Seb suggests you listen to Miho Hatori: do it now
The Web is truly amazing. I’m currently listening to Miho Hatori singing Dream Girl. This was suggested by Seb. The cool thing is that within 3 minutes of reading Seb’s post, I was listening to the music he suggested and liking it. Seb has a webjay playlist you can check out if you want more.
Important points about what I just did:
- It is free and legal. The fact that it is free is important: not everything needs to be free, but some things work much better when no direct cost is involved.
- While not perfectly instantaneous, it is fast. I didn’t have to wait 2 hours to follow Seb’s advice, otherwise I wouldn’t have.
- It is supported by a relatively fast and inexpensive network connection, free multimedia software (there is lots of free MP3 software, I use juke), very cheap storage (cost almost nothing), and social software (in this case, blogging software).
The beauty of it is that, except of the fast and inexpensive network connection, everything is available pretty much everywhere in the world. And I’m starting to think that the Internet is getting to be fast and inexpensive everywhere.
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3 minutes is good, but with broadband and a good player you should usually be able to start listening pretty instantaneously to most of the tracks on my Webjay list.
Comment by Seb — 28/3/2005 @ 21:51
Not here: bandwidth is not good enough for streaming. So, I need to save the file (somewhere I’ll find it) and then play it. That’s the other side of the equation: if I play it, I also want to keep a local copy I’ll be able to find later so I’m not always eating my bandwith.
Of course, if you are sitting in a NRC office, things are different… but I’m sitting at home…
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 28/3/2005 @ 22:12
Oh. You’re on dialup at home? I feel your pain.
Comment by Seb — 30/3/2005 @ 8:28
Seb: No. I’m on a videotron cable modem… but that’s not fast enough for true streaming *and* bandwidth usage is limited: you can’t be streaming all day.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 30/3/2005 @ 11:18
Not to quibble, but 200 kbps is usually enough for streaming; Videotron advertises megabit download speeds, so you should probably ask for a refund. ( see http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,12757482~mode=flat )
Comment by Seb — 31/3/2005 @ 16:00
Megabit download speeds I probably have, reliable download speeds, I don’t have.
This means that while it might work ok some part of the day, it will fail miserably the rest of the day.
Comment by Daniel Lemire — 31/3/2005 @ 16:57