I want a Twitter-style service for freeform, taggable, time-stamped data. My intended purpose would be to log real-world items. Like I’d IM/text/email the Data Twitter service with:

bike ride tags: bike, ride, exercise

writing a blog post tags: status, writing

phone call from annoying dude tags: annoying dude, phone

basketball tags: basketball, sports, exercise

These would all be time-stamped as I add them. A duration may also be useful.

The data could then be queried, searched, accessed via API from other web sites & apps, read via RSS and imported into spreadsheets.

Potential applications:

• import specific tags (like ‘exercise’) for a certain time period into a spreadsheet for analysis
• power cross-site social widgets from the data feed (most recently listened to songs, task completion, current status)
• use as a remote control for triggering events in software monitoring the feeds (bittorrent clients, server administration)

It’s super nerdy, by nature deals with private instead of social data and likely wouldn’t scale, but I still want it.

In preparation for the new album release I’ve re-vamped all the music/store sections on the site. I’ll spare you the boring tech details but it was A LOT OF WORK. Here’s some of the new stuff:

• Affected pages are music, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Remixed, Outside the Inbox and the store.
• I tried to roll buying and listening together in a non-obnoxious way. Anywhere you can listen to the albums you can also buy them and vice versa.
• Combined physical and digital buying instead of having two separate stores.
• Every album has a flash player on it now for quick listening.
• Variable prices for I Don’t Know What I’m Doing. MP3s go for any price including. CDs have a $5 minimum.
• Paid downloads come off the ultra-reliable Amazon S3 servers and free downloads come off my clunky junkbox.
• Buying a CD gets you instant access to digital downloads of that album.
• OGG format is gone, bye bye, hardly anyone bought you!
• Lossless FLAC format is gone (but might come back?) It was more popular than OGG but not by tons and the bandwidth considerations make it rough to give away for free.

There are probably plenty of bugs (please let me know) but good lord am I glad that’s over with. Did Prince have to write his own storefronts?

With completing all recording and sequencing on my next album and me regaining my enthusiasm for making new music, a complete sample library reset is in order. I’m a sample hoarder but my current setup (30-40 gigs of loops and samples in d:\music\samples\ subdirectories) has always been awful. The hierarchy’s all wrong and it sucks to browse. For a long time I’ve wanted a del.icio.us tagging style sample browser but I understand it’s a limited market.

But lately I’ve been using the latest beta of foobar2000 for my mp3 listening and organization. One thing I totally love about it is the facet view:

You can enter a search query or click in any of the panels (you can choose what tag you want each facet to be based on) and it narrows down the other panels based on your selection or search query. It’s really fantastic and makes it easy to explore your collection.

So a light bulb went off last night: this is exactly what I want for my samples! With some help from the foobar2000 forums I set up another copy of foobar and had it index my sample directories. Big problem: foobar saves all the metadata to the actual audio files — .WAV files don’t support genre metadata. Boned.

I’ve been scrabbling around trying to make foobar do what I want with various plugins but it’s a pain in the ass. Now I’m on to trying other media players…