Ask YC: What music do you listen to when hacking?
What music, if any, do you listen to when hacking? Do you find it helps you concentrate or is it just a distraction?
Found it here on YC, actually.
But that's only when I feel I need to be pulled along. Once I get into flow, I don't see or hear anything except what I'm doing. My music will end and I won't notice until 2 hours later when I come up for air.
In "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister are even more explicit: if programmers need to put on headphones to drown out ambient noise, they're using up the very creativity they're being paid so much for.
I assume you don't mean programming language? If that's what you did mean, where can I get music with lyrics in Python, Lisp, etc?
ASOT++ btw. I listen to it every week. You can d/l it on most torrent sites, which isn't even as illegal as d/ling other music. Its like taping the radio and giving it to your friend. And this radio doesn't have commercials. Plus trance style music lives on a different plane of business than the rest of the industry they way I see it - which is a whole different tangent I'll not go down.
These days I'll listen to MrsFudge Streaming Radio, which has the best music voting system I've seen: http://gurba.sytes.net
Alternately, there's Proton radio: http://www.protonradio.com/
Toward that end, here is some music I haven't seen mentioned here before. List of Demands, and Black Stacy, both by Saul Williams (see also http://niggytardust.com/, which many here may have heard of). He's on tour right now, if any want to see him live.
My hacking music preferences:
zenlinux's idea of a last.fm group for this is an excellent idea.
or maybe in the thrash genre
and another in the same sort of genre 'Gold Four' http://www.last.fm/music/Au4
It's a feature on Reddit, and being able to subscribe to something such as listings of books, music, etc. would be handy.
Then if someone wants to pose the question again they can refer to the initial posting and ask people to add their comments there.
Also, just go onto TPB or usenet and download some Beethoven or Wagner. It's 100% legal, no copyrights exist on them and even if they did they're so old it'd be void anyway. Even the BBC offered them up for free at some point, they were surprisingly good quality too.
I learnt this a long time ago when I was working doing reviews. When you spend 10 hours writing reviews, you need something to listen to or you're going to start shooting kids and spearing dogs for making the slightest noise.
Lately I'm liking Holy Fuck.
(Though I dug up some Hawkwind, too, for some odd reason.)
Proton: www.protonradio.com Frisky: http://www.cbs.nu/home/ CBS: www.cbs.nu/home/ Radiomagnetic: www.radiomagnetic.com
If I am in a noisy working environment, then I keep the music going pretty much constantly, to block out extraneous noise. In general, the more quiet and peaceful my environment is, the less music I listen to while working.
iTunes Radio: Electronic->AH.FM, Ambient->Drone Zone on SomaFM
All that screaming behaves almost like white noise for me :-P
I once downloaded a recording of heavy rain from a nature site. I found that sound very very conducive to coding :)
IDM or drum n bass for occasions where hardcore coding is needed.
stations i created "rabbit in the moon" "hacker radio" "garbage" "fluke"
any other cool strings to create stations off of?