James Galvin

When I started using Last.fm about a year and a half ago, I thought that was the only playlist I would ever need. I was very happy to scrobble my life away listening to recommendations from my neighbours. I don’t like organizing my music – I go into a frenzy about once a year where every single tag must be perfect, and I usually spend about eight hours capitalising song titles and adding in album information. The rest of the year, I like to just click ‘play’ and leave it at that. The greatest thing about Last.fm is that it knows exactly the kind of music I like, and it finds me more of the same. On the other hand, the downside of Last.fm is that it knows exactly the music I like, and always finds me more of the same. I’m not sure exactly why I overlooked the existence of MP3 Blogs, but I know that extreme laziness is at least partly to blame.

Now I have found Peel, named after the man. It is basically just a music blog feed-reader for the Mac, really nice and simple and easy to use. I have it set to auto-download new tracks from my favourite music blogs, and I will manually play the latest music from the for blogs that I don’t trust quite as much (I don’t want to accidentally auto-download any Sean Bán Breathnach tracks). The best thing about Peel is that it automatically creates a playlist for each blog, and adds the downloaded tracks to iTunes. For some reason, I really hate making playlists.

Now that I’m sold on the product and will happily fork out $15 on a licence, I need to find my favourite music blogs. I was very pleased with the ones that came with Peel.

• Aquarium Drunkard
• Fluxblog
• Music for Robots
• Said the Gramophone

I know of a couple of music blogs from Ireland which I visit occasionally (please let me know which ones I’m missing, because I’d like to check them out):

• MP3 Hugger
• Nialler9

I’m working my way through this list to find some sites that I like – please let me know if you have any recommendations.

My feature requests:

1. A maximum file-size limit for auto-downloading, so that I don’t waste my bandwidth downloading 100mb+ podcasts which happen to be in mp3 form.
2. The ability to view the title and description of the post accompanying the song. I’m probably missing out on interesting trivia here, or possibly even some important note left by the blogger. I might subscribe to a music blog that I don’t really like, if I felt that it produces the occasional gem, and it would be handy to see the title of the post, just the bogger refers to it as “the greatest song of all time” or something.

It is a great app though, I would advise all you Mac users to check it out. Windows people, I’m sure there is something very similar that you can use. Linux guys, you could probably write a script that does this without the need for a fancy GUI anyway.