I was using Seeqpod for a long time and loved it. THen it went away and that made me sad. Nothing was as good that I saw out there.

Then my friend sent me a link to Grooveshark. At first I was a bit cautious thinking this would never be as good as Seeqpod. Wrong. Its awesome. So using McSearcher one day I was thinking, man would it be awesome if we could search Grooveshark at the same time. Unfortunately, Grooveshark doesnt allow that, but Tinysong, which is a Grooveshark service, does.

Rock on, we put it into McSearcher yesterday. So now people can customize and use Google and search for music in the same place. I dont know but I use it and think its pretty sweet. Feedback?

“2ND CIRCUIT: INTERNET RADIO WEBSITE THAT STREAMS CUSTOMIZED STATIONS NOT REQUIRED TO PAY ROYALTIES TO INDIVIDUAL COPYRIGHT HOLDERS; STATUTORY LICENSE FEE IS SUFFICIENT”
by Jim Singer, 8/26/09, IP Spotlight

LAUNCHcast is a service that offers customizable radio stations. Songs and are to be rated and based on those ratings, suggestions are randomly made to the user in a station form. Individual songs can not be searched or replayed. The DMCA mandates that an interactive audio service (defined as one that allows a public user to be transmitted a program made specifically for them or an individual song they have searched) must pay individual licensing fees to each individual copyright holder, while LAUNCHcast only payed general fees.

Arista Records and other copyright holders filed suit insisting that Launch Media, Inc. should be paying royalties to the individual holders. In the first case defining the use of online radio, the judges did not find the service to be interactive by definition. They ruled that a user can not predict or control the service in any way other than skipping a song they did not want to hear. Because of this, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals let LAUNCHcast off the hook for paying a blanket license fee for the music they were providing.

Response

As discussed in class, it is a sticky situation when an online search/radio station begins to connect users to the music of copyright holders.

In the instance I wrote about last week with SeeqPod, they lost because their search engine had a music player that would play specifically what was searched for and they did not pay individual fees to all those holders. What makes this service different is the fact that the user can not hear exactly what they want to hear (they can’t even rewind), but rather are suggested unpredictable artists and songs.

Because LAUNCHcast is not providing users with exactly what they want to hear, they are not giving them an alternative to purchasing music from these artists. More realistically they are probably allowing their users to hear many artists and bands that they would not have otherwise heard. It seems as though individual copyright holders would want such a marketing tool available, getting their music heard to strangers. The bummer is that they fail to understand the investment in allowing a few free listens that could ultimately result in more record and ticket sales. Instead they want money in their pocket for every play clicked and are willing to use the DMCA to make it happen.

It is my pleasure to introduce the newest member of the “seek” family: Webseek. Webseek does the same thing that jaseeq did but in a different way and from a different place. Actually, the place is completely variable. Webseek uses plugins instead of one site hard coded into the application. I took the guts out of jaseeq and stuffed it with a plugin engine. The results so far have been promising. There have been some interface changes, like the removal of the playlist and related menu items. I am calling this an early beta, so don’t expect perfection. I’ll soon follow up with a guide to writing plugins, so maybe there can be some contributions in that area. If not, I’ll take suggestions for new plugins. I wrote two plugins for this version: playlist.com and hypem.com. By default, Hype Machine is disabled. You can enable it from the Plugins option under the Edit menu.
If you use this version of Webseek, consider yourself a tester and feel free to post any bugs/glitches. Also, if you do post a bug, please state what plugin is being used along with what OS you’re using. I’ve tested with Windows XP and Ubuntu Jaunty, so I can’t say how a Mac will perform.

Here it is: Webseek<Beta>

click here for original article

A new internet startup SeeqPod was a music search engine that would allow people to search for a song, would find it online, and play it to them on their website. They filed bankruptcy after Warner and EMI came after them, wanting $150k for each infringing play of their music. They claim that they are infringing because of public performance, and are claiming they are well aware that they are linking to a lot of private property.

The claim of the search engines is that the DMCA provides a safe haven for information location tools and that they shouldn’t be responsible for everything that they provide links to.

It is then argued by the corporations that because they have a music player that plays such searched music, they are publicly performing the protected works. They say that they are not trying to drive companies out of business, they just want them to respect the law.

Why they chose to file bankruptcy has not been released, but they did scare Warner by making threats of spreading their technology so that many more like them can pop up, too many for such corporations to take to court one by one.

Response

Sadly the corporations seem to have a valid argument as to why this idea is different than that of a Google search engine. Google links people to other sites, but once you click that link Google has nothing more to do with you. Having a music player that plays these linked but protected works seems to perhaps be making the argument of public performance a worthy one.

As mentioned in class and in the books, many are arguing that every media should be payed for individually. If you have a song on your iPod, computer, and on a compact disc, you better have paid for that song three times. To be able to access that song online without having paid a cent, it seems like this search engine is strongly resisting those opinions. Even if the linked songs aren’t on their servers, they are providing a service in which they should understand will be used in infringement significantly more than not.

While having these services multiply like rabbits seems like a good way to fight the power, it probably wouldn’t work. Such a service isn’t used by many online until it gains viral publicity, and once it does is when it’s going to gain the attention of the industry, is going to be taken toward legal action, and is probably going to be removed. These sites probably don’t stand a chance unless they link to other sites that illegally host the music and players, or they pay licensing fees for all that they link to. Yeah… right…

Reports over the last few days have said that Microsoft plan to enter the online music market with a new service to rival the likes of Spotify, Last.fm and Grooveshark.

According to the stories, the engine would be built on Seeqpod, which is interesting as of this morning, the website kept 404ing.

There’s many rivals for Microsoft to enter into battle with, but they’ve identified a growing market, as music streaming seems to be increasingly accepted within the music industry.

However, I don’t see Microsoft being able to compete with Spotify in Europe. Spotify is established as the fresh face of Internet music streaming and as such, I think their way in will be the US, where Spotify is still only available to those with invites.

Microsoft will have a much greater capacity to cope with the vast amounts of traffic that heads their way than the Swedish start up, and as such, can corner that side of the market. In Europe though, i think the story will be different as Spotify is very highly regarded by industry commentators.

The other area Microsoft can dominate is money. Spotify is looking for investment and it is yet to be proven whether the freemium model works. MS on the other hand can spread their pockets to cover initial losses and make a greater amount of money through advertising.

I forsee that the Microsoft offering will be a bumbling paid for product which will not match that of it’s rivals, it seems to me as if they’ve seen a gravy train and are looking to jump on it – just look at Zune – so they don’t get left behind what could be a lucrative market as we head out of the recession.

seeqpod.com is down and has been for a while now. They are being sued and filed for bankruptcy. Since jaseeq uses seeqpod’s search engine it also is down. The likelihood that seeqpod.com will be back is extremely low at this point. I have been considering alternatives for a bit now. I’ll update the site if I come up with anything.

I hope you all enjoyed the software while it worked.

Update: There is a jaseeq alternative: Webseek. Get it from here

As I was working today, I had a browser window open to Pandora, as I often do on days that I work from home, and much to my dismay, there was an ad right smack between the Black Keys and TV on the Radio. Aghast, I tabbed over to make sure that the noise was coming from Pandora, and there in the stream was a hideous Disney logo.

A little while back, I recall having read that they were considering this model as a way to bump lagging revenues and thinking to myself, “That would be horrible.” Well, the day of reckoning is here, folks. I must decide whether to keep my vow of abandoning Pandora should she take on in-stream ads or whether the benefits of still relatively ad-free music outweigh hearing a Disney pitch every now and then.  Making this more difficult, SeeqPod has been out of commission for a couple weeks, significantly limiting those of us who simply want to listen (not download, copy, or own) to some music online.

While I know that every business must pay the bills and the investors, I hope that some genius out there will figure out a way to monetize ad-free music for the masses.  If you need me, I’ll be downloading some torrents…

Wired
Seeqpod CEO Kasian Franks confirmed to wired.com Monday that the embattled music search engine was talking to Microsoft about a sale of part of the company, and said other parts of its search engine, which corrals MP3s from around the web into a neat streaming interface, could be sold off to other parties. In a brief interview that came amid published reports that his company was on the verge of being sold to Microsoft, Franks said his company “has been in talks with Microsoft for the last year” about a deal involving “SeeqPod’s knowledge assets.” Other SeeqPod assets could be sold to another, as-yet-unnamed company. In a lengthy interview with wired.com last month, Franks said the deal with a company he described only as a major new media company was all-but finalized, awaiting little more than the transfer of funds. Judging from the inclusion of this link on its site, SeeqPod clearly wants this Microsoft deal to go through — and wants the world to know all about it.

Da qualche giorno controllo SeeqPod per vedere se risorgerà e in che veste. Finora il messaggio in homepage era un generico “stiamo facendo delle modifiche, abbiate pazienza” e di seguito un annuncio sponsor.

Ma oggi, la novità:

While we’re cocooned for metamorphosis…

E la parola “metamorphosis” linka a search.microsoft.com. Questo mi fa pensare che MS abbia acquistato la compagnia e l’algoritmo. La parola stessa “metamorphosis” non è altro che una conferma. Dubito che SeeqPod torni quello di prima, visto il probabile acquirente.

Sarà quel che sarà, ma dubito fortemente che sarà gratis

UPDATE: a quanto apprendo da Tech Crunch, l’affare non è (ancora) fatto. C’è comunque una trattativa in corso, e Microsoft vuole comunque “toccare”  Seeqpod, sia pure con “un’asta di tre metri”

Long plagued by legal challenges from major record labels, bankrupt MP3 search engine SeeqPod has been on the brink of extinction for months. But CEO Kasian Franks recently told Wired.com that SeeqPod was in final acquisition talks with a major media company, and that its savior would be able to confer legitimacy on the company by negotiating agreements with the labels that he himself could not. Now, the company appears to be tipping its hand, suggesting that Microsoft (s msft) is the buyer.

SeeqPod’s home page, which has been down more often than not over the past few weeks, now features a pair of links suggesting that the service is cocooned for rebirth. One of the links points to search.microsoft.com -– not necessarily something I’d free-associate with metamorphosis. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant fits Franks’ description of a potential suitor, but was not among the three he named in the Wired interview — Apple (s aapl), Google (s goog) and Live Nation (s lyv). I’ve left a message with SeeqPod seeking comment, and will update as I gather more information.

Based in Emeryville, Calif., 4-year-old SeeqPod has so far raised at least $5 million from founders and investors. Its search engine, derived from technology initially developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, allowed users to find songs wherever they were lying around on the web, then listen to streams and create playlists. But the startup has run afoul of major record labels, and was sued by both Warner Music Group and EMI Music.

If you’re anything like me, you like to download your music an album at a time, if not entire discographies at a time (in FLAC format of course!). But, as artists increasingly embrace the internet, there are starting to be more and more individual tracks that are released only online, including remixes, etc. One way I can listen to this music is through youtube. Anything and everything seems to be on youtube these days. But what if I want to take it with me on my [iPod/Zune/other PMP]? Enter Seeqpod!

Seeqpod is a service that allows you to look up any music and listen to it online. This is achieved because seeqpod looks for any and every stray .mp3 file on the internet. So great, I can listen to it online. No different than youtube, just no cheesy placeholder image. What’s the big deal?

Well, there’s a way to get direct access to these MP3 files and download them to your computer, let me show you how:

1. Go to http://www.seeqpod.com/mobile/iphone.php#_home
2. Click search and type in what you’re looking for
3. Click the search result that most matches what you’re looking for
4. Click File>Save Page as
5. Choose a destination for the ‘file’
6. Click save

And there you have it, you’ve got the song you were looking for!

NOTE: This only works in Firefox and Opera!

Good luck, please comment and let me know how it works out!

Seeqpod.com is fast becoming one of our favorite web tools to find new music from around the web and play it right away! The best part of all, is that Seeqpod allows you to create and save playlists so you can come back and listen to your music whenever you want! (As long as you sign in for a free account ofcourse.)  It also includes features to make discovering new music a breeze allowing you to share playlists and even embed it into your own blog or web space.  Seeqpod does not host any music itself and makes it a point to observe the strict standards placed upon all of us by the music industry so it’s safe and a pleasure to use.  Similar to BeeMp3,  Seeqpod’s features and design truly makes it stand out from the crowd by giving you good control of the tracks you find and save. Sign up for a free account without any worries and start jamming out! We definitely have!

Seeqpod.com – Playable Search

SeeqPod, the popular “playable media” search service that many music sites use as the foundation for their core offering, has filed a petition for Chapter 11 yesterday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of the Northern District of California.

The company, which has raised $7 million in venture capital to date from undisclosed investors, is evidently doing this out of fear about the outcome of the multibillion dollar lawsuits it was slapped with by music labels like Warner Music, Capitol Records and EMI.

We reported earlier that SeeqPod has become quite the target of the music industry, which went so far as going after developers who merely leveraged the SeeqPod API. They silenced Songbeat and forced Streamzy to put itself up for sale on eBay as a result.

continue reading from source

For those of you who used to use the popular media search engine Singingfish.com, I found a good alternative:   Seeqpod.com.  It allows you to search for and index; text documents, audio files, video files (including YouTube.com videos), and other media files from your browser through a simple flash applet.  Now to find a substitute for Pandora Radio…

EDIT:  It looks like Seeqpod is down for the time being so I’ve been using Mixpod.com instead.

I’m so excited about the new SFA album that I threw together a little playlist on Seeqpod. All the tracks are from the previous records they’ve put out prior to DD/LY. Even without lots of the tracks I would have liked to put on there it still rules –  Enjoy! [Click the pic]

This is a thing that seriously bugged me. I downloaded MuSeek from Cydia, only to find out that PwnPlayer would be the only player to really open it up. I instantly opened up the Terminal, and started scouring the FileSystem for any sort of configuration scripts so I could simply point Dtunes to find my Mewseek downloads. I failed to find anything. Next I repeated the process for Mewseek, and then finally tried to find something useful with PwnPlayers’ configurations, but, nothing.

Basically, you can do this in two different ways. I’ll describe both, the easiest way first.

1. Open up Cydia
2. Search for MobileFinder, and download it.
3. Open up MobileFinder and navigate to /private/var/mobile/
4. Highlight the “Downloads Folder”
5. Press “File”
6. Press “Move”
7. Now navigate to /private/var/mobile/Media/Music
8. Press “Move”

Now, if you open up Pwnplayer, and go to the “Filesystem” tab, you should see the folder called Museek Downloads, and directly under it, see a folder called Downloads. You can now open up either folder and listen to all your tracks.

Continue reading below if you want to see the more advanced, but faster, version of doing this.

This is assuming you have downloaded MobileTerminal and can access a terminal on your Ipod.

1. Open the terminal
2. Type mv /private/var/mobile/Library/Downloads /private/var/mobile/Media/Music
3. That’s it

This is even faster if you are SSHing into your Ipod from your computer and can simply type these commands on a normal keyboard via your PC.  This is another perfect example of why the command line is so useful!

#Steps Graphical – 8

#Steps Term – 2

Image via Wikipedia

The Streets (via last.fm)

On the one hand Mike Skinner of The Streets twitters an offer of free gig tickets for people that remix a Donk version of his music.  Note, he’s inviting people to violate copyright.

Then you have EMI suing Seeqpod and Favtape services that are merely linking to music, not violating any copyright..

The problem isn’t just happening in the music industry in the US, it’s with video in Europe and this certainly wont be the last time a content owner sues.

Artists and Publishers are clearly on two different paths of maximising incentives for engagement and giving fans reasons to buy new music.

The real question that everyone is rightly asking is what value is there to the artist in limiting their exposure in a medium where the link is king?

What value is there to the potential fan if I can’t find new music?

We all know this is pointless in the long run.  Links make stuff discoverable.  Simple.

If EMI really wanted to stop this they could.  With all of their approved publishers, they could mandate that all make their URLs/links are un-trackable.  For every single track, they could obfuscate the URLs automatically changing them every second.  Give each ‘approved’ publisher a one-way key to generate a hash of the URL, so only they know what the URL will be at a discreet point in time such as 08:34 on Tuesday 26th Feb 2009.  Every non-approved third party will not be able to determine the URL.

Even simpler still, why not just stop the offenders from spidering the web-sites?  They could easily mandate that the publishers block the traffic.

There are so many technical solutions, it is clear that EMI’s strategy is not to prevent linking from happening.

EMI loves the link, they know they need it, they know that without it they are dead on the web.  But, they see the link as a money making opportunity, to be used on their own terms.  It’s traditional content ’syndication’ without the need for a sales team, just IP lawyers.

If they win this case, and prove a point, what’s the next big ticket??   Google.  And everyone knows they pay content owners to stay out of trouble.

here’s a playlist i made for no particular reason at all, other than i’ve been using seeqpod to look up some interesting and somewhat random artists and songs. some are new, others are from the past and rather far afield. enjoy.

Here is the setlist for this week:
Today is The Day – Lincoln Brewster
Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble – Delirious?
Unfailing Love – Chris Tomlin
Come Thou Fount
My Soul Finds Rest – Scott Underwood
Because of Your Love – Paul Baloche

I think I’ve played three of the songs before so I have a little bit of homework to do tonight before practice tomorrow night.

So how do you guys prepare after being given a list of songs for the week?

I like to create the setlist in order on seeqpod (playable search website) or itunes.
Then I’ll listen to the songs while I’m at work so that I can get familiar with the sections, lead guitar melodies, dynamics, and effects.
I’ll do a search on youtube so that I can see the live version of the song by the artist or the way it has been played by other churches.

Here is an adventurous take on a classic song. You might even consider it a mash-up!
Rush vs Baloche

I’ll print out the charts before I go to weekly practice but I just play the songs by ear before practice.
I am surprised at the amount of charts with the wrong chords out there so I don’t depend on the chart other than being a place where I can write some notes during practice.
If there are effects beyond delay, I’ll try to figure out the settings as best as I can before practice.
I’m trying not to be the guy who plays the same thing 20 times in everyone’s IEM while tweaking my setings ever so slightly
For most solos, I will improv something but if it’s a Lincoln Brewster song, I try to learn the solo note-for-note. I used Audacity to slow down the solo in Today is the Day which helped tremendously.

Last year, I served at a church which got a new worship pastor (big Lincoln Brewster fan) and suddenly we’re playing Everlasting God WITH the solo in practice. We never played it with a solo before and after playing something that sounded like a Guitar Hero mess-up (and not on purpose like David Crowder!), I decided to learn it note-for-note the night before playing. For the record, I don’t think it’s a great solo like Today is the Day but, based on people’s comments to me that week, there is something in the solo that people tap into during worship.

Here is a note that I got from the exec pastor the following week:
i really enjoyed the band, overall, and a particular highlight was your riff in the middle of that one song. and here’s why: on one hand, it simply was terrific music and musicianship and added a depth of energy to the song. but more importantly, it drew me into a deeper place of worship. it was cool and i wanted you to know your contributions are leading people to God’s throne. thank you.

Most of the time, I feel like I am just doing my little part serving on the team but this time I was surprised that 20 minutes of practice could have that effect. Cool.

But you don’t need solos much less electric guitar to have that same effect.
This last Sunday, my family went to PCC night service and the whole thing just blew me away.
And the worship team had no electric guitar! Unheard of in modern times!
They had lead vocals/piano, acoustic guitar/bgv, bass, and drums.
and God doing everything else.