Happy Birthday to me (technically now yesterday). Parents took me out to eat. Yum. (And though they're late buying me a present, they said they'd get around to it one of these days.) Hard to believe another year has already gone by.

Now, everybody go out and try this. iRate. It's a collaborative music filtering/downloading program. Though obviously very a very young project at the alpha stage, it is sweet!

To quote the project's page:

iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free downloads of their music.

Deep down, we all want to get away from the big evil RIAA, don't we? Though there are thousands of talented indie artists out there who would love nothing more than to have their music heard, sometimes, it can be difficult and time-consuming to find all the good music that's out there.

Now, this program makes it about as easy as one can get. Grab the tarball, run java -jar irate-client.jar, click the Download button, and it grabs tracks to play!

Some of them are sweet. Some of them suck. Click the button that corresponds to your reaction, and watch as the program picks more good ones on the next download cycle.

Excellent.

That said, the interface could use some refinement. I want a nice easy, "Click here to visit this artist's web site" button. But all in good time.

Music recommendation. Artist: CARV. Track: Slipbackinto. A nice solid metal groove.