I'm not a musically talented person, but I usually like to have something playing in the background when I'm on the computer. My kind of music, of course. And I wear earphones at work so I don't disturb other people.

At home, I have my 'Jukebox' located conveniently in Stargazer (the 2nd HDD) so there's no problem. But I can't possibly load all my music unto the work laptop which I leave at the office, and 8hr/day & 5 days/week is a pretty long time to fill. So what's one to do to rid of the silent boredom and avoid playing the same tracks over and over?

Well, first of all, there's web radio. There's a couple web radio sites with seiyuu as personalities that I listen to, but my Japanese level isn't good enough to be able to write (in English) and listen (in Japanese) at the same time. Besides, seiyuu may speak perfectly clear Japanese when voicing over characters, they can speak really fast and mumble quite a bit outside recording sessions. As a result, I can only listen to web radio when I'm doing more routine work or data punching. And the radio programs that I listen to only get updated on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

Next there's Songza. As mentioned before in a previous post, Songza is pretty neat and friendly. The only things is, it usually grabs the source files from YouTube, so you sort of have to know what to search for. It's a great resource to hear some only-on-DVD live performances, though. My current Songza playlist includes a couple Mizuki Nana's songs from the 2006 and 2007 Animelo, a few tracks from the Sound Horizon Triumph live (especially love that duet by Yuuki & Revo), a few Vocaloid2 songs (more on those in another post), and a few Kageyama Hironobu live songs (e.g. Pegasus Fantasy in Portuguese), Kamen Rider Kabuto's OP, and three versions (piano, original Russian, and English by Ed's VA) of Brothers from Fullmetal Alchemist.

Today I found a new way of listening to music at work. From an unlikely source, too. Nico Nico Douga XD I'm very new to this and right now only listen to the Vocaloid songs, but the site is full of treasures. For example, I'd search for 'KAITO' and play the results one by one as BGM. I'm not sure what I did this afternoon, but it just automatically started jumping to a different Miku's video after finishing the current one. I believed I started with a Kaito + Miku one, and it just sort of went out of control afterwards. I'll have to find out how to do that. :D

I used to do last.fm while going online on foreign (i.e., not my Coordinator) computers and play 'my radio station.' However, I soon found out that my music taste was a bit too skewed and it quickly returned with a no more new track available message after a short while. I think the site's got a whole lot of music recently so I should have a better chance now, but I think it'll only play each track at most 3 times? Not gonna work for me if I just want to listen to music when not on my computer. Besides, I still doubt it'll have much selection for my taste...

Before this all, I used to do shoutcast and listen to the anime stations. The selection is usually pretty varied, but that represents another problem for me. I don't just listen to any anime song, so while I get to hear some nice tracks that I don't have, it's relatively easy to encounter music styles and artists not quite my taste. And it can get annoying when people request a whole line up of songs like this. Lastly, the connection can be scratchy from time to time, and the sound quality may fluctuate sometime.

So at home, I have my ever expanding 'Jukebox' to rely on. At work, I alternate between the music I loaded, the web radio, and Songza, depending on what I'm doing and my mood. I'll be adding Nico Nico to the mix from now on. Should be fun. XD