magnatune for the bird

I first heard of Magnatune at LUG Radio Live where they had a booth setup. I didn’t get a chance to check them out until yesterday, and it’s a pretty cool site. There’s some neat electronica up there along with the other usual genres. Their business model looks pretty interesting too, along with their CC friendliness and promotion of music sharing.

I started mucking about with a Songbird add-on last night and got something working a few hours ago that builds an additional “Magnatune” library in Songbird to represent all the tracks available on Magnatune. You can play them directly from the remote track (yay open web!) currently. I plan to add a way to purchase the track so it can be added to the local library as well (which should also allow it to be sync’d after purchase then too). It’s been an interesting challenge… and I’m still running into a few hiccups, I suspect because of the way I now effectively have two local libraries (which shouldn’t be that big a deal since devices, etc. all have their own libraries from Songbird’s perspective).

Anyway, it’s been a fun project so far… and I have to say, there’s something cool about having all 7600+ Magnatune tracks available for direct play within Songbird. I’ll definitely post this to the addons site when I’m done.

4 comments April 30th, 2008

for the last time, i’m not at Sun anymore

From Dave Neary’s nicely written blog… to Theodore, I’m not at Sun anymore.

I left 7 months ago, while still in my first term on the OGB, and I was re-elected as a community member who does not work for Sun.

I did drink the kool-aid for 4.5 years… but I’d like to think I still think for myself and have independent thoughts.

kthxbai!

Add comment April 29th, 2008

OMFG!!! jamendo songbird integration!

omfg, why didn’t anyone tell me Jamendo started doing Songbird integration!?!?!?! i’ve been getting my music via Firefox this whole time.

many thanks to Mike Linksvayer over at Creative Commons for pointing out to me that Jamendo kicks some serious ass in Songbird.

go check out pornophonique’s 8-bit lagerfeur album. it’s wicked 8-bit gameboy-style rock. my favourite track is “sad robot” (the first track)

1 comment April 28th, 2008

Pomposity

Here’s a tip. When you’re applying for a job, in your intro paragraph, don’t describe yourself as a “renowned industry icon”.

About the only good thing I can say about that resume is that the the intro paragraph I read saved me the time of having to read the rest of the resume.

1 comment April 22nd, 2008

Naming nits

It’s Songbird, not SongBird.

It’s OpenSolaris, not Open Solaris.

(yeah yeah, I realise I’m hardly qualified to be the grammar nazi, but those two do bug me)

5 comments April 22nd, 2008

ghostbusters!

Yeah yeah, I’m a movie-themed Media Views kick apparently…

I threw together a derivative of yesterday’s Attack of the Clones Media View, this time titled Ghostbusters

This one views all the broken tracks in your library, e.g. those tracks who have been deleted from the filesystem or renamed and are no longer valid entries.

Add comment April 18th, 2008

attack of the clones!

half the fun of making an add-on is coming up with the name… so here’s my newest:

Attack of the Clones!

i got tired of replying to all the Songbird posts asking for the ability to remove library duplicates with “it’d be a simple add-on to write”. i finally decided to write it. i also wanted to play with our new media views feature, so i implemented this as media view.

once you’ve installed this in Songbird, go to your library and then click on the Media Views button (button the right of the search toolbar) and select “Attack of the Clones!”. the media items it will show you are all the duplicates in your library. you can select individual ones and the XUL label above the playlist widget will show the full path. simply find the ones you want to remove and right-click to remove them (from the library… i don’t remove from the filesystem)

update: duh. whoops, forgot to actually link to the damn thing. here it is! thanks mark!

3 comments April 17th, 2008

french celtic rock?

bizarrely intriguing.

i came across Bézèd’h’s Ton jour viendra album clicking through Jamendo yesterday and have found it pretty catchy.

the french celtic rock sound is definitely unique. and hey, it’s creative commons licensed with 192kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis torrents available. now this is what we’re always harping about as the Open Media Web.

rockin’.

i sent $10 their way. the best part?

Donation to the artist Bézèd'h       9.50 USD
Promotion on Jamendo.com    0.44 USD
Tax     0.06 USD
Total with taxes    10 USD

how awesome is that? Bézèd’h gets $9.50! that shit ain’t happening on iTunes, i can tell you that much.

3 comments April 16th, 2008

yay history meme!

originally from planet gnome but it looks like the meme jumped worlds over to planet mozilla where i found it from dan mills (of weave fame).

wonder if it’ll jump worlds over to planet opensolaris too.. ?

[stevel@grommit:~] 501$ uname -a
SunOS grommit 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc
[stevel@grommit:~] 502$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
87 ls
81 cd
41 vim
38 ll
22 cat
18 svcs
14 java
12 svcadm
11 su
10 ps

1 comment April 14th, 2008

Songbird 0.5 final on OpenSolaris

Alfred just built a Songbird 0.5 final build for OpenSolaris… his blog contains all the salient links for download and such.

I’ve been playing with it on my Thinkpad running snv_81 and it works a treat. In fact, it seems to work better than Songbird on my MacBook does. If my Thinkpad weren’t a beast to carry around, I might start to use it more. Maybe I should finally figure out how to BootCamp my MacBook into SXCE now.

Three cheers to Alfred for getting the 0.5 final built! I’m working on getting it hosted at the Songbird site now. We’ve not previously had a place to put up contributor builds, so this is kind of blazing the path for us there and helping us define a lot of stuff we need to do for the future anyway.

Along those lines, I proposed a topic for the upcoming OpenSolaris Developer Summit where the four of us (alfred, ken mays, albert lee (a.k.a. triskelios), and myself) could talk about and show off Songbird a bit. Obviously, I have a slight bias given I work at POTI - which is why I’ve coerced the other 3 into joining me so I sound like less of a corporate tool.

I’m hoping the four of us combined can swing a decent demo, while I hope Alfred can say a few words on working with the Songbird project devs. He’s in the unique situation of working for a huge corporation (Sun), contributing to an upstream open source project (Songbird) which is itself downstream from a huge open source project (Mozilla). Certainly I think Alfred has had some great interactions with the Songbird devs in terms of test, code review, patch submission, etc. that might be insightful as we work to open up the OpenSolaris developer contribution process. I know I’m curious to hear his thoughts anyway.

1 comment April 7th, 2008