As I’ve mentioned in previous posts (here, here and here), I am a big fan of Sonos. When they added standalone (no PC required) Rhapsody support a while back, I was pretty excited and Sonos converted me into a paying subscriber to Rhapsody.

Now they’ve added another great service with the release of version 2.2 of Sonos’ system software: Pandora. I’ve been a big fan of Pandora ever since it first launched and I think it is the one of the most interesting of the music-discovery services out there. By employing an army of musicologists who have tagged and categorized hundreds of thousands of songs with hundreds of attributes, they’ve created what I think it the most musical of the recommendation engines.

The fine folks at Sonos gave me early access to version 2.2 and I updated my system with the new software yesterday. I spent time this morning listening to three different artist-centric stations that I created on the fly: Alison Krauss, Steely Dan and St. Germain. I spent half an hour listening to each station and was consistently surprised and pleased by the quality of the songs that came up and I discovered some new music that I will definitely add to my collection.

Thanks for the early look, Sonos, and thanks for adding another great service to the platform!

Update: Pandora, I have a suggestion for you. It isn’t immediately obvious to me how I would create a URL to link to a particular Pandora station. I would have linked back to Pandora in this blog post for each of the example stations I gave, but instead had to link to the artists’ web sites since how one would do that isn’t apparent.

Technorati Tags: Music, Pandora, Rhapsody, Sonos

Last September, I gave a presentation at an event called The Startup Junkie Underground about my experiences as a co-founder of Excite, which I co-founded with five of my classmates from Stanford in 1993.

We’ve all gone on to do our own things since then. I became a VC in January 2000 when I joined Mobius Venture Capital and am now in the process of launching a new fund called Foundry Group with five of my colleagues from Mobius.

Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer went on to found JotSpot, and eventually recruited yet another former Excite founder, Ben Lutch. JotSpot was acquired by Google and now Joe and Graham and Ben are back in the search engine business again, but this time at the most significant technology company to emerge in a generation. Way to go, guys!

Anyway, I threw together a set of slides for the event, complete with some great pictures from the archives (yes, that’s me with the hair) so I thought I would make it available here as a PDF.

One thing I discovered during this process is it is difficult to find old news stories and stock data for a company that is now out of business, so the preso is long on story telling and short on fancy charts and graphs with historical stock data and the like. Any suggestions on where to find that kind of info would be much appreciated. And any of my former colleagues who have additional recollections or contributions are encouraged to contact me. I’ll update and expand the presentation as I get more material to integrate into it.

For fun, I’ll also try out the SlideShare widget so you can look at it right here:

Technorati Tags: Excite, History, search, startup

This is a somewhat arcane post, but I’m hoping that the astute readers of my blog might be able to connect me with someone who has expertise with Yamaha digital mixers and Aviom personal monitoring systems since I need to make some buying decisions in the near future and I’ve been unable to get all my pre-purchase questions answered.

I run a Pro Tools HD3 Accel system in my recording studio and currently use a Hearback system to allow musicians who are laying down tracks to adjust their own mixes. This works very well, save for the fact that the Hearback system is only eight tracks and is monophonic but for one stereo pair. I’m ready to move up to something a bit more powerful.

My fellow music geeks Jason and Carl and I have been going to NAMM for years, and a few years ago we discovered the Aviom personal mixing system, which offers 16 channels of fully controllable/customizable stereo mixes to every musician in a studio or live setting using one of the Aviom personal mixers. And they sound great.

When I moved from Portola Valley, CA to Boulder, CO last summer, I left behind a 600 square-foot fully soundproofed recording studio that had once been a detached two car garage. It was a great space and sonically isolated from the house. In our new house, my very understanding and supportive wife has turned over two rooms on the lower level to my musical activities to use as a recording studio. I’ve got one great control/mixing room and one “live” room for the band. The only problem is, despite my best efforts to soundproof the live room using Quiet Solution’s excellent and effective THX-certified QuietRock, the fact that it is directly under my three-year-old son’s bedroom means that the days of the late-night rehearsals with the amplifiers turned up to eleven are over.

So given this new reality, my next project is to create a “silent” jam room. OK, it won’t be totally silent; you will still hear vocals and the sound of drumsticks on trigger pads, but nothing else, and this will not be the least bit audible from my son’s room right above. In this era of multichannel digital audio networking technologies, personal monitoring systems, virtual modeling of physical instruments and analog electronics, personified by Aviom’s Personal Mixer, Roland’s incredible V-Drums and Line6 modeling amplifiers, it is possible for all electric instruments (keys, bass, drums, guitars, etc) to jack directly into a mixer and still produce realistic sounds without actually setting up an amplifier and putting a microphone on it.

So on music nights, my bandmates will simply walk in to the jam room, turn on their personal mixers, don their headphones and plug in their instruments. And we’ll be treated to a nearly silent jam session with fully engineered album-quality sound (assuming I am a good enough audio engineer).

Aviom has a card, the 16/o-Y1 A-Net Card, that plugs into Yamaha digital mixers, allowing Yamaha mixers to route audio into the Aviom personal monitor system. Yamaha’s digital mixers range in cost from $2k to well over $100k. I’m most interested in the mixers at the low end of that price range, since I’m saving my pennies for a Tesla Roadster. But I digress…

I’ve looked at the Aviom and Yamaha documentation and spoken with their tech support people, but I cannot determine yet exactly how the Aviom integrates with the mixers and whether I can easily send output from any track on either the 01V96V2 mixer or the LS9-16 mixer to any of the channels on the Aviom card.

Presumably I should be able to, but I am concerned that the number of mix busses on the mixers might limit how many tracks I could send to the personal monitor mixes. The 01V96V2 has 8 mix busses, while the LS9-16 has 16. If I can only send 8 tracks into the monitor system on the 01V96V2, it won’t suffice and I will need to buy the LS9-16, which is more expensive. Also, the 01V96V2 can act as a ProTools front-end and runs at 24 bit / 96 khz resolution as opposed to 24/48khz on the LS9-16. So I’d prefer to buy the 01V96V2, but I need to talk to someone who understands these mixers and understands how they integrate with the Aviom system before I pull the trigger.

If anyone out there can help me, I’d be much obliged.

Technorati Tags: Aviom, Digidesign, digital mixers, Hearback, NAMM, personal monitoring, proaudio, ProTools, QuietSolutions, Yamaha