Spotify

2009-11-10T14:22:00+00:00

I was all set to fire up the free Spotify client listen to one of the suggested albums from a previous post. I was ready to accept the rather grating adverts every few tracks when I noticed the people at Spotify over a 0.99p day pass which I duly signed up to.

Getting the client to work on my office machine proved to be a little more of a challenge as running through Wine it seemed to be having issues playing sound. My work machine is on the current Ubuntu LTS so getting a little long in the tooth but I eventually found the "padsp" emulation function that allows programs to think they are talking to an OSS sound device while using the new schizzle that is PulseAudio. For reference the correct solution to running is:

padsp wine spotify.exe

The Spotify experience is different from that of last.fm offering as it does complete control of the playlist. However if I really want the music I will most likely buy the music and add it to my various distributed digital devices. Having said that I can certainly see me paying for a day pass every now and again to listen to albums before I buy them. So any releases from the last year I should be listening to on today's pass?

The things geeks think about....

2009-07-14T16:01:00+01:00

I've been thinking about the whole Twitter* thing recently having been trying it out for two months or so. I haven't much to add to my previous analysis other than spam will continue to be a problem in this new landscape and risks bogging it down.

From the start of the experiment I was keen to ensure I was insulated from the vagaries of corporate idea development. This is why I micro-blog on many different networks and prefer sites using open APIs that are compatible with free software. Unfortunately I walked into that trap when I renewed my subscription to last.fm earlier this year.

My current preferred music player is Banshee which had admirable support for last.fm until recently. Unfortunately without the original founders and new corporate interests it looks like it will be hard to get a license key for FLOSS software, being by it's very nature open to inspection. As soon as you need a document signing on behalf of a loose knit community things get tricky. I do have a fall back solution of running the Flash radio player in my browser but it's not the ideal solution as it puts me at the mercy of Adobe's Linux support and of course isn't open source**.

I think it is time to break out the scripts and start importing data into libre.fm just in case the rules get changed again.

* Other micro-blogging sites are available but I suspect #tweets have won the naming race.
** I know it's a shock I'm running Flash. It was all iPlayer's fault. I try gnash every now and again but I can't get even get YouTube to work though it is supposed to.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - lastfm

Spotify

The things geeks think about....