FMnest: All music’s eggs in one basket
FMnest gives you quick access to music posted on the internet. Simply pick a band and FMnest will return a streamable playlist of mp3s from music blogs around the world, along with Youtube videos, band info, news, blogs and upcoming gigs. It’s an auto-generated hub of the latest music content, for any band you like. It also serves a list of suggested bands to listen to next, to help you discover new music.
Features
- Find music by almost any band
- Read news, bios, blog posts and gig information while you listen
- Watch Youtube playlists
- Discover new bands with intelligent recommendations
- Load your Top 50 bands from Last.fm
- Integrates with Extension.fm
- Works wherever there is Flash or HTML5 (even the iPad!)
FAQS
Why do songs take so long to load?
FMnest finds a lot dead MP3s, which would get pretty annoying after a while. So before returning them, it checks each one to make sure it works. It only needs to do this once, because it saves the results in a database. If a band is taking a while to load, it usually means you’re the first to view them.
What do these links do? 
This will take you to the blog that originally posted the MP3. Unfortunately it doesn’t take you to the exact blog post, but its still a good way to discover blogs that post music by bands you like.
Does multitasking work on iPhone and iPad?
It sure does. Even the remote control functions work (kind of). Read this post for more information.
This band isn’t working!
If they are an obscure band, it’s possible that no information was found. Otherwise, there may be an error and you should leave a comment so it can be fixed!
If you have any other questions or requests, this is the place to make your voice heard.
Known Issues
- Support on iPhone/iPad isn’t perfect. This is because its early days for HTML5. Improvements will continually be made as it become more stable
- Youtube videos are worst hit – No continuous playlists and many don’t work
- Recommended band lists aren’t showing on iPad. Weird. Fix coming ASAP!
Under The Hood
The Echo Nest is a music data platform for building intelligent music applications. They do all the hard work, gathering data from across the web and performing analysis, and make it really easy to tap into this information. It let’s you do everything from artist similarity to beat matching and content fetching, without the need for your own expensive servers. FMnest uses their MP3, News and Blog data feeds, as well their similarity engine.
Last.fm is the go-to resource for band bios and pictures, and this is exactly what FMnest uses it for. It also uses their listener data to generate the ‘Related’ and ‘Top’ band lists.
Upcoming Gigs on FMnest are powered by Bandsintown. There’s a few Gig Guide services floating around, but Bandsintown seems to be the best, both for comprehensiveness and ease-of-use.
Youtube make it really easy to generate video playlists around a certain band. The results aren’t perfect, but Youtube has videos for even the most obscure bands, making it invaluable.
Making music play in multiple-browsers is a nightmare. And now with the iPhone and iPad, which don’t support Flash, it’s even worse. But thankfully there is SoundManager, which handles it all in the background, so you don’t need to worry about it. It’s a really interesting project, but unfortunately it’s a tad complex.
With the heavy integration of Last.fm and Echonest, you’d be forgiven for thinking that that’s how FMnest got its name. But it was actually another FM domain that takes the honors. Extension.fm is an add-on for Google Chrome that turns the web into your music library. As you browse, it collects MP3s and organizes them in an iTunes styled interface. It’s really cool and extra effort was made to ensure that FMnest worked seamlessly with it.
The best thing about Extension.FM is that music keeps playing as you jump for one band to another or leave the page. It’s great!
This one is mostly for any developers out there. If you’re wondering how to make a site that pulls in data from multiple sources, without losing your sanity, check this out. It’s a universal PHP Library with built-in caching. Awesome.
The Future
If you have anything you would like to see (or something isn’t working), leave a comment!
Trackbacks & Pingbacks