Just the FLACs, Please.

2 bands I like are releasing new albums shortly:  Brooklyn's Yeasayer and Portland's Menomena.  This is awesome.  In fact, it's so awesome that I went off to go and pre-order both albums.  "It's 2012," I thought to myself, "surely each band will offer me a lossless audio download option for their new albums.  Won't that be nice?"

And then cold, hard reality set in.  Menomena offers a cool t-shirt, a vinyl pressing, and a CD.  That's it.  Yeasayer offers a big deluxe bundle, a CD + a couple MP3s, an LP + a couple MP3s, and an even bigger deluxe bundle.  Neither of them offers a download-only option.  Neither of them is selling through Bandcamp or a similar service.  Neither of them, in short, is catering to me or others like me who truly want to support bands they love, but are not interested in paying an extra $3.60 (for example) for shipping and handling.

And so, bands, I implore you: please give me a download-only, lossless-audio option for your albums!  I will download them.  I will not share them illegally.  I will even promote them on my blog to all 5 of my readers.  Pretty please?  

My plaintive cry to this effect was retweeted by Menomena themselves, and subsequently by many others - telling me I'm not the only one who feels this way.  So maybe, one day soon, things will change. In the meantime, you can check out an awesome track from the new Menomena album here, and you can stream the entirety of the new Yeasayer album here, thanks to the good folks at NPR Music.

All Songs Considered - 24/7

If you haven't already heard, NPR's All Songs Considered blog recently launched a 24/7 streaming music channel featuring "a non-stop mix of every song ever played during the 10 years of All Songs Considered."  This is extremely exciting news, for music nerds & public broadcasting nerds alike.  There's tons of great music here, enough to keep you busy for a very long time.  The only dilemma is, what's the best way to listen to it?

If you're using a web browser, you can use their web-based Flash app (on the page linked above), or if you have an iPhone, they have an app for that.  But what if you don't?  Don't be fooled by that "Android" link on the page, that just links to a stream - it's not really an app (though there is a community-built app for streaming NPR stations on Android devices).  So what's a non-iPhone user to do?  Fear not.  My friend Lori recently made me aware of this page, which lists all the myriad ways you can get your digital hands on that stream of sweet, sweet music.  Most of those links are for iPhone apps, but they do go into a little more detail about the Android streaming link as well as recommending an Android stream player (I've used this one, with mixed results).


I think my favorite thing about this is that they expose the underlying stream link so you can use whatever device you want, as long as it can read an audio stream.  So Squeezebox users, rejoice!  You can simply open that stream URL via the web interface, and voila:  10 years of curated music will be yours to enjoy on your home stereo system.  Ain't life in the future grand?

Internet Radio And Me, Part 2

A while back, I was working via a client's VPN which cut off access to some portions of my own home network (lame, I know).  One side effect of this horrible state of affairs was that I could not listen to my own music library during the day.  I wrote about some of the options I tried back then, and eventually I found a way around it and that was the end of it....until now.  I just started a gig with a new client which has me working in their fancy offices in midtown Manhattan.  Said client is a bit...touchy about security, and so they are employing all manner of port, proxy, and app-blocking against my efforts to stream my music from home.  I've found a way around most of their defenses (again, not to do anything nefarious, just to listen to my music, which I suppose could be nefarious, depending on the song), but the only method available to me suffers from a pretty long lag, and an overall lack of easy control of what's playing.  I basically just have to set up a playlist then sit through it - skipping around is a slow and frustrating affair.

So once again, I find myself at the mercy of internet radio.  I checked in again on the big 3 - Pandora, Slacker, and Last.FM and wasn't much happier than I was last time.  Pandora now has ads (I don't have a premium account), ditto Slacker (that is, when the stream is working), and Last.FM is convinced that I am really into emo.

So where does that leave me?  WOXY is out of business, Lala just shut its doors and gave everyone an iTunes credit, and there's only so much daytime NPR programming I can handle.  I know there's a million internet radio stations out there, but which ones are any good?  Santa Monica's KCRW and Seattle's KEXP are both great options, if you don't mind the occasional pledge pitch.  And I've been enjoying hearing a ton of new music on the hyperlocal (for me) East Village Radio.  But so far this month, the big winner in the "help me find something great to listen to" sweepstakes is NPR Music.  Thanks to their "First Listen" series, in the past 2 weeks I've been able to stream (for free) new full-length releases from The National, Flying Lotus, The Black Keys, Sleigh Bells, Dead Weather, and LCD Soundsystem, to name just a few.  And thanks to their "Live In Concert" series, I got to catch up on recent shows from Freelance Whales, Shout Out Louds, Hot Chip, The xx, and Caribou, among others.  In a word, rock.

What do you listen to when you can't listen to your own music library?  Online radio stations?  Recommendation engines?  The sound of silence?  Tell me in the comments.