Item 19: Audio/Video - Music and other Audio

It was funny; while working on this section, I had already previously opened up Pandora and was listening to it as I worked. I've known about Pandora (and have used it) for the past year or so. I really like it, becuase I'll just put it on in the background and it keeps playing songs it thinks I'll like basede on the "station" I've selected. I really like Josh Groban, have this artist as the "station" I listen to most often, and usually like the artists that they play on this station. When I don't, I simply rate it with a thumbs down symbol and it skips over the song. Yeah!

Last.fm was neat too -- comparatively, for my purposes, it was a little overloaded with more things to do -- watch videos, listen to a couple tracks of the artist I input(and offer to purchase them), see who is currently also listening, listen to the "station" for the artist, see artistst they list as being similar, etc... see the top listeners for the past week (who really cares about this?!?!?)

Anyways, it may be due to experience, but I preferred Pandora over last.fm.

I also went out to the Gutenberg.org's Audio Book collection and Mango Languages websties. I'd heard of the GAB collection and come across it a couple time to meet patrons needs at the reference desk. Personally, I don't care to read 'for fun books' online... I could download some of the audio books in MP3 format, but the one I did look at (Jane Austens' Pride and Prejudice) was so big, it'd probably take up half of my 2 GB MP3 player. Maybe if I was at home, I'd download them and update them to my player on the weekends. I usuaully only listen to books on my MP3 player when I'm traveling... well, I am traveling in the next two weeks, so maybe this weekened I'll download a good chunk of the book.

As for the Mango Languages website, it sure started of simple! But, sometimes that's all a person needs. It would be neat for kids who are leaning about another culture and want to learn how to say a few basics, like "hello, how are you?" I briefly looked at the first quarter of the first spanish language. Mostly basics, but easy enough to follow along. I also took a peek at the Japanese and Greek ones; becuase the tutorial shows the text of the foregin lang in the alphabet of the culture, I think it would be a lot harder to learn these ones.

I think libraries could definitely make use of these resources. Project Gutenberg could be used when a student needs to read (or listen) to a book and we don' thave any copies left in the system (of course, they'd have to have a computer and the internet at home.)

As for whether CDs are dead, I think that eventually they will go the way of tapes and whatever came before tapes... Tapes are still around some (hey, I still have a tape player in my car and listen to boooks on tape), but, like VHS tapes, no one really buys them anymore... With technology moving as fast as it is, it seems that no media type is safe from extinction.