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WHAT’S HAPPENING
Movies: Opening Friday, “Astro Boy” (PG), “Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant” (PG-13), “Amelia” (PG); Wednesday, “Michael Jackson: This Is It”; Nov. 20, “New Moon.”
New on DVD: Arrived Tuesday, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” (PG-13).
Concerts: Friday, Xtreme Wheels, 6:30 p. m., Attack Attack! plus Set My Friends on Fire, Miss May, Our Last Night and Color Morale.
Saturday, Xtreme Wheels, 6:30 p. m., Never Shout Never plus Meg and Dia, Now Now Every Children, Carter Hulsey.
Monday, Xtreme Wheels, 5:30 p. m., Be Shred or Be Dead Tour with Sea of Treachery, Suffokate, Blindwitness, We Are the End, Calamity in the Skies and We Stand as One.
On TV:Nickelodeon will have a Halloween marathon of hits beginning Friday. Shriek Week kicks off at 8 p. m. Friday with a Halloween premiere of “The Troop.”
LOOKING FOR A GOOD READ?
The finalists for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature have been announced. They are: “Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith” by Deborah Heiligman; “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” by Phillip Hoose; “Stitches,” a graphic novel by David Small; “Lips Touch: Three Times” by Laini Taylor; and “Jumped” by Rita Williams-Garcia.
WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: 8tracks
While automated music recommendation engines that power Web services such as Pandora (www.pandora.com) and the Genius feature in the iTunes Store are all the rage, there’s something to be said for playlists picked out the old-fashioned way by humans. That’s the thinking behind the music-sharing
Web service 8tracks (www.8tracks.com).
8tracks allows users to create personalized playlists of their favorite tunes. Each playlist must be at least 30 minutes long, about eight songs, hence the service’s name. You can upload DRMfree tunes from your own collection or search for songs on 8tracks’ database. You can then name your mix, even upload a picture that represents it, and send a link to share your list with your friends on Facebook or Twitter or get the code to embed a music player on any other Web page.
If 8tracks’ model sounds familiar it’s because it is very similar to the one that fueled Muxtape (www.muxtape.com), a music-sharing site that allowed users to share custom playlists before it was shut down by the RIAA in August 2008. (Muxtape has since been reborn as “a platform for bands”).
For 8tracks to avoid the fate of Muxtape, it has implemented a series of restrictions to keep it from drawing the RIAA’s ire. Some of these restrictions include limiting the number of songs from the same artist or album to two, and scrambling the order of your mix the second time a person plays it. If you used 8tracks’ database to add songs to your playlist, you can only listen to the first 30 seconds of those songs when you play the mix back (other listeners will hear the full songs).
The restrictions are a bit of an annoyance, but necessary if 8tracks is to continue to operate.
8tracks members can follow other users and comment on their mixes. Some users build mixes around a theme such as studying or exercising. Despite its limitations, 8tracks is a fun way to discover new music. – Eric Goodwin, McClatchy-Tribune News Service
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I flew a plane. I actually felt less afraid flying the plane than being a passenger.”
– Rachel Bilson, on overcoming phobias, in People magazine.
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