Dec 17
I thought really quick this morning that I would like to play a little Christmas music, something nice. Where to get some in a hurry? Well, of course, I went to Magnatune.
Really, I don’t mention these guys enough, not here or on the show. As their motto implies, they are _not evil_. They are DRM free, they carry a FANTASTIC selection of music of all tastes and interests. You pay REASONABLE prices that you decide, and Magnatune actually gets money back to the artists too, much unlike the big music industry giants.
Do yourself and some really talented musicians a favor and check out Magnatune today. You can also arrange Magnatune gift cards, and , of course, listen for FREE to their ENTIRE collection!
Nov 18
How would you like to pay 4 cents a piece for your music? Well, the price was definitely right for me. I stopped at BestBuy and bought a SlotRadio card to use with my Sansa Fuse.
Slide this little card in your Sansa Fuse and you get access to 1000 songs over a variety of genres. It works a lot like radio in that you cannot really choose what songs are going to play next, however, you can switch the genre channels and skip songs.
So far I am really digging this. The audio is encoded at a high quality and the actual songs are all popular (no bad B sides). For 4 cents a song, you just can’t beat this. It would be nice if the format was a bit more portable and I could get the songs somewhere other than my Sansa Fuse, but really, that is what I listen to most of my music on now anyway 
While I was picking up my SlotRadio card I did also notice a few Slot Music cards as well. These are the pretty much the same thing as the slot radio cards but filled with one album. The price is about the same as the regular album and, word has it, this music is slightly more portable as an unencumbered mp3 that you can move from device to device. I will have to put one of these on my hot list of things to get and see for myself. I would have grabbed one already but the only albums available at the time in person were not to my musical taste. Ordering online seems to have quite a few more choices though.
Sep 15
Kplaylist
Some of you might remember that I used to run GnuMP3d as my home music server of choice. While this is still a great choice, after my recent new server install, I had an interesting choice to make.
The newest versions of GnuMP3d work fantastically like always, but they do not provide for any measure of security at all. You can use the music library as long as you can get to it. Now I know I can employ measures like iptables and hosts.deny, etc., but I decided I would still feel much more secure if I just ran my music server on a different VM that was only accessible from my intranet. I also did a little performance testing and found that GnuMP3d hogged up a lot of my system resources when it was starting up as well. All these factors and more sent me on a quest to once again look into some different streaming music servers.
There are really not very many of these available now that are current and full featured. There are, in fact, 4 that are hands down above the rest. The first was GnuMP3d, which, still, is a great piece of software. I just wanted something different for a while. I looked into Jinzora, which seemed to me to be completely overcomplicated and quite broken when not importing music collections via mp3 tags (stay away from this one). The one I almost settled on was Andromeda, a non-free software program, which works absolutely perfectly for what I wanted. For a measly $20 you can purchase the full version and I was *this* close to doing so until I decided I would give kPlaylist a spin.
kPlaylist is a LAMP app that is actually very easy and quick to get going, looks and works great and it’s strict OSS as well. It even provides the little bit of security I need to feel better about running it in my main server VM
If you are looking around for a nice way to access your personal music collection, you could surely do worse than kPlaylist. Do yourself a favor and hit the website and check it out today!
Jun 17
Sansa Fuse
Many of you heard me giving rave reviews about my new Sansa Fuse earlier. Well, I just saw that
Woot.com has the Sansa Clip (smaller version of the Fuse) on sale RIGHT NOW 6/17/2009 for just $15. Go get one now. You’ll be mad if you miss out.
Jun 08
Sansa Fuse
I finally caved over the weekend and bought a new mp3 player. It has been a LONG time since I bought one, in fact the newest one I had was a one gb player (a _few_ years old). I have been listening to my tunes portably on my Nokia N800, but that is a pain in the butt. Let’s face it, the N800 is a full fledged computer and not just a media player, hence it’s not really designed with that sort of ease of operation, not to mention it’s a good bit bigger than your average mobile music player these days.
As an OpenSource kinda guy I tried very hard to stay away from the vendor lock in that the iPods provide, even though they are pretty darn slick. I kept looking around for one that looked a bit more OpenSource friendly. What I found was the Sansa Fuse (I picked up the silver 8gb version). It’s a credit card sized player that does pics, videos, fm-radio and all sorts of music formats including ogg. I have to say that so far, I really dig this little thing. It sounds great and works well. Just plug in the USB cable and it mounts up as a mass storage device and you can drag your music to the Music directory. When you unhook, you are ready to start listening within a few seconds.
Of course, I ran into an issue. Nothing with the player, mind you, but with my aging music collection. Much of it is so old that it is either not tagged or not tagged correctly, resulting in everything showing up on the Fuse as “unknown”. FEH. I had to fix it, and after some searching I came across EasyTag, which, oddly enough, really is easy to use. Just a quick apt-get install and I had it running on my Ubuntu machine and then proceeded to fix the tags of the initial set of music files I was putting on the Fuse. It was a piece of cake, and once they were reloaded on the Fuse with tags, I had working genres and albums and band names, etc. It was great except for one last thing. I needed album cover art. With a couple quick googles, I found that the Fuse would display album art named “folder.jpg” in each folder. And I found a fantastic place to get this art too: AlbumArt.org. Everything I have copied from there has displayed perfectly on the Fuse.
So there you have it. A great little music player which appears to work end to end with Linux. What more could a guy ask for? Well, the best part is it was $50 cheaper than a similar iPod!
Sep 15
I happened into the Exton Music store today and was persuaded to get another guitar. Actually, my neighbor had mentioned that the store was trying to get rid of some old stock and had a deal on a couple 12 strings there, and it took me until today to get there and look. At any rate, I have never really had a “really nice” acoustic guitar, and I have *always* wanted a 12 string. They sound really cool. I have had a lot of different guitars before, and they were mostly all cheapo’s. This one, however, is different. I bought an Ovation Celebrity Deluxe cc255. It’s just like the one in the picture, but slightly darker wood. It sounds phenomenal! The best part is I got it for $100 off the list price.
Now all I have to do is learn how to play better Anyone have any links to some of those 3 chord songs
Sep 15
One of the real perks of working/living in the Philly area that never occurred to me before coming here was the fantastic street musicians. Sure, there are some real stinkers, but I have run across some really great ones in my travels through the train stations.
Today, I stopped and bought a cd from just one such group of guys that I had been listening to all week. Gregory Underwood, John Brock and Ron Davidoff do some really good blues stuff and I picked up their second Suburban Station R&B cd. I also have, in the past, picked up a cd from Anthony and the Reverend. This is just great stuff. These are the kind of musicians who really live their music, their music is as natural to them as breathing and just as necessary for them to live.
I only wish I had the resources (and the ambition) to get a bunch of these guys together and get their stuff on a website for them and help make them a little money and give an avenue for the rest of you guys across the net to hear how cool this stuff is.
Recent Comments