Review: Seamless for iPhone

Imagine this scenario, you’re listening to your favorite music track on your Mac and had to leave the house, don’t you wish your iPhone or iPod touch can seamlessly carry on playing the track from where you were at in iTunes on your Mac? Or if you were deeply engaged in a podcast just before you had to head out, so you have to wait for the iPhone or iPod touch to synch using iTunes before you leave. This happens to me often especially the latter.

Fortunately, Five Details, the 2008 Apple Design Awards winners and maker of Flow, has a solution and it is called Seamless.

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Finding songs by humming

Ever went into a record store not knowing the name, artist or title of a song you looking for, and decided to hum to the store staff expecting them to know what song you’re looking for?

Well, the students at New York University may have a solution for record stores around the world.

They have created a system that allow one to hum into a microphone, the computer records it, analyse and extracts the melody and rhythm characteristics, then compares it to its database returning a ranked list of possible songs.

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Discover New Music

Pandora is a new service by Pandora Media Inc.. It is essentially a very smart customized radio station. It is based on the work from the Music Genome Project.

It allows you to specify the music you like and based on the Genome of the music specified it will play other songs that it thinks you will like.

The great thing about this service is that it does not require any download, accept for the FLASH plug-in to be installed on your favorite browser.

Why do I think Pandora is great? Well we have to begin by talking about the problem with many of the current online music stores (iTunes Music Store, Connect, etc.) and similarly the brick and mortar stores (HMV, Best Buy, SAM’s, etc.). The fact that it is difficult to find what you (the individual) like. More importantly, what I may like based on my music preference. Pandora solves this problem by using the Genome of the music you specify to seek out other songs that you may like.

This is similar to the technology applied with Amazon.Com and other online retail, but this is done without other members’ input.

Pandora’s Genome library is built by professional musicians, each with at least 3 years of professional music experience, performing classification of a song.

Each song takes about 3 hours to classify and each musician participating had gone through extensive training on Music Genome.

You can check out My Radio Station at Pandora.