The irrepressible Lucas Gonze is back from a few years absence with a new project, "Wax Mp3".
Wax MP3 Launched yesterday with the full Magnatune catalog as its music source.
You can see (and listen) to it here.
Lucas tells me that the goal behind the Wax Mp3 site is to be an extremely minimal radio station. You visit the site, it plays music. If you don't like the current song, his "reload" on your browser and you get a new one. Simple idea: just play me music! I like it.
Lucas is of course, the creator of WebJay, which was a really wonderful make-and-share-playlists-of-web-music site. Magnatune was a big supporter (I think we advertised on it, actually) because it helped people find the best of open and shareable music. Yahoo acquired webjay in 2006, and then shut it down 18 months later (sigh).
Lucas also originated the XSPF open audio playlist format, which Magnatune supports. This then helped cause the creation of the XSPF Flash Audio Player, which Magnatune used for many years. We now use a Flash player derived from it maintained by the Ampache project.
Anyhow, that's all to say that whatever Lucas does, you can bet it will be interesting. Check out "Wax Mp3" as another approach to finding something to listen to.
I've already listened to 3 great new songs; normally I never would've thought to choose their respective 'genres'. What a great idea.
Posted by: Ivan Ilic | June 24, 2009 at 03:07 PM
It is a great idea! And I like that idea, but not the way it looks. It takes up an entire screen. I find the tile effect of the photos discomforting and objectionable - makes my head hurt. Is it possible (just giving out ideas here) to make it small and lite, looking sort of like the way the old winamp looked (and I mean OLD like version 2.64) and given the ability of being on top of the other windows and movable on the desktop? All that twitter, facebook and other garabge icons actually distracts from the music. Sorry, I don't mean to offend, but it is diamond in the rough. It has tons of possibilities (please don't add a clear dome, fins, and a fox-tail like Homer did to his brother's new automobile :) ). Good, no, great luck to this project.
Posted by: Ashley | October 27, 2009 at 12:25 PM
Hmm, this player seems to be gone now. Would have liked to take a look at it again, because I can't really remember what it was like. Ah well, my Magnatune Player has a "Play Random Album"-button and I've actually already found some music I like through that.
@Ivan Ilic: You can install my player in Google Chrome as an app, which makes it a window without address bar and such. Using a good operating system (Linux or *BSD) you can make *any* window stay always on top. Maybe there are tools made by some hackers for that under Windows/Mac OS X? And when you hide the collection my player very much looks like Winamp 2 or 5 (which I also loved back when I used Windows).
See:
http://tinyurl.com/magnatune-player
[end of shameless plug]
Posted by: panzi | February 07, 2012 at 09:22 PM