Music always sounds better in large spaces.

A downside to attending a great tech conference is that by immersing yourself in a world of possibilities, you quickly grow frustrated by how the world actually works.

For example, at one point during a break in the conference, I found myself sitting in a rather large room where music was being played on a loudspeaker. One song that I knew and liked came on and, for a few seconds, I actually believed that, with a touch of a button, I could download the song to my computer -- instantly.

Sure, I could have gone on Kazaa or LimeWire to search for and download the song, but what if I didn't even know the title or artist? What if I didn't want to "steal" the song but, as a conscientious consumer, instead wanted to simply learn who recorded it and what album it was on?

Let's say that for legal reasons the song (playing on the sound system) itself wasn't downloadable but instead you could freely download a sample, artist and track information onto some sort of handheld device. Think of all the embarrassment this would save shy record store shoppers. You've seen High Fidelity -- if you ask about the identity of a song, the clerks will indeed laugh at you for (1) your lack of musical knowledge (2) your ease of persuasion. Besides, if they wanted you to ask what the song was, they wouldn't prop the jewel case on top of the store stereo.

The key to all of this being really great (besides the assumed universal wireless access) is that every song and every location would be represented: Ocean Beach Safeway (and their never-ending Elton John soundtrack) to the Warfield (and their pre-show Outkast remixes).

(It wouldn't hurt to be able to download the songs, either)

I guess what I'm looking for is some sort of 21st-Century Personics System that actually has a decent catalog of music to choose from.

Update: Thanks, Ryan, for posting the URL to this Daily Ping entry which contains links to mentions of The Personics System on the Web.

Comments

[Ryan]

Did you say... Personics?

http://www.dailyping.com/archive/2000/10/15/

[Stuart]

There was a system mentioned a few weeks ago that involved
a cell phone and a database of songs. The user dialled a number and let the system listen to the music ( In a restaurant, bar etc etc ). It then would come up with its best guess for the song name.
It was apparently quite successful with the song signatures already included.

[Erica]

At lunch today I heard a song that I knew but it wasn't sung by the artist who I had originally heard. It would have been great to know who else was singing it and why. But alas, I was too lazy to ask about the album playing.

[Christine]

There is also a Sony product that you can get, small enough to attach to a keychain, that you then point at the car radio when a song you like is playing. It tracks the station, the time, etc. and you then download it to your computer and it looks up the song information for you. I was always tempted to buy one, but never did.

Thanks to Tivo, now whenever I listen to the radio in the car I wish there was a Ravo - where you could rewind the song and play it again!

[Philbert]

Yeah - Sony did come out with a product that did just that...however it was later discontinued, and all hardware was purchased back from consumers by Sony.

http://www.bricklin.com/emarker.htm

[Bob]

One media retailer which a buddy of mine from the Bronx, NY states has several buildings of music: J & R Music World (http://www.jandr.com/).

MP3.com is a pretty good site to listen to music samples.

To practice dealing w/ databases, I've posted my music collection as web pages for music I actually bought. My MP3 collection is too large to catalog @ this point (7 CD-RW discs backed up so far), but that too will eventually get posted.

For any record companies who might see this msg., I'm available to produce websites for them so people can check out their inventory. MS Access does fairly well for generating web pages of information, but Microsoft adds too much unnecessary code which I strip out.