Welcome to a narrowcaster's dream

November 19, 2003 9:13 PM

But I've never heard of any of these artists... Say hello to iRATE radio. The premise is simple: mp3's collected from various free sites are collected and indexed on a common server. You, through your spiffy iRATE client, are fed mp3's, which you then rate. Over time, your musical tastes are matched against others, and you are then fed mp3's which you will like, ostensibly. [...via Bifurnicated Reinvents]
posted by jazzkat11 (14 comments total)

I've been using iRATE for a few months, and have found a lot of good music through it. Some of the music you get through iRATE isn't so great, but a lot of it is first rate.
posted by peeping_Thomist at 9:54 PM on November 19, 2003

Hey, thanks jazzkat - this is spiffing!

As the Yahoo article linked to on the site says: "The problem is that most of the music (on the Internet) is, frankly, awful. Unlike bands signed to record labels, there are few filtering mechanisms to screen the good from the bad."

At least this will mean a first layer of filtering - I believe, optimistically perhaps, that most interesting music eventually surfaces somehow.

Is this Bifurnicated Reinvents you speak of perchance related to the legendary Fluorinated Rivers? ;)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 10:03 PM on November 19, 2003

I've been using irate for about a month and enjoying it too. It's kind of a pain to register full listens of stuff you don't like so you can get new stuff, but otherwise it's a great idea and execution.

There's a great story about irate (this is how I first heard about it) on kuro5hin here, summing up what this means for finding new music and free music in general.
posted by mathowie at 11:22 PM on November 19, 2003

I played a bit with iRate after reading the k5 article a while ago, and while I never had the patience to filter enough songs till it started regularly bringing me things I liked (Perhaps because my tastes are so finicky and scatterbrained) i did manage to spend a pretty hilarious afternoon filtering through the first layer of crap. As I think one of the comments on k5 said, I could've made a great mix cd out of just those.
posted by atom128 at 11:52 PM on November 19, 2003

Hehe.. I think thats the popular problem with it - I've been using it for a number of months now, this post reminded me of it ^_^

Some of the stuff is.. bizarre.. But some stuff is great, mad props for it.
posted by Mossy at 11:58 PM on November 19, 2003

some kind of genre filtering for it would have been nice; as it stands, I'm not sure I have the time or the patience to filter it until all it sends me is electronic music and jazz/blues.
posted by juv3nal at 3:30 AM on November 20, 2003

LastFM is similar. Been enjoying that for a few weeks as well.
posted by yoga at 4:06 AM on November 20, 2003

I'm liking LastFM a lot more than I liked iRate, which seemed so terribly, terribly slow. I'll give it another try after the MeFi rush, but I'm not holding my breath.
posted by Jairus at 8:15 AM on November 20, 2003

Worst.
Use of.
"i" Prefix.
Ever.
posted by wendell at 8:40 AM on November 20, 2003

this sounds really similar to yahoo's launch cast - only you get a whole lot crappier of a selection without the ads.
posted by rhapsodie at 10:57 AM on November 20, 2003

It is like launchcast, but all the music is somewhat free of RIAA stuff.
posted by mathowie at 11:39 AM on November 20, 2003

Yes, there is a certain amount of filtering involved - though after a certain amount of legwork, I'm now receiving ones I enjoy, songs I would never have known how or where to search for.

Plus, my conscience is clear knowing these are 'free-ware' songs.

I just wish the OSX client was a little more robust.

Is this Bifurnicated Reinvents you speak of perchance related to the legendary Fluorinated Rivers?

Yes! and its sister site, Furniced Bivents. :]
posted by jazzkat11 at 11:57 AM on November 20, 2003

Does anyone know of a service like these that operates over port 80. I'd love to get something like this for my windowless cube but the corp firewall only lets 80 thru.
posted by Mitheral at 12:06 PM on November 20, 2003

I love the idea behind this. About 300 times more subversive than napster ever was. Does VNC work over port 80? You could control a machine running Irate and then move the songs to a streaming server or something.
posted by mecran01 at 6:07 PM on November 24, 2003