I have talked a lot about music lately, and everyone seems to talk about music everywhere. Everyone knows of, or at least has heard of Pandora, a service that lets you create your own radio station surrounding a particular artist, and then the site recommends other artists that are similar in style and genre. You can favorite songs that you like, and ban artists and songs that you don't like. As you ad and favorite more content, Pandora begins to understand your music preferences based on given criteria. Other services offer similar content, but Pandora is the most popular out of all of them.
I myself like many other visually impaired people have found issues with Pandora because of its tendency to use flash a lot. Flash is a way to display content on a web page in a dynamic fashion. As a result, I myself, like other blind and visually impaired individuals, use Last FM, a competetor that offers to build personal radio stations like Pandora, along with the ability to search there music catalog by category, also known as searching by tag. I have received feedback that Pandora is accessible on mobile devices with the help of a screen reader, and both Pandora and Last FM are constantly adding new features. If you love Pandora, I would invite you to also check out Last Fm, where you can find links on artists' pages to music videos, concert information, and biographys to better get to know your favorite bands.
You can imagine these services as music search engines of course, more like recommendation engines that try to get to know you. Now you won't have to say "I wish they could understand my taste in music.", anymore ever again. If you know of any other streaming online radio services like Pandora, please let me know in the comments to share with others.
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Music. Show all posts
Friday, November 7, 2014
Video Game Music
Every one loves music! Now fans of video games and the music contained within video games now have a resource to listen to and download there favorite tracks. If you go to www.vgmusic.com, you can find a variety of midi tracks of music from several platforms of games. Other sites are available, but they range in accessibility for the visually impaired, as well as general functionality and use. I myself can't get over the amazing style of the classic Final Fantasy music, and I always find more tracks to go back to from other games.
This is an amazing opportunity for the visually impaired to interact with a new form of music to listen to, and it's a nice break from mainstream music. It is not a leap to assume that blind and visually impaired people know of video games, they all have family members, friends, and class mates that have or currently play video games. Since sighted people talk about them, tv and the internet advertise them, and there popularity is always growing, it would be excellent if more visually impaired people got involved in this increasingly expanding aspect of pop culture. As a blind person myself, I have always been attracted to various forms of sound, and every visually impaired person I know has great love to audio and what music has to offer to the ears. So it is reasonable that blind people, like sighted people, will appreciate a new genre of music to listen to.
Vgmusic, the largest provider of free video game music to listen to and download, has a fully accessible site, and different consoles of video games to choose from. A search feature also allows you to narrow down your search even more, although having large tables to scan through in order to find a particular track to listen to can be tedious at times. With that said, I still highly recommend it as a way to opening your mind to a different category of pleasing music. Please follow and comment to let me know how you feel about this form of entertainment.
This is an amazing opportunity for the visually impaired to interact with a new form of music to listen to, and it's a nice break from mainstream music. It is not a leap to assume that blind and visually impaired people know of video games, they all have family members, friends, and class mates that have or currently play video games. Since sighted people talk about them, tv and the internet advertise them, and there popularity is always growing, it would be excellent if more visually impaired people got involved in this increasingly expanding aspect of pop culture. As a blind person myself, I have always been attracted to various forms of sound, and every visually impaired person I know has great love to audio and what music has to offer to the ears. So it is reasonable that blind people, like sighted people, will appreciate a new genre of music to listen to.
Vgmusic, the largest provider of free video game music to listen to and download, has a fully accessible site, and different consoles of video games to choose from. A search feature also allows you to narrow down your search even more, although having large tables to scan through in order to find a particular track to listen to can be tedious at times. With that said, I still highly recommend it as a way to opening your mind to a different category of pleasing music. Please follow and comment to let me know how you feel about this form of entertainment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)