Audio Boo

Following my recent attendance of the Student Radio Conference 2009, I was made aware of an online service named Audio Boo by the BBC's Head of Future Technology - James Cridland, (view his blog here. Audio Boo is an online blogging application with a difference, that difference being that we are talking about audio blogging.

To use audio boo you need to have a second generation iPod or iPhone with a microphone which you can plug in (if you are using the iPod). I use the microphone on Apple's new in-ear headphones. With this set up you download the application for free from the app store and open it up! Its so easy to use, at the bottom there are three buttons, one for listening to other peoples boos, one for recording your own boo, and one to link it with your Audio Boo account online.

Its brilliant to get your thoughts onto the internet quickly. You can follow people on audio boo as well similar to twitter, and of course you can be followed. My only grievance with it is that you cannot search for people and add them from your iPod, you need to go to the Audio Boo website.

If you want to check out some audio boos visit my website here, and you can see my current boos! To do this you can login to the website using your account details, and click on the RSS feed option. You can either feed all boos to your site, or just your own.

Update:

Claireatwaves has commented that a similar applications to Audio Boo is called ipadio, available from Ipadio.com, but this has a clear advantage over Audio Boo, in that you can broadcast from any phone! Having tried it, it does work very well but there are a few issues that lead me to stick with Audio Boo. One, that the quality is obviously that of a normal phone call, yet with the iPod application the quality is far superior. Secondly, the RSS feed I use to embed my Boos into my website cannot be replicated with ipadio, while they do offer an RSS feed for your phlogs (phone logs), it does not contain links to the audio files themselves, view an example at www.jsjallen.co.uk

Spotify!

Hello again! It's been a while since my last post, but I have been exploring the virtual world for technological gems to bring back to you and I am pleased to say I have found plenty on my travels! Articles soon to appear here consist of....

AudioBoo
Twitter
Tr.Im
Phorm - revisted
Google Street View
The LHC
OLEDs
The Sun Getting Dimmer
Visual Basic

and any more interesting bits I come across!


For today though, I will be looking at the musical revolution that is Spotify. Spotify is almost an entirely new tool for use online, in its simplest form, it is a standalone program which allows you to listen to a very large quantity of songs, for free, from your PC.
At this point I should enter a few qualifications to the previous paragraph, firstly, the "revolution" is not entirely unknown, many of us will be aware of Last.FM which provides a similar service, but within your web browser and by no means with the variety (or style) that Spotify provides. Secondly, while the service is free, as is the program to download, there are the occasional adverts which get played between entire songs. Note the word entire, if you are searching for songs and listening to little bits of many at a time, you will experience no advertisements.

I would just like to mention here a very interesting discussion I have come across concerning internet advertising, and more specifically, is it theft of the service if you turn the adverts off? Click here to view James Cridland's Blog

Spotify runs as a program from your desktop and is able to minimise to the system tray so as to stay out of the way, it has a very useful playlist function which allows you to save all your favourite songs in the appropriate playlist and listen to it at you leisure. (Incidentally, you can listen to my playlist of favourite songs by downloading and installing Spotify, then clicking here).

Spotify solves the major problem of wanting a song but not knowing what it is, you can simply search the lyrics on google, and then get the song on Spotify, it has undoubtedly quenched a vast musical thirst of my own!

However, as with all new toys, there are of course limitations and improvements that could be made. For one, I would love to see and option saying "Buy this song"*, or even better once you have made a playlist "Buy this playlist". By clicking this you would purchase the song (via paypal for example), and be permitted to download a DRM free file (like iTunes now does) to listen to and more importantly, put onto mobile devices such as an iPod.
Speaking of iPod brings me to my next improvement, a Spotify app in the app store, this truley would be an astounding app (assuming similar functionality), the ability to have all the music you could desire literally at the touch of your finger.

In summary, Spotify has truly given me a (so far) brief musical education and I have no doubt I am going to learn a great deal from it. I highly recommend the program and am certain you will not regret giving it a go. Download Spotify from Spotify dot com here.

***Update***
As per the comments on this blog, you can actually right click on a song and buy it from 7digital.com! Great news, but it doesn't work on every song, or playlists. Still good for the odd song though! Thanks for letting me know Afront.