Earfeeder is a service that scans your computer for music and creates an RSS feed you can use to subscribe to news, concert ticket and iTunes availability notifications for all the musicians you listen to. It’s a simple but fun service that you can use once to subscribe to music updates and then forget about. The site uses a Java applet to scan your hard drive for audio files. You can check off bands you don’t want to include in your feed, or select only bands with more than 5 or 10 songs on your computer. One downside is that it will pick up podcasts as well as music, but filtering for artists with more than 5 songs can help to some degree.
Boulder, Colorado entrepreneurs David Cohen and Brad Searle built Earfeeder. They say they’ve received permission to syndicate the news feeds from sources like RollingStone.com and they put affiliate adds following items delivered. Including Pitchfork Media would make it even better. Earfeeder won’t scan your computer from Firefox on an Intel Mac or in Safari but otherwise works well.
One way to work around the FireFox limitation is to scan the music with Firefox, grab the RSS feed link and switch over to Safari to view the feed. Doing so allows you to get update on the feed via Safari.
Well I’ll try it but I suppose it’ll work best for people with a mainstream music taste
If you are into music this is a great service from two great guys right here in my back yard of Colorado! I have been looking at Earfeeder for a while and just love this service – way to go Dave and Brad!
Give it a go and be sure to use NewsGator for consuming Earfeeder’s feeds (couldn’t resist)
Actually it might work best for people with unusual taste – Jessica Simpson fans would be overwhelmed with news they’d easily find elsewhere, for example.
Hm we’ll see how it works with German Gothic bands ^__^
Yeah! Dave/Brad…we love earFeeder. And we love all of the cool happenings coming out of Colorado! Well done!
Yea rite. They won’t scan your computer.
Won’t scan from IE on a PC either. The loading indicator has been spinning for about 10 minutes. Looks like the JS function “kickIt” isn’t kicking.
Bruce, drop me a note (david at earfeeder dot com) and let’s get it working for you. It always helps to get the latest JRE from java.com.
Also, earfeeder works fine on a mac, just not in safari (should work well using firefox on any mac, since that’s what I use).
I got to see this working about a week ago and it is very cool. Definitely worth checking out if you are a music lover.
I installed it, finished indexing my 37k song dataset in 10 min, and got a bunch of cool info right after. Yet, I have disappointment, as I somehow missed a Thomas Dolby concert at my local mall.
Its pretty cool, though, to keep on top of other hot ticket shows, so I don’t miss another early 80’s techno soft pop wonder.
watch the Boulder New Technology Meetup video where David presents the basics of earfeeder.
Crazy thing is the tongue in cheek remarks by David at the end of the video…he called it!
http://bouldert...-3-david-cohen/
-bp
sounds a bit like Superfeed ( http://nextepiso.de/superfeed/ ), but geared towards music, and better.
i’m still waiting for Google Reader to fix their ‘Next>>’ feature. _That_ will be dope.
Hm, not as cool as I hoped.
I’ve got a normal electronica-with-a-little-hiphop music taste and all earfeeder could find after scanning my 400 songs was 2 gig-entries from stubhub and that’s it
The problem is that popular music magazines like RollingStone and others don’t write about “smaller” bands. Additionally, finding news on official artists’ pages is not easy as they rarely include RSS feeds, nor do they have a good HTML structure to spider. Did you check out http://www.bandnews.org yet?
For concert listings for your favorite artists, you should check out Showaholic at http://www.showaholic.com. It allows you to load your favorite artists from your last.fm profile, and will alert you to upcoming shows in your city.
Also, I couldn’t even get earFeeder to work on Firefox (Not sure if it’s a firefox problem or a linux problem).
Check out http://www.sleevenotez.com – a real-time information aggregator for digital music. It pushes rich metadata to the page based on what you’re *currently* listening to. Lots more features to come in future though
If it’s concert/ticket info that you are looking for, you should check out
http://BeeThere.net/
It loads artist from iTunes, and you can also add bands on the site. There are also audio clips, recommendations and more for browsing events.