I have mentioned before the Internet Archive and its wonderful collection of free live music. Now you can bring some of that music to your own site with a new Live Music Widget, as announced by the Internet Archive last week.
The widget is available on Widgetbox at http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/internet-archive-free-music. You can do some customizing of width, height, theme, etc. However the content remains the same; new music as it’s added to the archive.
When I took a look at the widget it included music from bands including The Grateful Dead, Donna the Buffalo, Cracker, and Drive-By Truckers. Now if it had a built in player that would be even more awesome, but alas….
The widget was created by Jeff Kaplan (or at least some user calling themselves “JeffKaplan”) of the Internet Archive. This is the only widget available from this user. Will be perhaps be seeing more on the way?
By the way, if you like this widget, don’t forget to check out Dewey Music, which I covered last month in ResearchBuzz. Great stuff.
Despite the fact that I’m not fond of Guinness, I suspect I will be be coming back to the Irish Beer Finder, available at http://www.irishbeerfinder.com/. Why? Because in addition to finding Irish bars, the site also lists information about Irish music. The site lists 2,400 Irish bars and taverns in all 50 states.
From the front page you can look at featured bars and get some of the latest news, but you can also do a search for Irish bars by city/state or zip code — and with a radius ranging from one to 300 miles. I did a search for Irish bars within 10 miles of Phoenix, Arizona. I got 13 results, from Seamus McCaffrey’s Irish Pub to Mulligan’s Brick Bar. The search results include an address but if you go to the location’s page, you’ll also get a phone number, a nice Google Map, and a form for reviewing the location. Most of the listings I looked at had a Web site address. Some also had an e-mail address and a few even had a link to the location’s bar menu.
Want some music? Check out the Irish Beer Finder News page, which lists not only musical events but also the occasional road race. And often with the Web links to individual bars and taverns you’ll easily get music listings.
I was surprised at how many listings had Web addresses and e-mail addresses; someone put a lot of work into getting these listings together. If you enjoy a nice Harp Lager or some good music, you’ll find a spot for your next outing at this site.
It’s Music Thursday here at ResearchBuzz!
Do you like browsing album covers? Would you like to do it one giant page at a time? Visit Album Art Search at http://www.album-art-search.com. At this site, the search for album art comes first and the music comes second — if you ever stop enjoying the album art long enough to get around to the music.
The site starts out with a bunch of popular covers. You can browse by genre if you like but it’s much more fun to do a plain keyword search. Do a search and you’ll get a page full of album art that relates to your keyword. I started out with cows:
Now of course you can search Amazon’s music selection for cows and get a quite servicable result, but I’m wondering if there’s some different way these album results are being sorted. It seems to me that I’m getting more indy-offbeat-type stuff. (Cows with Guns? Two Cow Garage?) The albums are hard to appreciate in the result montage but click on one of them and you’ll get a much larger version of the album cover, a link to the Amazon page for the album, and an invitation to “log in” if you wanted to save an album to your favorites. Apparently this site was built using the Google Apps engine, so it also uses the Google login. I didn’t try it.
With search results that provide images only, this site isn’t good for serious research. But oh is it fun to browse around.
