Eileen Hadidian passes away, great Christmas music, 100% Magnatune royalties go to Healing Muses

Last week we lost the wonderfully talented flutist/recorder player Eileen Hadidian. Eileen had given many of the last years of her life helping others heal through music through the nonprofit she founded, as well as by recording with the ensembles Healing Muses and In Nova Cantica.

We recently released In Nova Cantica's album of traditional Christmas-time carols and dances, featuring Eileen (with other musicians).

Eileen's "Healing Muses" was founded because of her personal experience in 1999 during her own first battle with cancer, where music had greatly helped. The Healing Muses program grew quickly to include many Northern California hospitals, and in 2002 Eileen incorporated Healing Muses as a nonprofit organization. 

The "Healing Muses" program now features numerous other musicians, including harpists Patrice Haan, Maureen Brennan and Diana Rowan, who all also have extensive experience in the healing arts, medical science and social welfare.

In addition to their main passion of providing live music in hospitals, Healing Muses offers lectures, workshops and concerts demonstrating the healing power of music. Interviews have appeared in the Townsend Letter for Doctors and Patients, on National Public Radio, and in the Journal of the San Francisco Medical Society. Their three CDs can be found on Magnatune and a playbook of sheet music entitled "Heart's Ease: Music to Uplift the Spirit and Chase Away Pain, Discomfort and Stress" is also available.

Rest in peace Eileen, you'll always be with us and thank you for bringing such musical joy to us all.

As a gesture of respect for Eileen's life and contribution, Magnatune is giving its entire share of Healing Muses' royalties (usually, Magnatune gets 50%, the musician gets 50%) for 2012 directly to Healing Muses, which is a registered non-profit company, and which continues now.

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HOW YOU CAN HELP:

If you like the music that Eileen made with Healing Muses and In Nova Cantica, please download their albums, so that your monthly membership royalties go to them. If you're not a member yet, think about joining Magnatune and then downloading her music.

iTunes: filtering only Magnatune music in your music collection

A few weeks ago, Magnatune member Casey D asked me via email:

Do you folks add any tag I can use to just say "hey, grab some random magnatune stuff, it's all pretty darn good" to my iTunes setup?

Well yes! We do add an id3 "description" that gives the musician's home page at Magnatune. You can see it--for instance--in the VLC media player:

Unfortunately iTunes doesn't recognize it, so the quick answer to Casey's request to make a playlist of only Magnatune music was "no, sorry, I don't see how to do that in iTunes".

I thought his request was very reasonable, however, so I went about fixing the situation.

As of today, all our MP3s have an id3 "grouping" tag of "magnatune", which you can verify in iTunes:

You can use iTunes' "smart playlist" feature to create a playlist that only shows you music you've downloaded from Magnatune, by looking for this "grouping" tag:

which then gives you a view of just your Magnatune songs.

and if you choose "view - show column browser" you can easily select artists and albums from Magnatune.

Thanks, Casey, for pointing out something really useful that should have worked, and thus prodding me to make it work!

-john

New Android App for Magnatune

A new, official Android App for Magnatune is now available, and is free for anyone to use.

You can download it from various Android app stores, such as Google Play and App Brain or you can install the APK file directly.

Be sure to look for "Magnatune (official app)" when you download it from your favorite Android store. Don't accidentally install the much older "Magnatune (beta)" app that was done by a fan many years ago, and which doesn't work at all any more.

The Magnatune (official app) works well on a variety of Android phones, including large format tablets, in portrait and landscape mode. I've tested it on Android version 2.2, 2.3 and 3.0, at both low resolutions and high. The app has a clean and minimal interface, features browsing by genres, artists, albums as well as full text search. It works both for free (non member) and in member mode, just like the Magnatune web site does.

For this app, I hired veteran Android developer Paul Yago, who did an outstanding job working with me to get a lot of functionality in a clean, non intrusive interface.

Note about logging in: some members with long and complicated passwords have had problems logging in with the Android app. I've seen problems like this with the iPhone app and long passwords, but I'm not sure if the problem is that they're very hard to type, or there's a problem with Apache and long passwords. At any rate, if you change your password on Magnatune to something shorter, that seems to solve the Android-logging-in problem.