We have received a lot of questions about how salsa dancers can find and explore new salsa music for free. Here we provide you with a great tool for you to find new salsa music radio stations using your iPhone or iPod Touch that can help replace your current listening habits to one of a more Latin feel.
We also review a few applications on the iPhone that can help anyone identify salsa songs by singing part of the tune or putting the iPhone next to the sound source.
Hope you enjoy and it helps you out!
How to find free salsa music with an iPhone
It’s amazing the amount of intuitive applications that are available today for those fortunate enough to be tech-saavy and even moreso mac-saavy. Before using AOL Radio I used a website called live365.com. It has 10s of 1000s of radio stations of different genres, way more of each genre than AOL Radio offers. The only downfall is a 30 second commercial after every 5 or 6 songs. I guess there is a pay-version of it too, with more access and no commercials, but that’s not my style. Since I work at my computer most of the time, it’s great to have such a selection of (basically) commercial free latin radio. Great post. Keep up the good work Anthony and Julie!!!
Shazam, Midomi - both great apps to identify songs. Definitely recommend them. (and they’re faster over wifi)
As a quick tech aside - You can pop nearly all the podcasts on a new 3G iPhone - the quality of the recording really shows! This plus Youtube - a great new way to learn with a dance partner how to do a move. Here’s to hoping that the video function comes to the 1st gen and 3G iPhones, and Touches.
A useful tip - if you see a song, and want a quick reminder, hold the home button, and quickly squeeze the power button at the top. It’ll do a white flash, and there’ll be a picture in your picture roll. Or in Shazam, just add a bookmark / or pop the bookmark into a salsa tune folder.
Well, I’m glad people like my salsa + technology articles. Now if I could only get more people using twitter….
Great video Anthony. It is easy to understand and will get more people to integrate salsa music into their everyday lives. I wrote about it on my site, Ritmo Bello:
http://www.ritmobello.com/2008/07/23/salsa-dancing/great-video-on-how-to-find-free-salsa-music-with-an-iphone/
I also wish more salseros utilized Twitter!
Has anyone else tried Twinkle? Something along those lines - with the ability to track a salsa crowd of users you’ve signed up to would be great. Or a salsa/dance version - I’m sure that you could have a way to allow all iphone enabled/web app contacts to show their status for a dance that evening, and where they are. Some way of arranging it and shazam, instant salsa party!
Yes. To tell you a secret, when I was talking changing the forums to something like ‘facebook+twitter+microblogging’ - it would basically be a salsa version of Twinkle. I haven’t finished it, but when I do, I’ll ask for beta testers to help me out. Wanna be one of them?
http://twitter.com/addicted2salsa
@Tom - what is your twitter account?
Marvellous excuse to get one! Great to see that someone’s finally taken the step to stream an event - hopefully it went well, missed the stream due to other commitments.
Aye, sure, would like to beta test, and happy to give feedback. tomtubbsatyahoodotcom, tommyt on Twinkle, tomtubbs on Twitter.
I’ve tried to get in touch with the webmasters/owners of salsajive.co.uk, http://www.salsa-uk.com/ and http://www.uksalsa.com just to see if they’d make their back end accessible to an app that showed events/classes on a google map, but no reply. Seems like they’re missing a big opportunity.
For England/Britain at least, i’d say the above all had a chance, salsajive especially. If the data was in a database of the right kind, i’m sure you could turn it into a KML, or some such, and turn it into a salsa version of contacts, but accessible via a Google Map portal/interface.
The thing is, if the major sites are slow off the mark, they’ll lose out big style, as once someone has the app, the data sets (class times, dates of week, events, when, where, zip codes numbers etc) themselves are easily downloadable, or open to have a wiki style entry.
Definitely get some decent coverage from the salsa scene available.