elearning for music

Right from the start of my tinkerings with online learning for music, I realised that I was incredibly fortunate that my subject area was so ideal for the online environment, as media rich resources are what makes online learning in music so much better that paper.

For a while now, I’ve been investigating how to embed commercial, copyright music (preferably without getting into trouble). iTunes 30″ segments are useful, but when you hyperlink, iTunes opens. I came across Last FM recently, a site that allows 2 kinds of sharing beyond their own site - a playlist player and (for many of the individual songs) an embed code. Strangely, I only got this latter code to work in a web page and a wiki (not in a blog post or a moodle forum post), and then only after a bit of tinkering. I mailed Last FM to check if what I was doing was legal and I’ve not heard back. I’ve currently got a test page in my wiki.

Each segment is only 30″, but often for a learning activity (about the music’s features and content) this is all you need.

There are major copyright issues surrounding sharing commercial music online, so here’s a seeming paradox: why is commercial audio so closely protected when the video version of the audio is so often available to embed, in it’s entirety, at YouTube. The example I use on my wiki page is a song for which I did the string arrangement - Midnight, by Un-cut. Last FM lets me embed a 30″ segment, but YouTube lets me embed the whole thing.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 7:24 pm and is filed under elearning, music and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.