I feel a bit late to the party with this one, because despite having played around with Panic's Unison last year, I have my brother to thank for mentioning just how much music there is on Usenet these days. And he's right - I haven't downloaded so much music since AudioGalaxy died. I am going to need to upgrade my iPod to hold it all.
The meeting of Usenet, MP3 and a client like Unison has some very nice characteristics - leaving aside legality for the moment. It delivers a stream of new things every day, categorized in a way that makes it easy to find things that you might like, even if you have never heard it before. But unlike streaming radio, it's random access enough that you don't have to check everything, you can pick out a track here, a track there - and with Unison and a fat enough pipe you can start listening immediately, kill it if you don't like it and move onto the next thing.
All Unison needs to finish things off is a) fast forward - it is already downloading ahead of what you're hearing, so it would be nice to skip ahead, especially for those extended electronica intros - and 2) "shuffle mode" - just pick tracks at random from the latest posts, play the first 30 seconds or the whole track. Obviously shuffle is cool right now, but when you're spoiled for choice, randomness works.
Back to the Usenet radio - listening to an extremely cool live recording of D'Angelo, from a Swedish radio broadcast. This is post-Voodoo and he is kicking some ass, seriously. Certainly beats the hell out of listening to four guys who don't know much about photography discuss digital cameras.
Comments