Music For Dozens Blog

We just finished a relatively systematic re-styling of the site. We're aiming for simpler, cleaner, faster, easier-to-use. One of the best new things we added was a genre browser. The cool thing about it is that it uses a hand-curated list of tags to provide a kind of taxonomy. That is, we picked the tags we thought best linked to genres of music represented on the site. Tagging has a power with music that it doesn't many other places. Odds are that if I think something is 'jazz', you'll concur -- you might not like it, but you'll probably agree it's jazz. But, since these are tags, anyone can particpate. You can tag any song 'jazz' or 'reggae' or 'portalnd' and it will show up in the genre navigation for everyone to use. It's a kind of combination of taxonomy and folksonomy that seems pretty powerful and that I haven't seen anywhere else.

Anyway, hopefully everything will be hunky dory with the new changes. If we look away anything that you miss or if you have any other ideas for how we can make MFDZ better, email us. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

I didn't realize that I hadn't mentioned it here until I actually saw the thing on the page after making that last post! We just released a new version of the off-site player which has a bunch of new features: fast-forward, rewind, pause, displaying the artist name and song name (the artist name even acts as a link back to the artist's page on MFDZ), and a progress bar.

We built it using Open Laszlo which is a neat open source framework for making SWF files using javascript and XML. David Temkin, Laszlo's CTO worked on the Newton, so you know it's got to be good. We'll hopefully be doing a bunch more with Laszlo in the future, so keep your eyes and ears peeled.

Recently, ñBlog, a Spanish-language site listing tips and tools for bloggers, wrote a post about MFDZ where they mentioned our support of "musica libre" (Creative Commons) and demonstrated the use of our off-site player. Since then we've been getting a mini-avalanche of music in Spanish, in a rainbow of musical styles. So I thought I'd highlight two of my favorites here:





Sorry for the terrible Spanish in the post title, I'm sure it's not right, but it was the best I could do. . .

Amysue is one of our longest standing and most productive artists. With 17 tracks on the site so far, some from as far back as the old CD mailing-only version of the site, and new ones coming all the time I always enjoy following her musical output. One fun aspect of that output is the multiple versions she's done of her song, Stolen Shoe. In the most recent (podcast) version, she explains the story behind it, which is funny and touching, much like the song itself. I thing of it as Amy's theme song. So, here are the versions, enjoy:

Piano Podcast version

Album version (electric guitar)

There's even an acoustic guitar version on Amy's offsite podcast. I hope she puts that one up on MFDZ soon too. I could listen to a whole album of just this song.