party shout

How do you listen to music alone?
When at home:
1) I turn on my stereo radio to a public radio station.
2) I plug in my ipad nano to a dock connected to my TV and use the remote and TV interface to browse to a playlist or an artist.
3) I plug a cord from my stereo system into the speaker jack of my laptop and play music off my itunes. Usually picking a song to make a genius playlist.
4) I put on a cd or dvd of music into my stereo system.
5) I carry my ipod on my person and listen to a playlist or audiobook through my earphones or mini speakers. Sadly this lowtech scenario is probably the most common method.

When at work:
6) I usually plug my headphones into my work computer and listen to one of the following:
6.a) itunes that has different music files on it then i have at home. Or i listen to music podcasts like All Songs Considered and Not Your Usual Bollucks.
6.b) I launch Hypem.com in a browser and play from the "Popular" playlist. I am a FREE registered user for Hypem even though i don't contribute any music, I am only a listener. I do "heart" some music and then go back and listen to my "loved" playlist. I like hypem because most of the music i can zone out and work to, but also keeps me alert because its mostly upbeat remixes.
6.c) I launch pandora in a browswer and play from one of my many "stations" or a mix of them. This is another one that i have registered for a FREE account. I really like pandora's music genome because i think its pretty smart and accurate. However i find that i am constantly making new stations because eventually the station will play the same set of songs over and over. SO if i want something fresher i have to start a new station or add an artist to station.
6.d) Very rarely do i listen to last.fm. I just don't like their recommendation algorithm.
6.e) Sometimes i get music random webistes, blogs, npr music.
7) Sometimes i just plug my earphones into my ipod and listen to playlists, or an artist.

How do you listen to (recorded, not live) music together with other people?
If it is at my home then the same as 1, 2, 3, or 4 from above.

And if it is just one other person and we are NOT at my home, then i share one of my earphones with them and we listen to a song or two on my ipod.

I just don't like their recommendation algorithm.

works great for wu-tang.

hahaha i can imagine them writing this algorithm:

if(user) likes (wutang)
then(wutang*2)

Or
if(user) likes (wutang)
then(wutang_forever)

;)

ha! onny wins.

How do you listen to music alone?
When I'm at home or at the office I tend to use iTunes on my computer. at home I have a set of cheap computer speakers I plug into, at the office i use a firewire sound interface going out to speakers.
either way, i'm usually just picking a random album from my itunes library and listening to it...occasionally i will use the "itunes dj" feature, but i don't like it too much. i have a smart playlist dedicated to music I have recently added to my library, which to ensure i don't add something and then forget about it completely.

i pretty much can't listen to music when i'm working. there are two reasons for that, firstly that a lot of my work deals with sound, so obviously i can't be listening to music and doing that at the same time. but even if i'm doing writing or research or something i can't listen to music because it makes me zone out and listen rather than work. so most of the time at home or at work i tend to listen to music when i'm doing relatively mindless tasks like cleaning, organizing, batch file renaming, cooking, etc. it generally means i don't listen to very much music on average...i often force myself to listen to something to help me relax when i'm getting too focused on work and losing the forest for the trees.

otherwise, until my portable headphones broke i listened to music a fair amount on my phone when walking around or on the bus or train. this has changed a bit recently, though, partially since i don't walk around much anymore (i tend to bike everywhere) and when i'm on the bus or train for some reason i've been preferring to listen to podcasts like Radio Lab.

Finally, the other way I listen to music these days is Spotify. This probably doesn't apply to what you're looking into, billy, since it's only in europe, but i use it to listen to pretty much any artist i hear about and what to check out. For example, the other day I read an article about a French rapper who I hadn't heard about, Diam's. I opened up Spotify and listened to a couple of her albums.

Spotify is brilliant for the vast range of music on demand for free, good audio quality, half decent player, sharing, etc. Really really good. The ads are a bit annoying, but not nearly enough to make me want to pay for the pro account.

How do you listen to (recorded, not live) music together with other people?
Spotify all the way. Pretty much every party or get together I go to uses spotify now to listen to music in the background. More often than not a conversation about music will happen, and songs that come up are added to the playlist. I don't think I know anyone that has a pro account, but I have heard of some people buying the 1-day pass for all night parties to avoid ads and so on.

Otherwise, I sometimes try to make an iTunes playlist for a party but that usually ends in a conversation about my strange musical taste.

god dammit america, I want spotify.

isn't that nissan leaf sound the one from minority report?

If it was, Jon, they def. sampled it from the jetsons. damn.

Home Alone:
iTunes which runs off of our shared network attached storage drive

Commute(1 hr +, it's LA):
1- Local radio- KCRW for music and NPR, and then for zoning out usually 107.1, one of the less westernized latio station
2- CD-Rs- terribly sad but completely true

@ Work:
Last FM or Pandora, I want to like Last FM more, and I keep trying to use it more, but I honestly use it once a week and the rest in Pandora. I put way too much energy into my Pandora account early on. Lately (over the course of the last year) I've felt that it 'gets me' less and less and just plays what is new from that band, and I can't get myself to pay for it yet, and I hate the ads. But the repetitiveness of some of my stations I've come to enjoy, and when trying to focus I'll often go to one of the ones that I've been thumbs upping and downing since 2006 for comfort/background noise.

Rollerblading:
An un-updated ipod with the same 4 gigs of music on it from 2005. Sometimes the repetition is great sometimes I want to throw it in the ocean. I have not taken the time to update it. No excuses.

2 of us:
1- Local public radio KCRW on our home stereo, streaming.
2- or my itunes, but Steve has more music so we usually listen to his library (off of the same network attached storage drive) but his is organized in an enormously complex folder structure and played through winamp, rather than itunes.

Many of us:
Usually my library, Steve's library, or pandora (another grossly managed party list that i've had too long to know what to do with).

The Tesla roadster sounds like the first engine sound, but I hate to tell you the Nissan Leaf has almost no sound. You here the gravel from your tires more than the engine.

an enormously complex folder structure

oh man, I remember having one of those. what are the arguments again?

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