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New Release Tuesday

I saved up from last week, and splurged this week on all the new stuff that has come out in the last 8 days.

Movies:

  • Blade 3

Music:

  • Aimee Mann
  • Nine Inch Nails
  • Ben Folds
  • Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Soundtrack
  • Ryan Adams
  • G. Love & Special Sauce (slightly older release, but they didn’t have last week’s New Order)
  • Mike Doughty (former lead singer for Soul Coughing)

The new Nine Inch Nails and Ben Folds are dual discs, with DVD content on the back of the disc. The Ben Folds dual disc has the entire album in 5.1 and some video content. We’ll see how good it is.

The new Mike Doughty album is fantastic. It’s been too many years since he’s made music, and 89.3 had him live last week acoustically so I got a preview then. The new album, produced by Dan Wilson of Semisonic, has blown me away. It’s much more emotional and raw than his previous work with Soul Coughing.

Next week: Weezer!

Great music lives here

Re-ripping my CD collection for the 4th time in as many years, I’m reminded of all the great music I own, that I rarely listen to.

Having everything located on a central server you can stream from, either by artist or just random, let’s you hear things you haven’t heard in years.

I need to get the server back up. Soon.

Jinzora & Netjuke to merge

So I leave for a business trip for a week, and halfway through I finally check the ‘net for news, and what do I see?

Jinzora and Netjuke are merging efforts to create an even better music management web tool.

While kind of cool, I’m glad to see the Jinzora team in firm control – their release cycle and active development is why so many Netjuke users have jumped ship from Netjuke to Jinzora. Blake Waters, the lead developer of Netjuke, has been busy for the last 2 years on other projects, leading to Netjuke development stalling.

I’m glad Jinzora 2 has been released, and under the GPL. I have concerns about Netjuke’s future, as they wanted to get away from the GPL, and possibly even charge for the software. I’m hoping Jinzora stays on the path they have so far, and away from where Netjuke had thought about going. And Netjuke’s requirement for 2.0 for PHP5 was disconcerting – I understand wanting to use latest and greatest versions of software, but even Ubuntu doesn’t support PHP5 yet.

I look forward to the teams working together.

Thanks to Jamie for the heads up on my forums.

Well, der

After continuing to play with Jinzora, I discovered something: Displayed number behind Genre’s is not the number of songs – it’s the number of artists.

For whatever reason, I thought it was the number of songs, leading me to believe the import process was missing tracks, though it would show the correct number of tracks imported.

Well, der. Jinzora was right.

I now return you to your scheduled programming while I rip my CD collection for the 4th time.

What have I been up to? Jinzora!

I’ve been playing with Jinzora this week, as you could see in the screenshot in my previous post.

I’m very impressed. I still have some glitches to work out – my ID3 tags don’t seem to be importing correctly, and I downloaded Easytag to check, and they looked right. A light bulb just went on, and I’ll have to check to see if it’s using id3v1, instead of version 2. I’m 99% positive all my tags are v2.

I really like the layout, it’s one of the best install routines I’ve ever seen, the album art it automatically grabs and puts up random is cool, and it does everything else. My only complaint, is that it doesn’t seem (and I’m new to this, could be wrong) a recursive file scan after the initial import to check for changes. One of the cooler things about Netjuke was I could update my ID3 tags, scan for changes, and it would fix it in the database. That, and the web pages seem to load slow, even on my local lan.

I’m slowly re-encoding all my CDs after the great hard drive crash of ’04, and doing it in MP3 this time, instead of Ogg. My new MP3 player cheats, and won’t do Ogg (though it does Napster2Go, but I’m not signing up for that).

iPod One

What’s on President Bush’s iPod, you might be wondering?

CNN is here to let you know.

The playlist does reveal a rather narrow range of babyboomer tunes. Writing in the London Times, Caitlin Moran noted: “No black artists, no gay artists, no world music, only one woman, no genre less than 25 years old, and no Beatles.”

Why am I not surprised?

Interview with Jon Lech Johansen

Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen, famous (or infamous if you work for Big Media) of DeCSS fame, and *Musique fame. Interesting follow-up to last week’s post about Digital Music on Linux.

Miguel de Icaza, of Gnome & Mono fame, recently reached out to Jon to create a pyMusique port to GTK# resulting in SharpeMusique.

It’s on my t0do list to download and try out. I’d give Apple’s iTMS a shot if it works. I’m hoping it shows up soon in the Ubuntu universe (I haven’t checked yet). I have Mono running, with a few apps (I love Muine) and I miss Tomboy (Tomboy isn’t working in Hoary for me, no idea why, it was fine in Warty).

Digital Music on Linux

So Apple has been in the news all week, as their DRM has been stripped – but what hasn’t necessarily been said is that is hasn’t been stripped, as as much as the Apple iTunes solution implemented on Linux doesn’t apply the DRM. Technically, it’s almost impossible to apply the DRM at the server level, and when pyMusique downloads a song on a Linux box, the DRM isn’t applied as it’s not a native iTMS client like on Windows or Mac.

I whole heartedly agree with this interview with Cody Brocious, one of the 3 developers of pyMusique (along with DVD Jon) on Linux. It’s not the DRM issue – it’s the fact, as a Linux user, I don’t have any options today to buy digital music on the platform I choose to use.

I’d accept their DRM if they supported Linux. No question.

I’ve used Napster and MusicNow – I’ve bought over 20 albums in the last 6 months online. We need a commerical Linux solution for digital music.

Get all of Napster for free

So yesterday I’m talking about Napster, and what do I see on BoingBoing today but a link to a how-to on burning all of Napster – for free.

There I go again being ahead of the curve. But seriously, sign up for the Napster 14 day trial, download Winamp 5 and a couple of plugins, configure them, and stream the albums on Napster. The plugins will take the stream, and convert it to wav, which you then burn. The only catches are that one, it works in real time, so you have to listen to the music, and two, you have to provide the CD-Rs.

From the site:

Three computers, one fast networked drive, and a few dedicated people: Turning Napster’s 14 day free trial into 252 full 80 minute CDs of free music.

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Have fun!

Napster 2 Go Reviews Start

Boing Boing links to a Washington Post review of Napster to Go. Let’s just say WaPo found it… wanting. Napster’s PR firm has been running full steam lately with numerous mentions in the press (after their post-Super Bowl Ad) where they’re trying to show the math hat an iPod with 10,000 songs = $10,000 or Napster can get you the same thing for $15 / month. That is, $15 / month for forever. Because once you stop paying your songs go poof.

Now I have a friend, who shall remain nameless, that loves Napster for their streaming service. He’s had various MP3 players over the years, but they were clunky, so he bought an iPod mini mid-last year. Loved the Apple experience when it came to digital music – he’s fairly technical but Apple made it easy to get and transfer music. Yet he comes back to Napster to use their radio stations. For $10 bucks a month (or whatever it is, somewhere in that ballpark) you can listen to any song Napster has. You want to burn it? Just like iTunes, that’s 99 cents please. So Napster to Go will be the premium version of their monthly fee based service.

I can see both sides – if you have a Microsoft powered (codename Janus) player, or in Microsoft marketing speak, Plays for Sure, Napster to Go can fill up your MP3 (or should I be saying WMA?) player until you stop paying for Napster. That’s pretty cool – I can get thousands of songs to go work out to, or listen to my car, my choice of songs, for $15 month. Compare that to Sirius or XM, and it could be a better option that satellite radio.

But on the on the other hand – DRM makes bad business sense as I’ve noted before. Think about it, as Xeni points out so eloquently on BoingBoing:

What if Napster To Go were Napster The Grocery, and milk you bought could only be consumed from proprietary square mugs (known for continually sprouting holes you have to patch on your own), and milk cartons vanish from your refrigerator shelf if you don’t re-up your subscription? You’d get milk elsewhere.

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I’ll let you figure out the allegory on your own.