Rhapsody in the Living Room

Some good friends recently gifted me the Roku Soundbridge M500. It is a beautiful device designed for a simple purpose...connect to your home network and play any songs you have on your iTunes or Rhapsody on your home stereo.

One one side of the tube is a wireless card (comes with!) and on the other is the wired RCA connectors to the stereo and a plug to the walls (also included!).

That's it!

After a semi-quick set-up, it was recognizing and connecting to my home network library and playing songs from my iTunes on the big speakers. Brilliant!

Even more Brilliant is the Rhaposdy connection - after enabling the UPnP port, simply add any song to your Rhapsody library and it will be available to play on your stereo. No more fumbling with wires, moving the computer closer to the stereo or listening to music at home through the computer. Just add it to your "library", which is just a pointer to a file on their server, and play it anywhere. It also plays any of your Rhapsody playlists or custom radio stations!

It's amazing to watch the evolution of technology and how we are building new devices to complement the older new devices. Who would have thought that I've have room for over 100,000 albums in my living room, now I can think of a song and have it playing in high (enough) quality.

Loving it...

p.s. One more amazing feature I just discovered after posting this - Favorite Internet Radio stations! Apparently the Roku Soundbridge can actually connect to .pls files (aka http://www.biscoradio.com/bisco.pls, http://www.tealeafgreen.com:8000/listen.pls) or .m3u files (http://web1.nugs.net/vault/nugs.net_radio.m3u) and stream them like regular radio. Nice!

Go See More Music Together!

In the spirit of "Community Development", we've been spending lots of time over here at JamBase thinking about how people like to go to see live music. One consistent idea that comes up time and again is that people like to go see live music Together. They go with friends, they meet up before the show for drinks or dinner, they sit/stand together during the show, they get rides together and (sometimes) go home together.

While I firmly believe that "we are all one", it would be an overwhelming task to organize everybody together, thus we introduce "JamBase Groups", yet another way for you to Go See Live Music ... Together!

Check it out at: http://www.jambase.com/myjambase/groups/

JamBase Groups expands upon the concept of JamBase Friends by allowing you to invite people to join your group and then see each other's calendars and communicate together. Groups are different than Friends in that you can see and communicate with people that are in the same group as you, even if you're not technically 'friends'. JamBase Group currently consists of the Group Events page which tells you which shows people are going to, Group Message Board so you can talk about the shows before, during (the ones you're not at) and after, as well as an evolving list of Favorite Bands.

Like most new stuff, this is still in early development so watch your step and please report any bugs to bugs@jambase.com to we can fix them and make it all work smoother.

Go ahead and Start a New Group, invite some friends to join and, yup, you guessed it - Go See Live Music ... Together!

Go See Live Music...FASTER!

It's amazing what a few hours staring at your source code will do.

Today I noticed a bunch of JamBase city related searches were timing out, so I dug in deep and discovered that there was a lot of redundancy and inefficiency in our database calls. After much prodding and pulling, fixing and re-fixing, realizing that progress is trading one set of problems for another (chinese proverb), I'm pleased to report that the JamBase Tour Date Search is now noticeably faster, especially for "beyond city" searches.

Give a whirl at http://www.jambase.com/search.asp and please let me know if you encounter anything un-expected, including a faster than expected search results.

Happy Searching!

Are We Supposed to Go "Behind the Music"?

I was thinking this morning that there is a certain mystique and persona which live music entertainers have that make them somewhat larger than life. I know I've looked up to and idolized my fair share of celebrities over the years, and there's just something about the stage and the art that combined together make it worth worshipping.

When you go behind the scenes, however, that starts to quickly fade away as you realize they're just regular people who put their pants on one leg at a time and have the same (if not more) problems as the rest of us. I remember hearing recently about an image shattering picture of Bruce Springstein doing the dishes on his cellphone - - do we really need to see this? Do we really want to see this?

For as much as we often push to get closer to the artists we love and learn more about them, hear the gossip and know the insider secrets, I've found that it is the barrier of the stage and the ability to admire from afar which is often times the most rewarding.

For The Fans By The Fans

Long before Phantasytour, before PhishArchive, before Walfredo, ZZYZX, my page and even Phish.com - there was Phish.Net. Started by a group of Phish fans passionate and insightful enough to want to organize information about the band so that newbies, net heads and hard cores could converge and learn about one of the most exciting exports from the state of Vermont - they were my initial gateway into the wonderful world of Phish.

I distinctly remember the first day I signed onto the Internet from my college home. My friends and I gathered around as we gazed into the infinite possibilities of the net. Naturally, we seeked out what we could relate to and meant the most to us at that time. Up came lyrics and stories and explanations of songs. WATSIYEM? Gamehendge, Reba, Trampolines, the Helping Phriendly Book - all before our very eyes in black and white text (literally), and most important of all - written and presented by Fans.

There is something inherantly selfless about a fansite. It's a total labor of love, with the only motive being to want to spread the joy one gets from the music and help their favorite artist excel and reach more people. It's not about money or special access, but the simply pleasure in knowing that you've helped to propogate a meaningful message and given the art more context. Plus it's a lot of fun to apply your passion to technology and watch it grow, get feedback and grow some more.

The official sites just can't quite do it the same kind of justice, and self-promotion is never as satisfying or effective as word of mouth. Speaking from within, language can be adopted and rules can be broken. Message boards and rumors and games and ideas can spread...so much moreso than when it is orchestrated or intentional around a 'strategic internet marketing campaign'.

The web is a vast and strange place for exploration and discovery, and I've often found that the best ideas are the ones which aren't quite as planned out, but exist out of reflex and instinct, relying upon what you know in your heart is the right thing to do and evolves organically from there - truly from the ground up. This is the real nature of fan-sites: allowing the hobby to flourish and the info to flow out of necessity and real interest, honoring the music while serving the fans.

Go See New Icons

We made a few fairly significant upgrades to JamBase today. The more noticeable one being the adoption of some new icons on our search page for WIN (Win Tickets), BUY (Buy Tickets), SEND (Email Show To a Friend), SAVE (Save event to MyJamBase calendar) and INFO (Event Info)

The other is an improved Band and Venue search - now when you search for a band name and/or a venue name the system will think a little harder (but hopefully not slower) about what you're looking for and either take you right there or produce a list of possible matches along with the number of current events in the system to make life a little more intuitive.

Give it a whirl, search for Skerik: http://www.jambase.com/search.asp?band=Skerik (he gets around!)

So Many Roads To Ease My Soul

What is it about a decade? 10 solid years of advancement and evolution and opportunities for nostalgia ... a chance to pause and consider how far we've come and how far we have to go.

As it was, 10 years ago this weekend was the last Grateful Dead show of all time. The end of an era.

Take a listen: http://www.archive.org/audio/etree-details-db.php?id=13996

You can hear it in Jerry's voice, especially towards the end of So Many Roads as he struggles with the lyrics and melody and finally comes to a place of peace. Hauntingly beautiful.

As Bill Graham was so apt to say, they're aren't the best at what they do - they're the only ones who do what they do.