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MTV visar just nu videon till Kanye Wests låt Stronger. Jag misstänker att jag kommer att få se den många gånger från till, men det gör inget för det är en mycket bra låt.

Stronger is one of the tracks on Kanye West’s coming album, but people are already going crazy over it since a radio show clip was ripped and spread on the internet. The clip featured a DJ talking over the awesome song, but there seems to be a full version out there now, spreading fast. The song is based on Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger and it’s quite intact actually. Kanye’s rap over it and his changes made are just perfect. I wasn’t too fond of his latest album, Late Registration, but I really liked The College Dropout and the new album, Graduation, looks very promising.

I got an invite a couple of days ago and I wanted to write something about it. It’s mostly positive. Almost only positive things, but lets take the bad first. Not all my music was available (no surprise) which is a bit annoying when it’s more like a music player than a radio (like Pandora or last.fm). You can’t really use Spotify as your only music player when you can’t listen to missing songs, free songs found on the internet or any other general sounds that you might find/have. You’re limited to what they have to offer. This was mostly annoying in the beginning when I wanted to listen to specific songs in my old playlist. After a while I more or less stopped listening to them, because it was too much work to switch between Spotify and my other music player.

Now the good stuff. What really impressed me at first was how fast the songs started and how jumping in the song really is as fast as your ordinary music player. No delays whatsoever. The interface is nice, iTunes-looking. There are of course some things that could be smoother, but I won’t go into them here. Even though it’s negative that not all my music was available on Spotify, they had a lot of stuff that I didn’t expect to find. I wonder if they agreements cover the same amount (or more) for a released product, or if the content is just for the beta.

The radio is so-so, but does its job I guess. You select zero or many genres and they try to play music from those genres. Sometimes you don’t really agree with the genre set for a song, and sometimes it’s plain wrong, but most of the time it makes reasonable choices. You can also select from which decade it should play music, which was something that I liked playing with.

Time to go back to listening to Dilated Peoples again (though some of their albums are missing in Spotify).

Awesome music. Enough said, I think.

Nah, they deserve more;

Ed Banger Records is a bit hyped lately, but they’re worth it. I find most of the stuff they release really good. I’m a big fan of Justice and DJ Mehdi mainly. DJ Mehdi’s Signatune is simply awesome. First time I heard it (the album version) I just wanted more of it (it’s only one minute long). Fortunately for me, Thomas Bangalter had already made a longer remix of it. Check it out on YouTube. I also suggest you check out Justice vs. Simian – We are your friends, because the video alone is easily worth it. If you want more, check out their (Justice’s) songs D.A.N.C.E and Phantom too.

Another good label is Institubes. My favorite artist there is probably Para One, who has made some really good songs. Dudun-Dun is one of the best.

(Edit: “daniel” sent me an invite. I’m not sure who you are, but many thanks!)

I wonder if Spotify is as cool as it sounds like. If only I had an invitation so I could try it out *hint* *hint*. Now when we in Europe can’t listen to Pandora, there’s definitely room for something new and Spotify looks like it could fill that spot and more (the social part, that Pandora doesn’t really have). From what I’ve heard (in Swedish) about Spotify, it at least sounds like a cool product, even though the social parts are apparently missing right now in beta.

I tired Pandora for a month or so back when it was brand new, but I didn’t like it that much. I often want to listen to a particular artist and only that artist for some time and that’s something you can’t do with Pandora, or last.fm for that matter. That’s why this quote

Other times you need to scratch that itch with one of your oldest favourites. (From Spotify.com)

made Spotify interesting to me. I’ve just recently started using last.fm, but not mainly for listening to music, and I like the social idea about it (though I have to admit that I don’t use it a lot yet) and like David wrote, it gives you an idea about what you can do – what Spotify could do.

This was pretty cool: http://homepage.mac.com/digego/study_in_keith.mov

I’m not good enough to actually hear exactly how the code translates into notes, but the entire idea is kind of cool, and so is the result. I only got the link, so I’m a bit curious what the background is. If anyone knows, please tell.

Edit: I suck. This is of course the origin. Impromptu is the name of the programming environment. This is just so cool.