Tonight from 11 PM until 6 AM (EST), we’ll be making some updates to Grooveshark Beta and Grooveshark Lite. Nothing too scary! The only thing you might notice is that some images (like album art) might be offline, and a few songs might be slow/unavailable.
Hopefully not, but we’ve gotta warn you of the possibility!
Love,
Ben
In order to keep adding tons of new tracks to Grooveshark, we’re going to be making some optimizations tonight between 12 AM and 4 AM EST. Things probably won’t go hay-wire, but we’re finding it’s often harder to predict problems than you expect!
A small number of songs (and images) may be offline for a bit (between 12 AM and 4 AM EST), but overall you probably won’t notice any difference.
<3
Marq Vanderlaan’s Scarce Sounds
Hello. My name is Marq Vanderlaan and this is a new Grooveshark exclusive blog series called Scarce Sounds. Grooveshark’s song library is big, but doesn’t have everything. I travel the world hiking jungles, climbing mountains and following the sacred legends to discover music few have ever heard. Then I post it on Grooveshark. You may ask, who am I and why do I risk my life? I’ve been asking myself those same questions. Some call me crazy, but I can’t image doing anything else.
Last week a new uncontacted tribe was discovered near the Brazil-Peru boarder. Photo images and more about this new tribe can be found at http://www.survival-international.org/news/3340. Their passion and mystery fills each photograph.
Who are these people? What kind of music do they make? Every culture in the world makes unique music that defines them as a people. If I could hear their music, I could dive into their souls and discover who they are. I rushed to the airport to board the first flight to Lima, Peru. It’s been 8 years since my last trip to Peru–last time I did a piece on Machu Pichu.
From Lima I caught a bus to the base of the Andes Mountains.
The rugged mountain terrain made traveling slow, but 3 days later I was at the edge of the rain forest with my cassette recorder and a Quechuan guide named Acquefrita. The plan: a week’s hike to the heart of the rainforest to record the music of this previously unknown tribe for the first time. Trying not to make actual contact, for my modern world diseases would kill them; I let the mountains echo their music. This was what I heard:
So what title does one place on this song? A song that has been playing through these forests for millennium by a tribe whose name is still unknown. The only thing I could think to call it was a scarce sound.
Don’t be taken an advantage of,
Marq Vanderlaan
Grooveshark Autoplay is here! We’ve been working hard to bring you some cool updates to Grooveshark Lite, to help make your listening life a little less lonely. With Autoplay, you can pick any song you want to listen to, click the Autoplay-gear-button, and we’ll keep serving up songs that we think you’ll like so you can sit back, relax, and focus on all that work you’ve been putting off until after lunch.
Like the last time we made some upgrades to our MySQL database, I wrote a little song to share some of the fun of Autoplay with you guys. I hope you like it! Be nice :)
Grooveshark Autoplay from ben westermann-clark on Vimeo.
Also, if you want to read the lyrics, check ‘em out:
I was feeling pretty down
listening to Allison Krauss or something,
Then my love came to town,
took my browser, and got me jumping
‘Cause we all believe there’s something out there for you
but you can’t always find it if you don’t know what to choose
Autoplay is a way to find music you don’t know
and you might be surprised when music’s in your control
Give a smile,
give a frown,
you can vote them recommendations down
We ain’t got all the answers–just 5 million songs
which are pretty good chances
We’ll be more right than wrong
‘Cause you can have your say
I know what I’m gonna do at work today…
Autoplay is a way to find music you don’t know
When you do, you can save favorites and come back for more
GUITAR SOLO!!!!!!!!
I don’t want to be sure
but I want my say
I know what I’m gonna do at work today…
Autoplay!
Earlier this morning, we were fortunate enough to receive a bunch of great coverage from some of our favorite blogs on the new feature we just launched: Grooveshark Autoplay. Thanks to some totally unrelated weirdness with our search function, things kind of went haywire for a couple of hours, causing the site to be down temporarily.
Good news–we’re back up! Everything should be smooth from here on out, and we’re insanely thankful for everyone’s response and support. You can keep track of updates by checking me out on Twitter, as I’ll be posting status updates and giving shout-outs to our friends all day.
If you need anything, of course, let us know! And I’d love to hear your thoughts on Autoplay.
We’re working on fixing some issues with searching in Grooveshark Lite right now. A surprising number of people are here in the office at 9 AM on a Monday morning, so we should have all the problems brushed aside pretty quickly.
If you notice anything particularly wonky, let us know! We love you!
![Grooveshark [dot] com](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3018/2778521485_2b8cb063c6_s.jpg)
| Grooveshark tracks the best users so you know who can be trusted to deliver quality content. |
| In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. |
| Free streaming. Social networking. Music discovery. Oh, and reimbursement for sharing when somebody buys a song that you've uploaded to the collective. |
| If you're looking for a way to grab music from peer-to-peer networks without that nagging feeling that you're depriving a starving artist of her next meal (or a label exec of that Learjet upgrade), Grooveshark might help. |
| Grooveshark: a new music service that I can see a lot of potential in. |
Del.icio.us
digg
reddit