Internet Phoenix'd the Radio Star

December 5, 2009 11:02 AM

Is there a radio station of Mefi Music?

A stream station, that is. But that's my question. I want to listen to Mefi Music while I am busy. Is there an option?

posted by humannaire to Feature Requests at 11:02 AM (46 comments total)

There's no radio station, no, but you can listen to the recent tracks via an embedded player down at the bottom of the sidebar on the front page of Music. There's also a link there to a random tracks player that's probably the closest thing to what you're asking.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:09 AM on December 5, 2009

It's interesting how the word "radio" no longer means, you know, radio. Great big multi-megawatt transmitters connected to towers, sending radio waves over a city or town. That kind of thing.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:14 AM on December 5, 2009

Your contact Corduroy has a playlist that looks pretty good: Tunes Like Fine Threads. Other users you admire or relate to may have good playlists to explore too.
posted by carsonb at 11:21 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

The random tracks popout link is awesome. However, if you find a track you like, there seems to be no easy way to get to that track in a browser (that track's MeFi Music page). I've found that I've had to MeFi search for the username, click on their Music contributions, and search through the results there. It's a pain in the ass, but the tracks don't always show up in a simple search. I can't figure out why. But if I like the track, it's worth the extra steps to find it.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:24 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I think we lost the "click through to thread" functionality that the player used to have when we made an unrelated change to the player setup a while back. Some less painful way to get from random player to song would be nice, yeah, though I think we're sort of stuck with the limitations of the available software.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:34 AM on December 5, 2009

There are 673 Mefites over at Last.fm. You can listen here.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 11:35 AM on December 5, 2009

(sorry, I misread your question.)
posted by kuujjuarapik at 11:36 AM on December 5, 2009

And there is Metachat radio.
posted by Obscure Reference at 11:46 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

I frequently listen to random tracks at work.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:04 PM on December 5, 2009

A random streaming MeFi music player would be awesome! I'd pay another 5 bucks for that.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 12:29 PM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Radio is so 20th c, I want my MetaFilter TV station.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:52 PM on December 5, 2009

Check out the TAGS just above the player too. It'll bring up playlists of songs in specific genres.
posted by snsranch at 1:46 PM on December 5, 2009

Wow. I am really surprised. I think having one would bring in loads of more listeners/contributors to Mefi Music.

So how does one go about getting a Mefi Music Pandora-type station/thingy?

I really, really want one. Where I can favorite tracks. And make playlists.

In fact, can I have a Mefi Music iPhone app? It being the holidays and everything...
posted by humannaire at 2:19 PM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Clearly, there's a job to be done here! Metafilter mods, roll up your sleeves and get to work!

you know, when you can get around to it
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:19 PM on December 5, 2009

Radio is so 20th c, I want my MetaFilter TV station.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:52 PM on December 5 [+] [!]

Here.
posted by typewriter at 6:03 PM on December 5, 2009

I've gathered lots of tracks here that you can check out.
posted by umbú at 11:04 PM on December 5, 2009

I want my MetaFilter TV station.

I've been looking into writing some python that fires off once an hour to scan the front page RSS for youtube links & create playlists. Parsing the feed is easy, but the YouTube API is trickier than I expected.

It would be a little weird with much of the context stripped away, but the ability of the YouTube player to traverse a playlist without human intervention would be nice: more like passive TV instead of that icky interactive web thingy.

Would copying the text of a post into a video's comments be verboten? I guess if the copyright for user-submitted text belongs with that user, there's a implied (or express? if so, where?) consent for metafilter to publish it, but what about re-publishing?
posted by morganw at 11:39 AM on December 6, 2009

Re-publishing comments is generally not okay. You could certainly link to the post in the comments, though.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:18 PM on December 6, 2009

Re-publishing posts, I meant (though it's true of comments, too).
posted by ocherdraco at 9:18 PM on December 6, 2009

Would copying the text of a post into a video's comments be verboten? I guess if the copyright for user-submitted text belongs with that user, there's a implied (or express? if so, where?) consent for metafilter to publish it, but what about re-publishing?

Doing it automatically would be kind of weird, yeah. Depends a bit on the situation and the details, but anytime we're looking at "site x sucks content from site y as a matter of course and republishes it" it's kind of sketchy territory.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:31 PM on December 6, 2009

You can copy any of my comments, as long as you send me a check for 50 dollars for each comment copied. I think that's a reasonable rate. Actually, direct bank transfer would be best. Memail me for bank info.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 1:05 AM on December 7, 2009

Dude! That Happy Birthday MeFi song (MeFiTV: here) is tight! I even enjoyed the Mysterious Phantom Cortex Backup Jam Band in the background!
posted by cavalier at 8:30 AM on December 7, 2009

Republishing anything besides the link (in the way I had proposed) turns out not to be possible anyway, because playlists on YouTube don't allow playlist-creator-supplied metadata. No way to stick post title or contents into entries so you know how they were discovered. No way to do it with your own manually-created playlists either, so you end up with playlists full of weird crap that you have no clue how you stumbled on it.

I still want to figure out the YouTube Google Data API for Python, so I'll finish it, but the radio station looks a lot more interesting. All of the mp3s are served right from metafilter and you can do things like treat RSS of an artist or playlist or front page as a podcast then make a smart playlist (assuming iTunes) to play everything in that playlist automatically.

Creating a bigger pool of content from everything ever published would take a lot more scraping. Is *that* legit? Can I publish a file of every mp3 (about 4000) on mefi music w/ author & title? A "radio" app (native on the client or Ajax + Flash on a webpage) would stream random selections, allow tagging favorites & adjust the selection by choosing authors with a lot of local favorites.

There's so much possible that pb doesn't have time for, but I don't want to harsh on the mefi music's mellow.
posted by morganw at 12:22 PM on December 7, 2009

I support this idea very much.

However, I would suggest making it as simple and foolproof as possible. No Flash apps (I want to listen to this sucker on my iPhone). Running an Icecast server, pointed at the archive of songs, relaying the Artist and Title information would make me happy enough.
posted by Jimbob at 8:26 PM on December 7, 2009

Running an Icecast server

I don't want to pay for the bandwidth to stream the mp3s. I'm not sure Metafilter would want to either if music.metafilter.com becomes more popular. A streamer could have an "is anybody still listening?" pause like Pandora.

My proposed site would only maintain the favorites in order to tell the Flash player what to play next. If Metafilter had an API, it could forward favorites to the user's Metafilter account, but after looking at the way Google/YouTube handles authentication, that's a big job on the server side to do without inviting scammers. A site building playlists on the fly could *read* favorites and look up other songs by the same author as favorites aren't private, but it couldn't write them.

I just suggested Flash as a an easy single-plugin way to play mp3s in a non-mobile browser. Simple links to mp3s play fine on "Quicktime Player" on an iPhone, so a mobile version could offer that up, though I don't know how you play a playlist of mp3s without decoding the individual songs & re-encoding on the fly into a single streamed file.

If Icecast 1) lets the server tell the client that the audio files are somewhere else and 2) supports multiple files without decode/re-encode, that could work & there seem to be clients for everything. I'll check it out....
posted by morganw at 8:50 AM on December 8, 2009

So is that a yes?
posted by humannaire at 8:00 PM on December 9, 2009

I dunno, humannaire... you might wanna start another thread!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:11 PM on December 9, 2009

Continued from here

505. The lobster says hi. Or at least you assume it says hi, for humanity doesn't know how to communicate with lobsters. You assume that whatever that little waving about of things it just did is a form of greeting. Or distress, that's also possible. Or something else, some lobstery thing. It couldn't be a comment about your lederhosen, surely, they're only lightly soiled. No one's noticed, you're certain of that. But what if someone did? What if the lobster is telling everyone else that you're wearing a pair of lightly-soiled lederhosen? Don't be silly, there's no one else in this room who can communicate with lobsters, because everybody else here is human. That's your going assumption, anyway.
posted by Kattullus at 8:36 PM on December 14, 2009

506. The lobster collects your assumptions, and your lightly-soiled lederhosen. Then eats them.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:38 PM on December 14, 2009

507. Lead the lobster to a bed made from your ruined, lightly-stained lederhosen. Watch it not sleep.
posted by Kattullus at 7:10 AM on December 20, 2009

508. The lobster's tank is filled with water, and the tank is in a commercial space that maintains a strict non-smoking policy. Lobsters respire through the use of gills rather than lungs. Try to explain to the lobster why it has terminal lung cancer. In times like these there will be "why me?" and tears and "it's not fair".

You could cut the discussion short by killing the lobster and eating it, but now you are feraked out by all the talk about tumours and have lost your appetite. Your level of feraked outedness is rising in proportion to the length of time that
posted by Meatbomb at 11:18 PM on December 20, 2009

509. Do not listen to the lobster, it doesn't understand your art. It questions how a pair of lightly-soiled lederhosen can be art. Philistine!
posted by Kattullus at 6:48 AM on December 21, 2009

510. The lobster is never festive, not even when decked out in the silkiest Santa's hat and the greenest lederhosen.
posted by Kattullus at 2:57 PM on December 26, 2009

511. (refrain)

Give me an "L"!
Give me an "O"!
Give me a "BSTER"!

What's that spell?
"EL-OH-B'STER!"

It is difficult for English speakers to do this cheer properly because we don't generally have the consonant cluster "bst" at the front of a word.

The French word "bistro" is supposedly a corruption of the Russian word "быстро", or "quick, fast". Apparently the Russian occupiers in the war of 1812 swarmed the cafes of Paris with demands for prompt service.

Ooh, and get this: the Russian word for "train station" is "вокзал", from Vauxhall Station in London. Imagine some traveller returning to his primitive land from London, explaining that they have great terminals where aeroplanes come and go, and that these places are called "Heathrows"! And then, because you are such a fuckhead, that the word for airport in your language becomes "heathrow"? Zany?

The Polish word for hairdresser is "fryzjer", which is a corruption of the French "friseur". What is the relation between the Polish word "Kantor" for a currency exchange office, and Jewish names and culture? Could there be some link?

And why does English use the French root words for beef and mutton, but the older Saxon words for chicken and fish? Could this be another small clue to help unravel the conspiracy against the IOC?

And that is why you should always be sensitive to the needs of your men when rooting out sabateurs in the Giant Mushroom Forest. DeForrest Kelly.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:02 AM on December 27, 2009

511. (clarification)

That is why it is written "B'STER", with the apostrof. English speakers should feel free to inject a schwa sound, saying "b(uh)ster" if they find the pure consonant cluster too tricky.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:05 AM on December 27, 2009

512. The lobster will wish again it was a fish again as it boils in Michigan it wonders what a man from Michigan is called, especially one wearing lederhosen and a dirndl, a terrible combination, though it has a certain gender bending charm.
posted by Kattullus at 1:36 AM on December 27, 2009

513. The lobster sleeps. Don't wake it up. Tease the lederhosen from under its left claw and put them on. You are now ready for your interview, for the world.
posted by Kattullus at 11:17 PM on December 27, 2009

514. You can use the following to move the lobster: pallet jack, light forklift, pointy stick, rhetoric. Please try to refrain from making the lobster cry in the process, as that might...

STAIN THE LEDERHOSEN LIGHTLY AMIRITE LOL
posted by Meatbomb at 9:22 AM on December 29, 2009

515. You wake up still wearing the the traditional garb of your people but the lobster has gone, leaving behind only a slight indentation in the bed and a light stain on your lederhosen. Don't seek the lobster out, you will only find heartbreak.
posted by Kattullus at 12:33 AM on December 30, 2009

516. "Yeah, after I took mescaline I started seeing crabs all the time. We called them crabs but they were really lobsters. They followed me in the streets, into class… I would wake up in the morning and say 'Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?' I would say 'Okay guys, we’re going into class now,' and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang." Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialist. Note the absence of lederhosen, clean or lightly-soiled.
posted by Kattullus at 9:13 AM on December 30, 2009

517. The lobster will squeal like a stool pigeon, even if your deceit isn't given away by your lightly-soiled lederhosen.
posted by Kattullus at 6:06 PM on December 30, 2009

518.

Grab some noisemakers and a silly hat. Take your lobster out on the town to celebrate. Celebrate what? Why, the day of the lightly soiled lederhosen, of course!
posted by ocherdraco at 12:09 AM on January 1, 2010

519. It was the hunger, really, not you. At a certain point hunger becomes so intense a feeling that it takes over. So it was the hunger, not you as a person, that chose to eat the lobster. Try not to cry when you wash your lightly-soiled lederhosen, even though the stains will never really come out.
posted by Kattullus at 8:44 AM on January 1, 2010

520. Lobsters never sleep, only plot in darkness. One day you'll wake up happy, go to your drawer and pull out a pair of lightly-soiled lederhosen. A lobster has struck.
posted by Kattullus at 11:21 PM on January 1, 2010

521:

Q: Are the number of lobsters that fit the criteria binded and finite, or unbound and infinite?

A: That depends. What do you think of Luke Skywalker's Hoth Patrol outfit?

Q: Yes, very surreal.

A: What about your mom? Is she, you know, free?

Q: Are you saying you want to bone my mom?

A: LOL lederhosen amirite.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:25 AM on January 2, 2010

lobster/lederhosen moving here
posted by Kattullus at 2:09 PM on January 4, 2010