I’ve heard of ways to stream music from your home computer to your iPhone, but only if it’s been jailbroken. Now, however, there’s a way to do it without having to go down the jailbreak route, an application in the app store called Simplify Media. Simplify Media streams music from your home computer to your iPhone over an EDGE, GPRS, 3G or Wi-Fi connection (though I’d recommend trying to use Wi-Fi wherever possible).

But, more than that, if you install Simplify Media on multiple computers you can play music from either one wherever you are. So if you’re at work, you can listen to your home music library without having to bring the files with you. And if your friends install Simplify Media, they can hear your music and you can hear theirs (be sure to check the local laws before you try that one).

Here’s an overview of the idea:

But… does it work? Actually, yes. With Simplify Media running on my Mac-Mini at home, I can pick from my entire music library and listen to it while I’m out and about. I’ve tried it on Wi-Fi (best performance), 3G (good performance) and GPRS (OK performance). On GPRS the audio quality was even reduced to improve the buffering time. It sounded like I was listening to AM radio, but it still did the job. I have to admit that I probably won’t be using this day in, day out, but it is very handy for if I want a particular track I haven’t moved over to my iPhone. And I have to say I’m very impressed at how well it works.

Simplify Media for iPhone is free for the first 100,000 users, and will cost $3.99 after that. It is completely free for the desktop.

Links:

• Simplify Media for iPhone
• Simplify Media for mac/windows/linux

Previously, Songsterr worked along the lines of chords - which you would play along with. Now it works with full-blown guitar TAB. If you’re not familiar with TAB, it’s a musical notation that tells you which string and which fret on that string to play. Whilst the update is great news for anyone who wants to get their teeth into some serious guitar playing, there doesn’t seem to be an option to switch back to just chords - which may put off players who aren’t familiar/comfortable with TAB. Having said that, though, the song list has massively increased, and it looks like Songsterr is going to become a great tool for guitarists. I only hope it lasts, given the face of OLGA.

Moving on - I discovered a great guitar toolkit for the iPhone… oddly enough, called “Guitar Toolkit”. Just search the app store to find it. It costs £5.99, but seems worth it. So what do you get for the money? You get a tuner, which works using the iPhone’s microphone, a metronome, tones for tuning up by ear, and a fairly comprehensive chord library. Given that tuners can cost more than this app on their own, and a book of chords will set you back a few quid, this actually turns out to be pretty good value for money. Here are a few screenshots:

  

The only thing currently missing from the application is the ability to turn the chords from right-handed to left-handed layout… but I’m hoping that will come in a later update.

Finally - if you can’t find what you’re looking for on Songsterr, and you don’t just want to noodle around with chords freestyle, I found a great source of sheet music to buy: musicnotes.com. By installing the musicnotes viewer (and, for some songs, the Sibelius Scorch viewer) on your computer, you can load sheet music in your browser and print it out. So far I have seen and used their versions of Fix You by Coldplay, and You are Good by Israel Houghton. There seems to be a wide variety of music on there, so it’s well worth a look.

So there we go - a short roundup of some guitar-related sites and tech. Now go, make beautiful music :)

The guitar, like many instruments, is easy to learn but very hard to master. There are, however, plenty of books, teachers, and websites designed to help budding guitarists move from Guitar Hero to something a little more challenging :)

Songsterr is one of those sites that seems very simple on the surface; instead of just displaying chords, Songsterr plays them as well so you can get a feel for a song before having a go yourself. You can even control when the song moves on to the next chord if you want to go at a different pace to the default.

Now, I know other sites exist that do a similar thing, but most of the ones I have found expect you to pay for the privilege - whereas Songster is free. Yes, I’m Scottish, so “free” is always a bonus in my mind!

What are the big advantages to Songsterr then?

• It’s free!
• It’s simple - just a press of a button moves you on to the next chord
• It sounds decent - each song sounds vaguely like it’s meant to, as opposed to some terrible, cheesy, generic sound

And the disadvantages?

• “Proof of concept” - that phrase always worries me, because the site looks good but what if it never gets beyond the “proof of concept” stage?
• Still undergoing development - not all of the features are up and running yet (more on this later)
• Limited song library - there are only nine songs available at the moment

What about those developing features? Well, these will be very handy if they materialise. A song editor, to let you create your own songs… Guitar Learning Assistant, to help you with fingering, picking style, and so on… and an audio recorder so you can sing along and get an mp3 of your performance. Not too shabby.

Songsterr markets itself as a service for guitar players, songwriters, and for just playing around with (a la Guitar Hero). It remains to be seen whether the service will take off, but I can certainly see it appealing to all three demographics.

Check it out, and keep checking back for new features. This could be one to watch!

Radio’s come on a bit, don’t you think?
Image by The Rocketeer
Used under Creative Commons

In the olden days, before iTunes, my main source of Internet radio was Shoutcast and Winamp. Of course, these days there’s a list of radio stations in iTunes but you can still find a few good “independent” stations on Shoutcast. I discovered SomaFM through Shoutcast, and later discovered that it’s actually listed in iTunes too.

SomaFM is a commercial-free, independent radio station. Or, to be more accurate, a group of radio stations; 14 in all. My favourites are Groove Salad and Lush, both great for unwinding after a hard day. Groove Salad, in particular, is a great mix of ambient beats that can simply be started and allowed to wash over you, or put on in the background while you do something else. Cliqhop idm (intelligent dance music) is also highly recommended.

Click on over to SomaFM and explore the channels - you’re bound to find something you like the sound of. And while we’re talking about Internet radio, explore Shoutcast and your iTunes radio library too… they’re a great way to discover new artists and styles.

Finally… what Internet radio stations do you listen to (if any)? Recommend your favourites in the comments.

Third-party apps for Last.fm are fairly common: the skype plugin, user mashup, site badges, genre finder, facebook app… and so on.

Andrew Godwin has come up with a nifty way of visualising your Last.fm usage: LastGraph3!

LastGraph takes the raw data from your Last.fm account and works out your stats… your artist history, a simple timeline showing the number of tracks listened to over time, and then the very nice graph showing how many tracks you listened to by each artist over time. The larger, more detailed graph comes in a PDF that you could use to print a poster, should you be so inclined, to show your musical taste off to the world (in fact, now that I think of it… it’s called a poster on the site rather than just “graph”).

If you want to carry out your own statistical analysis, you can download the data in Excel, CSV or JSON format.

The only downside to all this is that the queue to get your data fetched is very long at the minute. I’m talking, massive - it took almost 24 hours for my data to be downloaded and processed. However, I don’t think you actually need to have your browser open the whole time; it’s like your username gets injected into the queue and worked on whether you’re watching the progress or not.

This is a great tool - it doesn’t do loads of stuff, but it does what it does well. And if you like making pretty pictures out of stats, it’ll keep you more than happy :) Premium accounts are available for £5/$10 per year and give the ability to hotlink to your graph, and some dynamic images for your site.

Thanks to Lifehacker for this one.

See my LastGraph3 data here.

Great song and A W E S O M E video… fantastic! Makes me happy.

Video Games Live is a concert of music from, you guessed it, video games. From Pong to the Halo series, and all played by a proper, full on orchestra. Accompanying the music is a stage show, featuring people acting out scenes from some of the games, a multimedia presentation, and laser show. I don’t think it could get any geekier, or more tempting!

The UK tour date this year is, as I said, in Glasgow on 26th June. Head down there and leave a comment about it. Go on, make me jealous!

I’ve long suspected that electronics have a timer in them that knows when the warranty is up… I’ve very rarely had anything fail while under guarantee!

Anyway, enjoy this one :)

They have some other fantastic songs, sketches, parody commercials, and a weekly interactive webcast Seriously, check them out and add them to your feed reader!

(Thanks to Kevin, Reverend Mavis, Avis for the heads-up on these guys)