Today I was working while listening to classical music instead of my regular musical diet of techno. During Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saens I found it eerily similar to the opening music in Beauty and the Beast, composed by Alan Menken. This is yet one more confirmation that Everything is a Remix. Have a listen to […]

I came across Ben Rector’s cover of a Tom Petty tune and came away impressed. Not only does he do guitar and piano, he plays a mean fridge and countertop. I also like that he can laugh at himself. (Platinum baby!) He’s already released a few albums. They’re definitely worth a listen.

Monkey Machine is a free online drum machine that can provide minutes of entertainment. It’s really quite fun. (via Download Squad)

Greyson Chance is 12 years old. He posted a video of him singing Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” in a choir talent show on YouTube. A post about his video rose to the top of Reddit and yesterday he appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show. 2 weeks ago barely anyone knew who he was. Now he’s on […]

Chat Roulette lets you chat with complete strangers (Warning: Some chatters are pervs and display things that will make your eyes bleed!). Merton does piano improv with random, unsuspecting strangers on Chat Roulette and has become a viral sensation on YouTube. The original video had over 4 million views, but he had to modify it […]

MP3s are reasonably big files. If they’re popular, their bandwidth usage adds up. All web hosting companies have bandwidth caps, whether stated or unstated. Even if it says unlimited bandwidth, trying using a few terabytes and see how long it takes for them to take down your site. I’m surprised there are so many video […]

Jam Legend is a guitar hero lookalike with a social spin to it. I signed up a while ago but never did much on the site. Then today, out of the blue, I was challenged to a duel on Gives You Hell (a song I’ve never heard of before). Not one to turn down a […]

I recently heard a clip of “To Show You My Love” by Mike Schmid (Warning: Music plays automatically). It’s a sappy love song, but I liked it enough to want to own it. I found shortened MP3s of the nearly all the songs on the album page but that wasn’t good enough. The album site […]

One of my favorite cartoon movies is Disney’s Robin Hood. After seeing it several times with my kids I started using the phrase, “Oo de lally” to express surprise or delight and it stuck. My 4 year-old and 2 year-old adopted the phrase too and it makes me laugh every time I hear them say […]

Audacity is a great audio editor, but it’s not an ideal choice for editing large MP3s because it takes so long to convert them. I have some MP3s that have dialog in the middle of the music and I wanted a quick and easy way to cut out the dialog. The solution is mp3DirectCut, a […]

The drum riff at the beginning of Simon and Garfunkel’s 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover was written by Steve Gadd, an accomplished drummer. I’ve had a recent interest in drums so I enjoyed watching Steve in this short video where he demos the riff. The dialog struck me as humorous. I’ve included it in […]

SoundIndex searches the big social networking sites (myspace, facebook, last.fm, bebo, youtube and iTunes) to determine the most popular artists of the day. Right now Robbie Williams is sitting in the #1 spot. (via techcrunch)

TuneGlue is yet another site that shows related artists (like recently mentioned Music Map). Once you search for an artist, you have to click on it and choose Expand. The site is powered by data from Amazon and Last.fm. Rick will be pleased to know it even has Dennis De Young :)

I always enjoy getting recommendations for good movies, books, games or web sites. I’ve had mixed results from web sites that try to do this. Listible is overrun with spam and The best stuff in the world is mediocre. Their recommendations are often sub par. My latest find is a site called Ditto, tagline, “The […]

Music-Map.com asks you to enter the name of a music artist. It then produces a tree of artists where the proximity indicates the degree of similarity. For example, Armin Van Buuren pulled up DJ Tiesto and Paul Van Dyk, artists I already know of and like that are similar to Armin.

Have you listened to music on the radio recently? It’s so full of ads and promotions that there’s little time left for the music. Have you ever wanted to listen to music by a particular artist? Have you ever heard a song on the radio but didn’t know who sang it? Jango has commercial-free listening […]

Step 1: Go to Songerize.com Step 2: Enter the name and artist of the song you want to listen to. Step 3: Click play. I searched for 5 songs and it found four of the five.

Last December I posted about free online music but new music sites are popping up left and right. The latest one I’ve heard about is Anywhere.fm. It lets you upload your own music and share it with others. I haven’t used it much, but you don’t even need an account to start listening to music, […]

I’ve listened to this Silly Song With Larry several times and I can’t seem to get it out of my head. It sounds familiar but I haven’t figured out if there’s an original. There may not be an original, but so far I’ve found that it shares some similarities with Last Kiss, originally written by […]

I knew John Denver’s real name was John Henry Deutschendorf, but this list has the names of tons of other well-known music stars, many of which I didn’t know about. A few of the more interesting finds include: Pat Benatar – Patricia Andrejewski Bono (U2) – Paul David Hewson Bonnie Tyler – Gaynor Hopkins Bo […]

There are lots of options for free music online. Some of it has commercials, but some don’t. I’ve been listening to some Christmas music on Shoutcast and the commercials are slightly annoying, but not unbearable. Pandora – You type in what you like to listen to and it produces a list of similar artists. One […]

I have a few dozen cassette tapes that I wanted to digitize (i.e. convert to MP3) but I wasn’t aware of the best way to do it. After a bit of research and some experimenting, I came up with a workable solution. You need a cassette tape player that has a line out, ideally in […]

I had no idea President Bush was so musical. Imagine and A Walk on the Wild Side Sunday Bloody Sunday

Don’t download this song.

Retro crush has a list of the 50 coolest song parts, meaning the 50 songs that contain cool segments. There are images of all the album covers as well as MP3s of all the segments, but they’re very low quality. At least they give you an idea of how they sound. I’ve always liked the […]

One of the reasons I like country music is because of the stories the songs tell. For instance, in Tim McGraw’s “Grown Men Don’t Cry” I was intrigued that he sang about his Dad being a slave to his job and not being around. I knew that McGraw’s Dad was a baseball player and figured […]

I’m not a big fan of the The Pixies. In fact, I’d never listened to them before last week, when I got a free, out of the blue, unsolicited two-CD set of a live Pixies concert in New York City, in the mail. I have no idea why it was sent to me, but if […]

Blenders Magazine came up with a list of the 100 worst songs based on the criteria that they were hits, and weren’t songs that were meant to be cheesy, like Macarena and Who Let the Dogs Out (who, who who who. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) The article says the entry that is most likely to […]

In Utah (and maybe in other places, but I’ve only seen it here) it’s a tradition of sorts to honk your car horn when driving through a tunnel. My father-in-law did it once, with the old, “Beep, be be beep beep” and then to our surprise, another car in the tunnel finished it off with […]

When I tell people I’m a fan of Marc Cohn, they usually say they’ve never heard of him. Then I explain that he sang “Walking in Memphis” and a glimmer of recognition appears on their face as they say, “Oh, I know that song.” Well, Cohn is at it again after his longest break yet. […]

Some say that music CDs will be gone like the dodo by 2007, but I have my doubts. I like being able to transport and play my music conveniently between work, home and my car and CDs permit me to do that. I know about iPods but I would have to convert all 600+ CDs […]

I just got my check for $13.86 from the CD MAP Antitrust Litigation. I had read that the checks were in the mail, but this time they were telling the truth. I’m one of 3 million people who is getting a check, so even though a little shy of $14 doesn’t seem like much, it […]

I watched a recent MythBusters episode about a duck’s quack not echoing but they failed to bust the myth to my satisfaction. The sound “expert” showed the audio graph of a quack in a normal room and of one in a room that echoed, but he couldn’t see the echo. They did some more experiments […]

Hearing “The Chipmunk Song” a few times this holiday season has made me curious. Did the original singer sing so slowly that when it was sped up to sound like chipmunks it sounded normal? How slow would you have to sing? Maybe the guy(s) sounded like that normally due to a severe birth defect. Or […]

The Guardian made a list of the top 40 US bands out of all those that currently perform. I won’t spoil it for you, but I have never even heard of their number one pick (though they sound like they could use a lifetime supply of chap stick…). Am I just out of the cool […]

There’s a rumor about the Phil Collins song “In the Air Tonight” that I would like to dispel. There are different variations of the story, but the gist of it is that Collins had a childhood friend drown and there was a guy that could have saved his friend but didn’t. Some variations even go […]

Guzzlefish.com is a cool idea. From their about page: Guzzlefish is a free personal cataloging system that allows you to manage and organize your movie, music, and game collections on the web. An easy to use interface not only keeps track of what you own but also keeps you up to date on new titles […]

A study of the musical preferences and personality traits of 3500 individuals suggests that you are what you listen to. This quote from the article is sure to please Levi: “I’ve always believed that people’s musical taste says a lot about them. If you like Avril Lavigne, for example, you probably need to have your […]

I was listening to Daydream Believer (or Beleeevah) on the The Monkees’ Greatest Hits album but couldn’t understand the dialog before the song starts. Google revealed a raging debate on the subject and naturally I had to listen to it over and over again in order to form my own theory. Chip: “7A.” Davy: “What […]

If I hear a song I like on the radio, I google the lyrics and download the song. If I already like the artist, I’ll probably buy the album. If I don’t know the artist, I’ll listen to more of their songs to gauge my interest. I’ve done this with songs like “Forever and For […]

In The Sound of Music Maria and the children sing a lovely song about a lonely goatherd, but do you know the story? I’ve seen the movie numerous times but never paid attention to the words. In case you’re in the same boat, gather round and I’ll explain it to you. Once upon a time […]

A musical based on Billy Joel‘s songs is on Broadway and as part of the publicity for the show, Katie Couric interviewed Joel. The interview reveals a glimpse of what he’s like as a normal person. I often wonder what people are really like, as opposed to what you see in movies or events where […]

Listen to music written and performed by members of MetaFilter. The original idea was met with enthusiasm and the site was launched today. “Electronica, rock, folk, it’s all there.” — Matt Haughey

I heard a song on the radio that sounded familiar and, thinking it was from a musical, searched around for it. I discovered that it is sung by Josh Groban, a 20-year-old baritone. The lyrics were written by Linda Thompson (David Foster’s wife) and Richard Marx composed the music, wrote the arrangement and produced it. […]

In a junior high social studies class we reviewed the lyrics of Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in an effort to peak our interest in history. Now a guy at Caltech has gathered the associated images and made the fruits of his labor (flash) available to all. I have a feeling that […]

My new Yamaha Clavinova CLP120 was delivered today. I’ve been planning to buy a digital piano for a number of months because I want to improve my piano playing skills and this past Tuesday I finally bought one. Some of the features I like best are the keyboard cover (like a real piano), weighted keys […]

I’ve finally done my first CD review for blogcritics.org for HEM’s Rabbit Songs. It’s harder than it looks to put into words how you feel about a group of songs. I’ll have to work on that. I posted the review at blogcritics and I’ve included it here as well. I should note that Levi was […]

You probably know the song, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” from the hit TV show Cheers, but did you know that there are more verses? Where Everybody Knows Your Name (by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo) Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got Taking a break from all your worries […]

I’ve discovered another song that I really, really like. It’s called One More Day and is sung by Diamond Rio. I think I’m going to get their album to see if the rest of their music is as good as this song. I first heard it on the radio but now I have downloaded the […]

A poll by Music Choice shows that Chris DeBurgh’s hit song Lady In Red is not a hit with wedding guests in the UK. The question, as far as I can tell, asked what the worst songs for the newly-weds’ first dance were. Luckily I didn’t play any of them for the first dance, although […]