Now first and foremost, last.fm is a great tool to let people get to know what music you like listening to. It also enables you to easily find people who have similar musical tastes. It also gathers statistics according to your music and presents you with your own weekly, monthly or yearly music charts. I guess it’s also much more than that, but I’ll let you find it out for yourselves.

Anyway, how does it work? Either you download their own music player or use special software plugins for your favorite music players, like winamp, xmms, audacious (my player of choice on Linux) and many others. Some players have such plugins already built-in and so you’re ready to use them right out of the box. The software sends data about the tracks that you play back to last.fm, which in return uses it to populate your music profile. Easy as pie and you only need to spend a couple of seconds to set it up (in most cases you only need to enter your user name and password in the software).

These are the basics and I recommend that you give last.fm a try. It’s really a fun way to share information about your personal music tastes. I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

You don’t need to register in order to see people’s profiles so if you wish to check-out my music profile, simply click here.

I promised that I’ll write a few words about my new speakers so here it goes:

The JBL L-100T’s hooked up with the Sansui 9090DB sound great, especially if you’re into rock and other genres that feed on raw power and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean that they’re your straight and simple, off the block “ALL-BASS/NO-CLASS” heavy loudspeakers that techno music enthusiasts praise so much these days. The high and midrange are also top-notch, especially the titanium tweeter (that’s what the T stands for in the name). They also seem to have a lot of detail in them. I say that they “seem” to have it, because as for the sound resolution and detail, I can only estimate as of now, because my only source of sound is my computer’s soundcard (an old SoundBlaster Live! Platinum), connected with a not-so-expensive 10 meter long cable… and this really can’t qualify as a quality music source, at least not in my opinion. So I decided that until I get my hands on a decent CD player or turntable hooked up with the system, I’ll leave my review as it is now and come back to it later. I simply feel that my speaker-receiver combo gives as much as it can, but it still can’t spread out it’s wings, because of the source.

On a side note: Actually, some people (especially Hi-Fi newcomers) make the mistake of putting most of their money in the amplifier and speaker sections of their system and leave the rest of the money pile for the source-devices. It kinda should be the other way around, because even the greatest loudspeakers and amps will sound like crap if they’re fed with sound coming from a crappy source. So my word of advice is: the source device should be at least on par with the other components of your Hi-Fi system, quality wise.

Another advice: If you plan to use your SoundBlaster Live! or Audigy series soundcard as a music source and connect it to your amplifier, use the rear-speaker channel output, because it’s of higher quality than the front-speaker one. I know it sounds weird, but the signal really has much less noise in it. If I remember right, it all goes down to the cards having a separate DAC for the front and rear speaker outputs, and Creative (the makers of the SB cards) paired a higher quality one with the rear output. If you don’t believe me, try for yourself. The difference is quite perceivable and you don’t need any high class equipment to hear it.

As for the other part of this post’s title, I’ve got a slight spending dilemma on my hands. I can’t decide on what should I save up money for now. I’ve got 2 ideas: a CD player or photo camera. The CD player would go as the new main source of music in my system, as mentioned above. The photo camera would mostly be for the benefit of the blog, because I (and probably you too) seriously think that my website is really in need of some photos, especially my guide posts. I’ve often written that this lack of “visual attachments” really starts to limit me and the post content’s quality in general.

Luckily, one of my roommates also had a similar problem. He started thinking about either investing in a camera or in new speakers for his computer. You could say that I slightly “poked him” in the right direction, by saying that now he already has a pair of speakers, but he doesn’t have anything to take photos with, so he decided for the camera. He spent a few days on the net and reading photography magazines, while being on the hunt for a good camera that would be available within his budget. He settled on a Samsung (I don’t know the model) and ordered it from the net (ironically enough, the seller is located in my home town). My plan is that when he gets it, I’ll try it out and then if I’ll like it, I’ll buy the same model. I really don’t want to start learning loads of stuff about photography as I’ve learned about audio stuff through trial and error and internet researching methods. I simply want something not too costly ($200 max.) that will make good photos which I can share with other people (like you for example, my faithful readers).

That’s all for now. From the blog’s stats I see that there are more and more readers subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, which is a good thing, as now I know that there are some folks out there who probably think that my site has some potential and is worthy of coming back to, which really is a high praise for me personally. As for the blog’s top content, my vinyl collecting guides take the top 4 places with almost no competition, so I guess that I’ll finally have to start thinking about a new guide series… Goodnight y’all .

For some time I’ve been using Linux (for those of you who don’t know what Linux is: it’s another kind of operating system. To put it in a nutshell: consider it as a more “open” Windows), the well known Debian distribution to be exact. I’ve configured all the multimedia applications (music/video players, etc.), but I still lacked something. Then, while skipping through the available software, I stumbled upon the piece of software called “streamtuner”. That’s when I re-discovered internet radio stations…

For all of you Linux-using music lovers out there, I recommend the streamtuner software (it should be available in most distros in your package management systems and if not then here’s the program’s homepage). What does it do ? It’s author describes it simply as “a stream directory browser”. And that’s what it exactly does. It shows us a listing of radio streams from the most popular stream directories (Shoutcast, Live365 and Xiph to name a few) according to a chosen stream category or by using the built-in directory search tools. When you choose the stream of a station that you’d like to listen to, you simply select it and push the “Tune in” button on the menu bar and presto! it runs Xmms (most popular mp3 player for Linux, arguably kinda like Winamp under Windows) and it automatically plays the stream which you’ve selected. It also allows you to make bookmarks of your favourite streams, similar to the mechanism which you find in web browsers.

Last, but not least, coupled with the “streamripper” program (here’s it’s homepage, it’s also available for Windows), you can directly command it to “rip” a stream, which means that it saves the songs which are fed through the stream as mp3’s on your hard disk. This is a great and useful tool if you find a good station with a cool DJ and want to record his program for later re-listening or when you’ve gotta go somewhere, but don’t want to miss your favourite radio talkshow (just like back in the old cassette recording days …). Streamripper doesn’t need to coupled with streamtuner, Xmms, Winamp or other player, so it’s not obligatory to listen to the stream while recording.

Winamp has a tool similar to that of streamtuner, although as far as I’m aware of it’s only limited to the Shoutcast directory (which is by the way owned by the guys behind Winamp).

In order to find a radio station stream you can also simply go to the stream directory’s website (I’ve put some of the major directories URLs on the Links page). Then you only need a player (Winamp, Foobar, Xmms) in order to connect to and play the chosen radio stream.

About 6 months ago, I’ve read about a new music radio project on the Internet called “The Music Genome Project“. It’s main goal is to help people discover new music, based on the music that they like. It came forth with the Pandora Internet Radio, which is a pretty genuine website and radio indeed. It simply asks you the name of your favourite band or song and in a few moments it creates your own, personal radio station, consisting of songs which are similar in style and genre to the band/song you entered. Later, while playing the songs (it plays right out of your browser and doesn’t need an external player software) you can decide whether you like a selected song or not and depending on your decision the system remembers and tries to either continue or stop serving music similar to that song. You can also bookmark the songs into a kind of “favourites” page, although later you can’t just choose the song in that page. While playing you can’t rewind/fast forward the song or go back to the previous song. The one thing you can do here is to skip the song that’s playing right now, but that’s also somewhat limited (it skips automatically if you “decide” that you don’t like it). It’s a great tool if you get the urge to find something new to listen to, but don’t want to go around asking record shop owners for music similar to your own tastes.

OK, that’s that about internet radio streams for now. From time to time I’ll post links to my personal favourite radio station streams.