Slacy’s Blog

When we turned off the PC that we used to use for watching TV, it also took away our ability to play music in the livingroom (since the HD TiVo that we have doesn’t support HME or HMO). So, we decided to break down and buy a couple more Squeezeboxes for the rest of the house. We got systems for the livingroom, upstairs, and the nursery.

I was a bit hesitant about the new Squeezebox v3 form factor, but when the units arrived, my opinion was totally changed. First, they’re a lot smaller than they look on the website. All the low-angle photography makes them look a lot bigger than they are. Small is good.

Second, they have much nicer displays than the Squeezebox v2 that we have in the kitchen. (We now have a total of 4). The display is larger in size as well as larger in pixels. It also supports multiple levels of brightness (per pixel) which means that the big fonts are nicely antialiased. It also means that there’s a cool mode that shows a dim spectrogram underneath the normal “Now Playing” track info display. Its really slick.

I’m going to be using the upstairs unit as an alarm clock, since the server software can turn the units on at a specified time and play any playlist. The cool thing about that is that because of the NPR podcasts, I can wake up to CarTalk on Monday, This American Life on Tuesday, etc. It’ll be great!

Well, I’ve finally found an easy way to use last.fm with the way I listen to music — which is all from my personal server.

It turns out that ampache has a builtin last.fm client support. So, anything that anyone plays using my ampache server automatically gets “scrobbled” to last.fm. I’ve currently set it up so all ampache users filter through the same last.fm user, but this can be changed.

So, you can see my user profile on last.fm. To see what I’m listening to, and my recommendations and stuff. Cool! Unfortunately, It took 5+ years (since the inception of audioscrobbler and last.fm) for there to be a workable solution to my flow. Thats kinda scary, but I’m happy that its finally working. Ampache rocks!

After the troubles with Netjuke after my upgrade to FC6, I decided to start looking around for a replacement for it. In my searching, I came across ampache, which offers basically everything Netjuke did, and more. Here’s a short version of all the great things:

• A ’search’ that searches everything (artists, albums, tracks) all at the same time
• Automatic import of album art from amazon, painlessly.
• The notion of a “Catalog” thats a collection of music.
• Automatic support for remote Catalogs, with API keys and security! Hey guys, if you read this, and install Ampache, I’d be happy to share my music collection — drop me a line. You know who you are. Oh, and if you want an account to try it out, drop me an e-mail and I’ll set one up for you.
• Builtin support for per-track ratings, and suggestions via last.fm. Awesome
• The UI is quite fast.
• Builtin support for downsampling.
• Cool community features, like the ability to see the last N tracks played (by everyone) as well as what each user is listening to right now.

The only downside is that I had to increase my PHP memory limit to import my music collection, but once I figured that out, it imported all my music, and works great. Rescanning for new music is painless and reasonably fast, as well. All it needs now is a color theme that isn’t so bland, and a better logo…

After upgrading to FC6, which includes PHP 5.1, when I clicked on the “play” icons in the Netjuke UI, the playlist would show in the browser instead of starting playback. The problem seemed to be that Netjuke was now returning “text/html” for the mime type of the generated .m3u, instead of whatever it used to be. The problem boiled down to some simple code in play.php. To fix the problem, change the following line:

header (”Content-type: audio/x-mpegurl\r\nContent-Disposition: inline; filename=netjuke-”.substr(time(),-7).”.m3u” );

to

header (”Content-type: audio/x-mpegurl”);
header (”Content-Disposition: inline; filename=netjuke-”.substr(time(),-7).”.m3u” );

I’m not sure why they originally wrote it that way — its a really silly way to set 2 headers at the same time. Too bad Netjuke isn’t maintained anymore…

P.S. Jinzora still blows.

The annual SXSW (South By Southwest) music festival is one of my main sources of finding new, excellent music. Every year, the organizers of the show produce a torrent full of demo songs from all the participants. Although it was hard to find, I just found the 2007 torrent linked from the toolbox page. Here’s a direct link to the 2007 sxsw torrent as well. Be careful, its 739 songs, 3.1GB!

I was going to write a post about how much great music has just been released. Maybe that will happen later. In the mean time, check out this quote from the e-music review of the Mountain Goats latest album:

“Woke Up New,” an ersatz calypso confessional, charts a painfully quotidian re-emergence from coupledom, while the more dire “Half Dead” counterpoints lyrical fatalism with agitated twang.

If I didn’t already love the Mountain Goats, I would run away screaming.

I just thought I’d see if Jinzora had made any progress with putting together a good web-based music interface. So, I downloaded and installed jinzora 2.6. The verdict: JINZORA STILL BLOWS!

It hung after spending about an hour importing 2/3 of my music (~16,000 songs). Not much more I can do at this point. Maybe they’ll have a 3.0 release that actually works for music collections of the 25,000 song size.

EDIT: I’m now using Ampache for music serving, and it totally ROCKS.

There was an interesting article in USA Today this weeken about eMusic, revealing that they’ve captured 11% of the total market share for online music. Thats really incredible, I had no idea they were so popular! Go eMusic!

The thing that I think is funny is that eMusic’s market share vs. iTunes is almost exactly the same as Apple’s market share in the desktop PC (Wintel) world. How ironic is that? Apple being the big bully, and someone else trying to take them down with a more progressive product. How ironic!

Slimdevices announced their “Transporter” today.

They say:

Slim Devices’ Transporter™ was designed to appeal to the most discerning audiophiles and music lovers. It streams digital music with sound quality that surpasses even the most exotic compact disc players.

At the heart of Transporter is a “no compromise” attitude to component selection and electronic design.

My Thoughts:

• This box is only interesting to people who’ve ripped as FLAC, since the mp3 encoding is going to kill any true audiophile.
• Dual displays are cool
• Its a little “bling” for me, even the black version. Less shiny, please (but I’ll never buy one anyway)
• Why not put the cool knob on the remote too!
• Built in wireless bridging! Genious!
• You guys gotta improve the slimserver software! Its still pretty slow to respond to browsing ~5k artists/~25k tracks, and seems like it really needs a rearchitecture! Rescanning my music folder takes a really long time at 100% CPU usage. I know you can do better. Oh, and your memory usage is disgraceful! (Mine is running at 163M Virtual, 56M resident, all the time) Its using more RAM (Virtual) than any other “service” running on my box. (This doesn’t include mail & web apps that can be easily shut down).
• Can the digital inputs be used for “ripping” from optical sources?
• $2k?!? Ouch. Is Sonos really that big of a threat?
• Make a Squeezebox that plays SD & HD video, PLEASE!

Holy crap. I had saw all the news about Yahoo! selling a single DRM-free mp3 of a crappy Jessica Simpson song. My first reaction was: “Great! DRM-free is the way to go! I hope Yahoo! doesn’t kill eMusic”

Well, I didn’t actually look at the page that sells the song, and missed two crucial points. Here they are:

1. You have to choose your “name” to be burned into the song. One article I read called it “mashed-up into the song”. I say “digital signature and tracking’ed up into the song”. (NB: The article does mention that 2 people downloaded the same song and compared them, and they were byte-for-byte identical. For these 2 guys. For this 1 case.)

2. Its $1.99. Yes! TWO DOLLARS! For one song! Holy Bejeezus! eMusic.com costs $19.95/month, and I get 90 songs. Thats about 22 cents per song. Yahoo is charging almost TEN TIMES more! (for worse music!)

If this is Yahoo!’s vision of DRM-free music, then I don’t want any. Thank you very much. Long live eMusic!