Friday, January 09, 2009

HearYa Earwood Vol 1: Best of 2008 Live Sessions


When I emailed the guys at HearYa my opinion of an O'Death song they took a look at the mcglinch blog and asked if I'd be interested in doing a drawing for the cover of their first-ever compilation of live in-studio sessions they recorded in 2008 with various cool Indie bands like Joe Pug, Backyard Tire Fire, The Everybodyfields and 13 others. I signed on for the job and ended up designing the whole cover. Head on over to HearYa and take a listen and grab the full album download for free. Thanks, Oz and Shirk!

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Monday, June 18, 2007

Request-a-doodle: Slacker Rocks

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redbutt said...Capture the phrase "Slacker Rocks!"

Slacker is a new online music recommendation player that went public beta in March or April of this year. I've been playing with Slacker when my favorite KEXP is either acting up or I feel like a different listen. What I've liked about Slacker so far is that they have a great range of preset stations that offer a nice wide variety of artists and songs -- especially in the Indie space. Slacker surpasses Last.fm in song availability and seem to have a wider variety -and outside the mainstream. Slacker doesn't appear to have the social/community aspirations of Last.fm but responses to my recent feedback leads me to believe they might have some of that in the works.

The other leader in music recommendation, Pandora, lets you create your own playlists based on artists you like but lacks the presets that Slacker has -- that's what puts the "slacker' in Slacker. If you're tired of trying to achieve perfection with a playlist that often gets muddied with not-so-great recommendations, you can slack off and enjoy a Slacker preset.

Slacker has a bunch of different options on tuning a station or creating a station based on artists to really fit your preferences. The options are not so intuitive and take some time to get used to -- trying to remember whether you can 'right-click' or not for some options gets a little frustrating.

The 'new' thing they're offering, supposedly this summer, is a Slacker personal player that you'll be able to access Slacker stations, including the ones you've created on your own, via satellite in your car or via wifi in your house or office. It's geared toward being a cheaper alternative to satellite Sirius or XM. We'll see if they can pull it off.

So far, it rocks. Take a listen to my IndieMcG playlist.

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