Miércoles 10 Oct 2007, 12:33

Anyone tried Social.Fm? The concept is free, legal P2P radio. You download some software and add the files you want to share. It can only be music you own legally (either digital purchases or CDs you own that you've ripped). Then any other member can stream your playlist, or individual songs by artists you've uploaded if they've searched for that particular artist.

I think it's potentially a very useful and fun tool. I was investigating it tonight because I resubscribed to Emusic, and was wishing there was a way to listen to more than short samples of music I'm curious about on there. Social.FM/Mercora could possibly be a great way for Emusic users to let other subscribers listen to their downloads, and make a better decision about what they'd like to buy.

That's just one example, but I think it could potentially find the sort of niche something like Soulseek has, where users who are into slightly more obscure music share it with others wanting to hear difficult-to-find stuff. Currently not many people are streaming music that is to my taste, but I hope that will change when word gets out more.

And as an adjunctive to my blog (more posts soon, I swear!) I would eventually, when I have the harddrive space, like to put my entire collection up to listen to. I'm never going to blog whole albums that aren't out-of-print as I believe in mp3 blogging as helping people sample music, not as giving away music. But this would be a way my readers could legitimately more fully explore music they're interested in.

You can find my page by typing 'spikedcandy' into the searchbox and choosing 'dj' from the drop-down box next to it. So far I'm only sharing some albums from Lee Hazlewood, Nancy Sinatra, Ruthann Friedman, Eux Autres, New Buffalo and Solex.

Let me know if you join up!

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!!!Please note!!! - There's a big flaw with this program. If you right-click over any of the files in your library or playlists, options include 'remove' and 'delete'. I thought 'delete' meant from the program library, and remove was from the particular playlist. But no, 'delete' means from your disk. Unlike Winamp and other programs, the different functions are not clearly distinguished so there's no mistaking them. And worse, it PERMANENTLY deletes files instead of sending them to the recycle bin. It prompts you 'are you sure…?' but it's easy to think that's just a program prompt if you're not used to the prompt for permanent deletion. In my case, my PC was a bit overburdened and the software had frozen, and I must have clicked the prompt without seeing it. Yes, I've just lost a whole lot of files due to this.

I've written to tell them this is OUTRAGEOUS. All programs should make it nearly impossible to lose data accidentally.

But knowing this, it is easy to avoid and surely they'll fix it before the next release. Still worthwhile - just be careful!