Thankee TechCrunch for the pointer to the new YouTube Music Discover Project which lets you use YouTube to explore music videos and possibly pick up on some new artists.
Enter a music act on the front page. (If you can’t think of one YouTube will give you some suggestions.) YouTube will take your artist and make you a list of videos by that artist sprinkled with some hopefully-related artists.
I did a search for Flogging Molly. YouTube gave me the screen you see here, with a tab that has a list of Flogging Molly videos available on YouTube. There’s also a mixtape tab that has the video playlist that you see on the left side of the screen. (The videos start playing automatically when you get the results page.) Then there’s a related artists tab that opens up to other lists of songs. In the case of Flogging Molly, YouTube recommended ten related artists, only two of which I had heard of.
The playlists that the Music Discover Project generates can be saved or opened, or songs removed on the fly. The songs in the related artist tab can be dropped into the playlist as well.
The site took most of the artists I threw at it, though sometimes there were only a few videos available and no related artists. Sometimes I was a bit surprised by the related artists it turned up and sometimes it seemed spot-on (do a search for Michael Hedges.)
Just two complaints: if you want to do a new search, it looks like you have to reload the page to get rid of your old search. And when you’re looking at music videos in that fairly small area on the results screen, the Google ads are about three times as annoying. Good thing you can minimize ‘em…
I first read about Dewey last week at Boing Boing. Boinger Dean Putney has create a project that makes it much easier to find and listen to the huge archive of freely-available music on Dewey — over 1.1 million tracks by over 10,000 artists!
Dewey is available at http://deweymusic.org/. From the front page you can get the pick of the day, or you can look at the top-rated, most-played, or newest tracks. But if you’d rather, you can browse genres or do a keyword search. I found the genres list way too unwieldy — one of the genres, I promise you, was “a campfire and a tent and a flashlight and some matches and a tree and that river and my glasses and a spaceship and a really really big bear but the bear is really really far away” — but the keyword search works really well.
I did a search for ragtime and got a results page divided into several sections. There’s a list of artists (in this case none) albums, and songs. At the bottom is a list of venues, but this isn’t for venue information, it’s for performances that were recorded in that particular venue. The result list also includes the number of “thumbs up” for songs.
And here’s the really cool thing — you can use the icons next to each song or album to either play it immediately or add it to a playlist. (Looking at albums full of songs gives you an addition icon option to download each track.) The playlist shows up on the upper-left part of the page. If you’re trying to make a playlist of a certain length, you’ll have to do some guessing — track length is not always available even for album listings. But if you just want some music, pop in some music and albums and away you go.
Both search and playback were fast and terrifically easy to use. I didn’t see a RSS feed for search results, which would be fantastic, and track length would be a great thing to have for all the songs. But I’m quibbling — Dewey makes the million+ tracks in the Internet Archive SO MUCH EASIER to find and use! I wonder if anyone would do something like this for the feature films section of the IA, or maybe the Prelinger Archives?
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin now has an online database of Italian opera libretti available. The database has over 3400 items and includes cantatas, serenatas, and oratorios. You can access it at http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/music/, with an information page at
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/books/holdings/libretti/.
The access page is straight search, giving you the option to search in several fields inlcuding title, call #, librettist, location, and printer. I can’t imagine something I’m less qualified to come up with a search word for, so I punted and did a keyword search for opera. I got 424 results presented in a table that shows a variety of information including item title, composer, theatre, location, and date. Click on the title of the item for a little bit of additional information including title page information and cast, if available.
I didn’t see any digitized images, but some of the items here are so old (the collection contains items that were published as early as 1600) that I can’t imagine the data about them is available many other places.
