Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Friday, September 15th, 2006
Amarok recently received support for the music sharing protocol known as DAAP, as part of our Google Summer of Code entry, thanks to developer Ian Monroe. Every week or two my sister and I prod each other about what new music we have managed to stumble across, but previewing it, and then copying it to our machines can be a small chore. Sharing our collections over the local network allows us to manage our own collections independently of each other. It’s as simple as connecting to the share and browsing the collection.
Since we like a fair amount of the same genres of music, it can be difficult to locate tracks which I don’t have in my collection already. I decided that it would be cool if Amarok would show me only the files which I did not have already in my local library, and it has become really quite useful.
Notice how many of the albums I already have are filtered out by the daap client. Neat! Whilst it isn’t working to my complete satisfaction (it does an exact match on tags in the database, and can be a little slow for large daap shares), I think it’s a cool feature that will be really neat to have. The next feature will be a “Copy to collection” option.
The other thing I really like about DAAP is that it isn’t limited to the local network. I can connect to a server on the other side of the world and stream music like it were a pick-your-own radio station.
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Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
Jet are releasing a new album called Shine On! Scheduled date is October 3!!!
Woo, so excited.
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Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
I’m very excited to say that I managed to grab a ticket to the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s show when they are coming in April next year! Sure is far away, but I can’t wait!
I bought the tickets on the internet, so it came to no surprise when there was an additional charge for processing and administration, and postage costs for sending tickets. However what struck me as odd was an option to do all the work myself, and still have to pay:
Posted in music, tech | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, August 15th, 2006
This week has been pretty eventful already, and it’s going to get even busier! Over the weekend I noticed that my computer was making more funny noises; you may recall that I’ve had a string of calamities which seem to be aligned like dominos on an oily table. Because I’m nearly at tipping point with my computer, I just started banging it when the noise started, and the quiet hush of the fan resumed its whirring. Sure, poor solution, so I discovered the problem was with the power supply unit. Wherever there is life there is death, and wherever there is death there is medicine/engineering (or both!). I replaced the fan with a replacement which I have, but not before snipping the wires and realising that I couldn’t solder straight onto the psu board without risking imminent death on switching it on. I only found enough shrinkwrap to cover one solder point on the wires, so the other had to be rigged up with the shell of another larger cable i found in the bin. Resourcefulness is the most attractive quality a man can ever have, I’m sure of it.
I also indulged in some retail therapy this weekend, buying a wetsuit to go with my surfboard! It’s been quite warm lately in Sydney, and work has caused me to become jaded about ever being able to be in the sun with some free time. Today was a good day, so I went for a surf after leaving uni early for . Seriously though, I feel so unfit as I could barely hold myself amongst the waves after thirty minutes in the water. Then I walked home and it hailed. Hilarious stuff, this city!
Tomorrow I’m going to cheer for the Socceroos as we play against Kuwait for the Asian Cup qualifiers, and then on Thursday I’m off to see the All-American Rejects - looking forward to the game and the concert!
Posted in music, sport, tech | No Comments »
Sunday, May 28th, 2006
The K3M meeting has been supremely productive for all attendees. If you haven’t been reading up, the coolest things in amaroK have been: Vastly improved start times, inotify signals for collection scanning, porting to KDE/Qt4 (runs!!), UI redesigns and last.fm integrations.
In our developer conference, we discussed total redesign of the amaroK core, using the enhanced functionality which Qt4 will provide, such as Model View Controllers for the browser architectures. Additionally, we discussed integration with last.fm to provide an enhances user experience.
I’ve been pushing the notion of web services integration into amaroK for the last couple of days, and I’ll explain why now. With the introduction of web 2.0 not long ago, the internet has become much more than just a content provider - and now has a main functionality of providing a service to the user. Not what it can provide, but how, and with what value and benefits.
Last.fm is a social music network which has many hundreds of thousands of users. Services which they provide include statistics of personal listening habits, neighbours, which are people with similar music habits, music tags, and ponies which recommend new music to bored and inquisitive listeners. Imagine the possibilities of providing such services directly from within amaroK. I’ll provide a small example. The audioscrobbler web services provide such as favourite and newest songs, by tag/user/group and more. By downloading the playlist containing the best rock songs, I can import it straight into my playlistbrowser. Some clever work and the playlist will only show the songs which I have in my collection that are also tagged favourites by last.fm users. This is really cool, because now I don’t ever need to browser my music and create playlists, since thousands of last.fm users know more than I do.
The real power in importing playlists, however, isn’t particularly in showing the user what they already have in the collection, but rather what they may be missing. By importing the favourite rock songs, we can show the listener that there are another X amount of songs which they might like. Since last.fm provides perfectly legal radio streaming, we can offer the user a listen of the song. Awesome!
This is just a small insight into some of the great services which are provided. Imagine more - automatic tagging of songs, labels, playlist generation, radio streaming, similar songs etc
The future is promising!
Posted in music, tech | 2 Comments »
