Music « Brian Junyor

20Dec/080

While in Santa Fe

Songs from Spirit by Sky Redhawk

I had the opportunity to peruse the fine shops of downtown Santa Fe on my recent visit to New Mexico. One experience in particular is worthy of a blog post -- my visit to the shop of Sky Redhawk, a Native American musician and owner of Native Sounds Music and Art Gallery.

Mr. Redhawk took up the Native American Flute about 10 years ago and has been making fine music with it ever since. He demoed one of the entry level flutes and I knew immediately that this was something that I was interested in learning more about. Having never had any affinity for playing a musical instrument, Sky showed me a couple of basic moves and I was sold. Sky also explained the difference between the Native American Flute and a traditional western flute...where the music comes from...it pours directly from you, and is both emotional and spiritual.

I've been playing around with it for a week now and I am still excited about it. I am definitely a beginner and am usually off key or out of breath, but I am learning - little by little.

If you are heading to Santa Fe, I highly recommend that you stop by Native Sounds and check it out. If you aren't, well why don't you call up the shop and order a couple of Sky Redhawk’s CDs, you won't be disappointed.

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27Apr/081

Sirius Internet Radio

I mentioned on Twitter that I was looking for a better way to stream music from Sirius. Even though I have a Stiletto, I find that it is more convenient to listen via the computer when I am in my home office. Sure I could listen to Pandora, last.fm, yahoo music, or a multitude of other streaming music services -- but, I am big fan of the Sirius music formats and have developed a familiarity with their rotation and DJs. I have Sirius radio in the car and at the office and I wanted to continue it into my home.

The standard interface provided by Sirius is web based and resides in a browser window. That might be fine for some, but I don't like having a tab or window open for some web app that really should be running in the background. It might be a personal prejudice, but I can't handle it. So I went off in search of something better. There are aren't many options out there, maybe because I am part of a small niche market.

Luckily, while searching the siriusbackstage.com forums, I found a nice little program that suits my needs very well. stream_On is a desktop streaming application for Sirius.

stream_On provides listeners with features that are not available through the Sirius online player, such as uninterrupted (all day) listening, song and artist alerts, full channel listings, instant artist biography retrieval, son info, and lyrics.

Screenshot of stream_On (preferred)

Screenshot of the Sirius web interface (yuck)

stream_On is a beta release and as such it has a few rough edges. If you are installing on Vista you will need to manually open the firewall to allow the program to access the internet. You will also need to download a third party app on the stream_On website if you want to minimize to the system tray instead of the task bar.

I have been using stream_On for several hours last night and this morning and am very happy with it. The author is also working on a version 2, but has stated not to expect it anytime soon.