I went on and completed all the fields but accidentaly hit the enter button while still typing in my email. Ofcourse the site bumped me back to the same screen and displayed a nice message in Red that i didn’t complete all required fields but to my astonishment the site language suddenly seemed to be Spanish? Since i don’t know a word spanish i just returned to the homepage, looked for a language button, found in at the very bottom of the site (D’oh!) and went back to successfully complete my registration.

Musicstrands is a nice webapplication, it allows you to share, manage and explore you favourite music genres, playlists and artists. The idea behind it is great. Although i think some features are a little overkill. Don’t get me wrong, the MyStrands plugin for iTunes and Mediaplayer is great, there aren’t many websites who offer their own desktop applications along with their website. As is the wishlist, the ability to form usergroups, arrange playlists, upload photo’s. You can even start your own blog on musicstrands. This is a feature more and more websites are integrating. StockExchange (www.sxc.hu) recently added blogs to their functionality too.

If you find an artist or song you like you get served direct links to online shops offering the album or single tracks. This is based on your location, overhere in Belgium for example, I got redirected to discoweb, amazon or Fnac. All of them shops who deliver CD’s at your door or offer them for paid download. The only drawback is that they redirected me to the spanish sites of discoweb and fnac, and unfortunatly i don’t speak spanish. Result: one less CD sold. But they are forgiven, it’s still a beta.

One feature i’m missing is the ability to suggest artists. There are millions of artists around the globe and personally i found that many of my favourite artists weren’t listed on the site: dEUS, Absynthe Minded, Admiral Freebee, Zornik, Soulwax, Two, etc to name a few. Next to that the majority of artists are american but i guess that’s something we europeans will have to get used to since almost all web2.0 applications focus on the american market. That brings us back to my favourite artists, from which the majority is based in europe. Musicstrands does have offices in Spain but the european musicscene still has a long way to go on Musicstrands.

I was excited to start using musicstrands at first, but after half a day of browsing, adding, recommending and creating playlists i couldn’t say i found new artists to my liking. An option that would allow us to suggest new artists or just add your own favourite artists would help alot, but maybe that’s something for Musicstrands when they get out of beta. Overall Musicstrands offers great functionality combined with loads of content on some musicgenre’s and some great way of recommending music (although i wonder how on heavens earth i got a recommendation for Prince??).

I’ve found a pretty decent solution in Google’s Picasa which offers good functionality for it’s price (it’s free) but it has it’s limitations too. The other option I had was purchasing a better tool like ACDSee 8 or ThumbsPlus 7 but they either are too bloathed or too simple.

But! Today Adobe released a first beta of Lightroom, their new photomanager. My guess Adobe is trying to get some marketshare from Aperture and they probably think, the sooner the better. The list of known bugs is extensive but it’s a beta so who’s complaining.

If you want to give it a try you’ll need to be using a Mac since they only released a demo for Mac OS X. Check Adobe’s website (or macromedia’s if you will) for the beta and give it a try.

There even are some first looks and reviews popping up here and there, one of them can be found at http://www.luminous-landscape.com and another one at http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/1109600/

Photoshop TV has a nice review on Lightroom in issue 12 of their videocast, just skip past Scott Kelby’s and Dave Cross’ boring jokes and take a look at how Lightroom works. It really looks damn nice!