nanovivid

Recently, Jeremiah was kind enough to introduce me to Lala, which is a wonderful music browsing/listening/collecting/buying site. That’s a little convoluted, so maybe a “web-based iTunes with some community features” might be the best way to describe it. Easily my favorite feature is that you can listen to entire songs before you buy, not just 30 second snippets. That’s a huge win compared to most competing stores (Rhapsody MP3 lets you listen to full songs as well, but it lacks an easy method of queueing entire albums). Pricing is another advantage; most albums are $7.49 or less, beating iTunes, Amazon MP3, Rhaposdy MP3, and just about everyone else.

Almost as soon as I started using Lala, I realized that it really needed its own Dock icon and separate browser window. Enter the wonders of Fluid. I created a SSB (Site Specific Browser) for Lala with a cassette tape as the icon. (Sure, it might not make perfect sense, what with it being digital music and all, but it’s better than using Lala’s favicon. If you want another option, the speaker icons by Jonas Rask are very nice.)

However, one important piece of functionality was missing. I’m very accustomed to having Growl notifications for music that’s playing, and while Fluid supports dispatching Growl notifications, there weren’t any existing Userscripts to make it happen. Of course, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and spent a couple hours poking around Lala’s JavaScript to see if I could find anywhere to hook in and grab player notifications. Eventually I tracked down the Header.updatePlaybackNowPlaying function, which had exactly what I needed, and I was able to write a Userscript to generate Growl notifications on Lala track changes.

If you want to set up your own SSB for Lala with Growl notifications (note that you will need to have Leopard for this as Fluid is 10.5-only):

1. Download Fluid if you don’t already have it.
2. Open Fluid and create a new SSB for http://www.lala.com/ (and set the icon if you’re so inclined).
3. Launch your Lala SSB.
4. Click the Script menu (the icon to the right of the Window menu) and choose Open Userscripts Folder.
5. Download the LalaGrowl Userscript, unzip it, and place LalaGrowl.user.js in that folder.
6. Back in Lala, click the Script menu and select Reload All Userscripts.
7. Click the Script menu one last time and click LalaGrowl to enable it.
8. Reload the page to activate the script (it’ll be automatically loaded from now on, but you have to reload the first time so the code can hook in and grab the information it needs to display notifications).
9. (This is optional and not related to Growl notifications). I’d highly recommend checking the Closing the last browser window only hides the window option in the application’s General Preferences. This makes it so that you can close the window and music will continue to play, just like in iTunes.

Hopefully someone other than me finds this useful!

As a disclaimer, I should also mention that if Lala changes their JavaScript significantly, the notifications will stop working, since I am depending on undocumented functionality (Lala doesn’t have an offical JavaScript API).

If you want to be my friend on Lala, here’s my profile page.

♫ M83 - Couleurs (Sasha Invol2ver Remix)

As I’ve alluded to previously, I have a bit of a weakness for droning, repetitive music. I’m not sure how it happens, but I sometimes have an almost physical reaction to it that feels as if I’m being wrapped in a comforting blanket. No other artist that I’ve discovered can do this to me quite like Tim Hecker.

I discovered Hecker’s music quite by accident. I think I stumbled across Harmony In Ultraviolet while checking out From Here We Go Sublime by The Field on Amazon. Harmony was listed in the “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section, and for some reason, it caught my eye. I clicked on over and was presented with this brilliant review (seriously, go read it). That right there was reason enough (well, along with checking out the samples) for me to stick the album on my wishlist.

Fast forward to January. I had gotten From Here We Go Sublime the previous fall and was thoroughly enjoying it. For those of you who don’t know, The Field makes amazingly ear-wormy minimal techno. His songs don’t bother with verses, choruses, breakdowns, or builds because they don’t need to. Instead of having a couple hooks in the song, he chooses exactly the right hooks and then loops them. Even though it’s completely repetitive, there are all kinds of tiny alterations and changes happening throughout each song, keeping it from becoming boring. I listened to the album quite a lot and The Field is currently at #17 on my Last.fm profile.

Then I finally bought Harmony In Ultraviolet and, well, here’s what happened to my music listening (courtesy of LastGraph):

Harmony is a massive album. I think the term “ambient” gets close, but it’s also very droning, sometimes very dark, and often noisy and full of static. The first time I played it, I simply sat in shock of the incredible, almost overwhelming beauty. Whether it’s the time-worn loops of Chimeras, the calming fuzz of Spring Heeled Jack Flies Tonight, or the massive synths of by Radio Spiricom, the music is not quite like anything I’ve ever heard before. I think it was also custom-tailored for my drone-loving brain.

I’ve also purchased the (oddly punctuated) Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again, which is a fantastic album in its own right. Where Harmony can be imposing and almost overwhelming, Haunt Me is warm and calm.

Tim Hecker’s music is in some ways the polar opposite of The Field’s. There are almost no beats and the hooks, such as they are, are drawn out over minutes. However, they both make use of minimalism in their own ways, and I’m powerless to resist either.

♫ Tim Hecker - Boreal Kiss (Part 1)

• Again & Again
  A fan-made music video for "Again & Again" by The Bird & The Bee that uses OS X as its canvas. It's very creative (and apparently it took three months to make).

• Imogen Heap - Just For Now (Live at Studio 11 103.1FM)
  A cappella with a sampler. Loops on loops. Very impressive and beautiful.

• charlatantric.
  Post-rock, shoegaze, and other etherial wonderfulness. Consistently one of my favorite music blogs.
• Otters Holding Hands
  I know this is all over the internets right now, but it’s just so cute!

• Dancing the Charleston to Daft Punk (YouTube)
  1940s dancing + Daft Punk = Surprising amounts of awesomeness.

• Nickel Creek Covers Britney Spears’ Toxic
  Remember last year when I wrote about seeing Nickel Creek and how they covered Toxic and how it was awesome? Well, here it is!

• Minilogue - Hitchhikers Choice
  Whiteboard animation. Brilliant music video.

• crytography
  hee! again. some more.

• Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke.
  “Ample parking asphalted over bunny bones.”