YouTube: The Streaming Audio Player
Dec 23, 2008 Audiophile
I’ve been experimenting with audio players at work lately. Favorites are Pandora and Grooveshark so far. I like the “set it and forget it” mentality of Pandora, and the ability to play damn-near-any-song-I-can-think-of-on-demand functionality of Grooveshark.
But something that caught me off-guard was YouTube. Apparently I’m the last person to find out that YouTube has a playlist functionality. You create a list of the videos that you want to play, and it will autoplay through them all. The YouTube library is disappointing at first, since they pretty much bent over for most of the record labels and removed all music videos. However, there is a small loophole (I think). Most of the songs you are looking for can be found in Live performances. If you enjoy a good concert like I do, then YouTube has a HUGE assortment of both professional and amateur footage of live appearances for you.
Another brilliant feature of the YouTube playlists is the ability to embed the ENTIRE playlist. I’ve been big into Muse lately (and if they ever come within a day’s drive of Miami next year, I totally plan on being there). Below is a selection of Muse songs that came mostly from V Festival 2008. This show makes Coachella look like a Wiggles sing-a-long:
At work I have several monitors. One I use mostly for email, pings and notices (you have new mail, you have new IMs, twitter dumped 5000 tweets on you). I found it entertaining to have a video running full-screen on that monitor while I master spreadsheet chess on the other two. I’ll keep playing around with it and hopefully YouTube will partner with some half-decent media companies to let them keep content.
Tags: grooveshark, muse, pandora, youtube