Posted on October 24, 2006 at 4:47 PM in bests
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
Another excellent Lifehacker.com find. If you let it, earFeeder takes a look at the music on your computer and prepares a custom RSS feed for you with ticket announcements, pre-sales, news, and album releases. You can take that feed and add it to the RSS Reader of your choice. If that reader happened to be Reader.earthlink.net, I'd commend you on your discriminating taste in readers.
If you're worried about the privacy and security implications of letting them take a look at your music, earFeeder's privacy page makes them sound pretty trustworthy.
Each step is really well marked and easy to follow.
I think the service is worthy of a best because it's an extremely simple and straightforward process, offers some powerful ways to make changes to your feed later, and fills an obvious need for music (and particularly concert) lovers. You can do all sorts of customizations to create artist-related feeds for yourself at sites like Eventful.com, but for a quick and painless process that takes you from having a bunch of music on your computer to having an ongoing stream of information about that music, earFeeder is tough to beat.
One of the neatest things about the feed it creates is that they give you a link under each entry that takes you back to the feed customization page. You can even remove artists you don't like, right inside of your RSS Reader. I don't know if I have any other feeds in my sources list that let me change what content is in the feed on the fly.
If you don't mind giving one-time permission for a program to look at the music on your computer, give it a try and let me know what you think.
Comments
Glad you like earFeeder. Lots of people are scared to let the applet scan their machine. What do you think about an option to upload your iTunes music library XML file instead? For iTunes users, that should let them rest a bit easier, right? Cheers, David.
Posted by David Cohen | October 26, 2006 12:36 AM
Hi David. I think the option of uploading the XML file output from iTunes would be appealing. It removes the "What is this applet doing?" concern, and I think people who would have a problem with the scan wouldn't mind going to the trouble of exporting and uploading.
Posted by Gregg | October 26, 2006 10:36 AM
I like the uploading of the XML file much better and definitely think it would alleviate customer privacy concerns. As long as earFeeder clearly stated what they were doing and that no other personal information woudl be collected, consumers will allow it.
BK
Security PM
Posted by Ben Kaplan | October 26, 2006 11:45 AM
Sadly, this little service doesn't support Safari, although they promise they are working on it. Looking forward to it!
Posted by Sheri | October 26, 2006 1:18 PM
The iTunes XML scan worked flawlessly for me even though my iTunes library lives on an external volume. I do like the idea of uploading the XML. However, I often find that iTunes doesn't keep my XML up to date so it may be a good idea to guide the user in a new XML export. Also, a drag and drop interface would be great - help me locate my XML file on my system and then I can drag it to a hotspot on the webpage for upload.
Posted by Phil | October 26, 2006 1:51 PM