Presence

For those of you subscribed to my combined feed, you may have noticed some .mp3 files showing up in the mix. I started using a service called Webjay, which allows you to create playlists of .mp3 files freely available on the Internet. Anytime you find an .mp3 file you like (for example, Oh! by Sleater-Kinney), just add it to you Webjay playlist. You can listen to all the songs in you playlist with one easy click from the Webjay page.

The Webjay application is in Beta, but so far I've found it pretty easy to use. It would be nice if there was a one-click way to add songs from others playlists to one of my playlists (the best way I've found so far is to use their "Copy" method, which is a bit cumbersome.

Webjay exports your playlist in many different ways. I added the RSS output for my playlist to the Presence Blogdigger Group, which mingles the songs added to my playlist with my links (via Furl) and my main blog posts. Eventually, I'll get to using Webjay's Javascript export to put a listing of my recent songs on my home page. For those keeping count, that's four (4) separate tools all combined into one. It would be incredible if a single application could handle all this (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

The best way to get started with a playlist is to go to Webjay's home page, browse through the playlists created by other users, and start stealing songs you like for your own playlist. Then it's simply a matter of finding free music around the web to add to your playlist. You could subscribe to the Blogdigger Media .mp3 feed, which lists the most recent posts that link to .mp3 files that Blogdigger finds, or you could visit the homepages of your favorite record labels (KRS, for example) and see what free samples they have available. Epitonic is also a good resource for lots of free and good music. I also just found another site similar to Webjay called SongBuddy (via SongBuddy Blogdigger Group) which offers similar song-sharing features.