunes library.
• Add your favorite playlists to your blog or website.

If you are new to Finetune and wanna know more about it, I recommend reading my detailed review of Finetune that I posted on this blog in February 2007.

After trying Finetune Desktop, you’ll also come to know how cool is the new Adobe Apollo platform.

In Review: finetune, The Unique Online Music Service

The World Wide Web (WWW) is full of wonderful services. In this article, I’m gonna write my honest opinion about an online music service called finetune.

I’ve used many online music services including Last.fm, Pandora, iLike, etc. But this one is completely unique.

Yes, finetune is unique:

Q. What does finetune do?
A. finetune is new kind of online music service with a unique combination of features:

• Enter an artist name, listen to a playlist of related artists personalized for you
• Create your own playlist from the music library, listen, share with others! It’s like on-demand music. You can stream your favorite songs whenever you want.
• Add your playlist to your blog or MySpace page
• Explore the finetune community — browse, listen, create a profile, tag, connect with other users and more
• Buy downloads, related products and services

Q. What’s so new and different?
A. A comprehensive music library:

• Almost 2 million tracks and growing
• All the major labels and the biggest independents, updated daily
• Supplemented with radio edits and other catalogs not available on most online services (e.g. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin)
• Meta data, images, reviews, etc.
• 350 distinct music categories, 400 professionally managed stations
• Baroque to Brit-Pop, Ragtime to Rap, African to Zydeco and everything in between

A proprietary recommendation engine, drawing on:

• 7 years of accumulated listener data
• Almost 100 million listener hours
• 20,000 user-created playlists

Easy-to-use

• Web-based (no client download necessary)
• Cross-browser and PC/Mac compatible: IE, Firefox, Safari (Mac)
• Simple UI
• Free

As you can see, while a lot of similar features can be found on Last.fm, you still won’t find an on-demand* online music service for free that can be used anywhere in the world.

finetune has everything that you can expect from a website in this Web 2.0 era. Still it uses a frame to make smooth music streaming possible. You can browse the whole site in the main frame while your music player will stay ON in the left frame.

finetune allows you to create your own playlist and stream the tracks whenever you want. It also has a music player for Wii. When you have 45+ tracks in your playlist, you can put a finetune music player on your own blog/website.

After digging around a bit, I found that finetune was at 5th position in the TIME Top 10 Websites list (2006).

* You can add maximum 3 tracks/Artist/playlist. They do this to simplify the playlist-building process while still maintaining enough diversity of artists to comply with Internet radio licensing.

Note: To see the finetune player working live on a website/blog, you may want to visit my personal blog.

Update: You also get a profile page like this.
[tags]finetune, online music service, on-demand music, free music service[/tags]

Lyricsplex Feed Update

Just a quick update:

Now you can enjoy the awesome music videos + lyrics posted on Lyricsplex via your RSS feed reader. RSS feed was already enabled on Lyricsplex but it wasn’t complete. Since now I’ve enabled full RSS feed distribution feature, you are welcome to become a Lyricsplex RSS feed subscriber.

[tags]Music video, Lyrics, Lyricsplex[/tags]

iLike – A Social Networking Portal for Music Lovers

If you are a TechCrunch reader, you should already be aware of iLike. I know iLike since the day the TechCrunch people posted an article about iLike sidebar plugin for iTunes. For the people who don’t know what is iLike, I’ll continue writing this article.

iLike is a social networking portal *dedicated* for music lovers. You may want to visit this link if you are eager to know how does this new portal look like, what is there for music lovers, etc.

The main thing that I like about iLike is the option to search YouTube videos. With every song sample, you have an option to search YouTube. This option makes it really easy to find your favorite music videos.

iLike helps you to discover good music easily and quickly. After finishing the registration process, you’ve the option to browse member profiles. iLike has many interesting features. As soon as you visit any profile, it starts to calculate your compatibility score. For example, suppose I’m the person A and you are the person B. Now, as soon as you visit my profile, the iLike system starts to compare your taste of music with mine. In seconds, it’ll show you the compatibility score. The compatibility score makes it pretty easier to choose a person as your friend.

You can visit my iLike profile to see how does an iLike profile look like. The whole iLike site design is pretty neat and beautiful. iLike doesn’t show any advertisement on your profile (what I’ve seen so far).

That’s it. Once you are a registered iLike member, you’ll discover interesting options. :)