While RFW’s post about Radio for the Deaf isn’t to be taken seriously, it reminded me to discuss the topic. I’ve never pushed for radio captioning. Sure, it’d be cool to follow along with the songs and practice my hearing — but really — most of the time I am the driver not the passenger. Not a good idea to read and drive.
How often do people listen to the radio at home with MP3 players? One thing I’d like to see is a greater use of technology that gives you the title of the song and the group/singer. My car is too old to have this, but Paul’s car radio displays the song title and artist if the song contains the ID3 Tag. Radio data system isn’t it, but it has relevant information.
It’d be nice to know the title of a song I find myself enjoying. I rarely discover new songs since high school as I don’t follow music by watching VH-1 or MTV because I don’t have the luxury of repeatedly listening to a song until I learn the lyrics. I have to have the lyrics in front of me while playing the song — that means no multitasking.
Many applications have popped up that allow you to enter music or books you like and the tool suggests others based on your entries (see below for a list of such sites). The more you do, the more accurate the tool gets. Unfortunately, it’s not high on my priority list, so I don’t have the luxury of discovering music through this means.
The best solution is to listen to radio and identify a song I like, but I don’t know what song it is without being able to hear the words or identify the title.
The newest song I’ve added is from CSI, the TV show. It appears at the start of the episode where Nick drives his truck and sings along with a song playing on the radio: Bob Neuwirth’s Lucky, Too from Look Up. That’s the first and only song I’ve bought from iTunes.
iTunes doesn’t have many from the musical genre and I had trouble figuring out which of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” would be the version I’d want. I’m rebelling from iTunes and Apple anyway because of their lack of support for captions.
Some of these let you track your favorite bands and access your music from any computer.
AOL Music
http://music.aol.com/
Audiri
http://www.audiri.com/
BandNews
http://bandnews.org/
HypeMachine
http://hype.non-standard.net/
Last.fm
http://www.last.fm/
liveplasma
http://liveplasma.com/
Lyrics Search Engine
http://lyrics.astraweb.com/
Mercora
http://mercora.com/
Midomi
http://www.midomi.com/
MP3Tunes
http://mp3tunes.com/
Musicovery
http://www.musicovery.com/
MusicMobs
http://musicmobs.com/
MyStrands
http://www.musicstrands.com/
Pandora
http://pandora.com/
Plurn
http://plurn.com/
UpTo11
http://upto11.net/
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One of the things I’ve discovered about an iPod is that you can stuff the lyrics into the notes part. It’s not synchronized, but while you are playing the song, you can tab ahead and have the lyrics there…very handy.
I know what you mean by no multitasking 🙂 I haven’t learned too many new songs since graduating from school…no time!
But seriously, that’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed the iPod because it tells me what is playing. I don’t use iTunes with it, there are free applications available that work with it, and I just scan in my own CD collection for music and avoid the whole tiresome DRM crap.
Cheers,
BEG
Thank you! I’ll look into the notes thing. Since it’s my own music — I usually can figure out what’s playing.
I gather radio stations will accommodate this ruling by offering text transcripts through their web sites for hoh listeners. Captioning radio, now that’s a thought. Wouldn’t work during driving thou. 😉
Radio is not used for ONLY music.
Radio is THE way emergency information is broadcast here in Hawaii. I am ALL FOR radio captioning, and would be the first to jump at the opportunity to purchase a device that would broadcast emergency information.