Technorati Tags: media player, songbird, video, audio, album art, beta, software, cross platform

Getting music from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’.  There are several ways to go about doing this.  The first, and easiest is to hang around your favorite DRM-free download store, like Amazon.com or Rhapsody for starters.  See something you like?  Buy it!  You may also have a lot of your music on an ancient format, like a CD or perhaps a clay tablet.  Let’s say you’re looking at a stack of CDs that are sitting outside of your computer and you’d like to get all that music into your computer.

Grab the first CD you want to encode (and remember, this is for your one, archival purposes only copy of your CD.  Don’t sell it, share it or do anything illegal with it – or if you do, remember that I told you not to).

You’ll have to install a program called Sound Juicer to rip those tracks from your CD and deposit them to your computer.  Here’s a previous post on how to install Sound Juicer and enable it to rip to MP3 format if it doesn’t default to that option for you.

When you run Sound Juicer, I’d suggest saving all of your files to your Music folder.  You can find it at /home/your-user-name/Music, or click on Places -> Music.

In my 8.04 Ubuntu install, Sound Juicer wasn’t put into the Applications menu for me.  You can always hit the terminal and type sound-juicer but I like a menu entry as much as the next guy.  Right click on your Applications menu and choose Edit Menus.  From there, click on the Sound & Video menu on the left, and then click the New Item button on the right.  Call it Sound Juicer, use the command sound-juicer and the icon should find itself.  Click Okay and exit out of everything until you’re back on your desktop.  Open it up and rip some CDs!

Now, you’ve got a few CD’s ripped, you’ve downloaded all of Barry White’s music from Amazon and you also have a gig or two (or twenty) of music you’ve been carting around with you since your brother’s friend used to DJ, you’ve got to decide what to do with all this stuff.

My first suggestion would be to take the whole cart load of music, in it’s many folders and various locations and put it all in one place.  Ubuntu 8.04 has a nice place all set up for you called “Music” which we talked about earlier.  Not terribly original, but eminently workable.  The folder is located in your home director, under Music, or Places -> Music.

Once you’ve got everything in one place, what should you do?  I’ve been working hard at getting all of my MP3′s tagged correctly.  Tags are bits of the file that tell you and your computer what the song is, where it came from, who the artist is, what album it’s from and lots of other information. Improperly tagged music can cause a lot of problems for those who like order and organization.  It’s also the leading cause of MP3s showing up in players as “03.mp3” rather than “Sweet Barry White.mp3”.  (I made that title up, by the way).

So you’ve got your music in one place, what now?  Let’s make sure it’s all properly tagged!  If you’ve downloaded the music from a reputable site, it’s most likely tagged correctly, although it could have some extra information there you don’t want.

What about all the other stuff?  If you’ve ripped it and made sure your info was correct in Sound Juicer (default settings usually work) then you should be okay as well.  All the other files you’ve got laying around though, they could use some work most likely.

In comes MusicBrainz.  It’s a community run and updated music metadata site!  Wha?  Essentially they’ve compiled a list of music, musicians and albums and have made a way for you to use that information to correctly tag your stuff.

You’ll need to get get a nifty piece of software called Picard to utilize their services.  Go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic File Manager.  Once synaptic is open, search for Picard.  Find it, right click on it, mark it for install and say okay.  Synaptic does it’s thing and you’ve got Picard!

Again, you’ll have to add it to your Applications menu manually.  Right click on your Applications menu and choose Edit Menus.  From there, click on the Sound & Video menu on the left, and then click the New Item button on the right.  Call it Picard, use the command picard and the icon should find itself.  Click Okay and exit out of everything until you’re back on your desktop.

Now, start up Picard from your new menu entry.  You can do a single MP3 or load up a whole folder’s worth by clicking the Add Files or Add Folder buttons.  For this example, I’ll use a single file.

Click the Add Files button, browse to where your dubiously tagged MP3 file is and open it.  I’ll show you how this works, by illustrating tags with one song.

Once your file is opened, double click on it to see what kind of tags you have.  I’ve used a Bobby McFerrin song because he’s cool and I like to seem worldly.  As you can see, there’s only one tag, and that’s the file name.

Click Okay.  Now, back at the main Picard screen, with your MP3 highlighted still, click the Lookup button.

BAM!  There’s your MP3 info!  It’s like magic!  Or not.  Anyway, highlight the song on the right side panel and click the Save button.

Now you’ve got all the info you need for this MP3.  You can use the Add Files or Add Folder buttons to put up as many MP3′s as your mind can handle, and then highlight them all and click the Lookup button.  You’ll have to go through and save what you want but it sure beats manually looking up all this information.  This means opening each album, and saving the selected MP3s.

Picard can do a lot more but those are the basic tools you’ll need to get started.  Here’s the documentation for those who want to dig deeper.

There may be songs that Picard and MusicBrainz just won’t have info on.  At this point, you can manually tag your songs using a program called Ex Falso.  Ex Falso can be gotten by going to System -> Administration -> Synaptic File Manager.  Once synaptic is open, search for ex falso.  Find it, right click on it, mark it for install and say okay.

Strangely, this was added to my Applications -> Sound & Video menu automatically.  Open the program up, select an MP3 to modify, click on it and you can see all of the tag information.  By clicking on a tag, you can edit it.

Okay, you’ve got your MP3′s all lined up, they’re tagged and just ready to go!  What now?  Now you need a good player and playlist organizer.  On to my new favorite program for this – Amarok!

A note to Ubuntunistas.  Yes, I know Amarok is a KDE program.  I don’t care that I’m running it in Gnome.  I love this program.  Love it in a near-biblical sense.

Back to Synaptic, search for Amarok and install it!

Once you’ve gotten it installed, fire it up and walk through the Wizard which will tell Amarok where all of your MP3s are.  Applications -> Sound & Video -> Amarok.

This is an easy to use yet fully feature piece of software which you can use to do everything from create and play simple play lists, to sync your MP3 players.  This would take an entirely new post to describe how to use this. Or bettery yet, head on over to the Amarok site and check it out yourself.

There are lots of other music players for Linux and Ubuntu out there that you can use as well. They’ll be a lot more fun now that you’ve got your music organized and tagged correctly.  Banshee is a great Gnome native player which just hit release 1.0.  I’ve also used XMMS with a good deal of success.  All of these are available through Synaptic on your Ubuntu computer.

You’re organized, you’re tagged and you’re ready to go!

Technorati Tags: mp3, music, rip, tags, mp3 tag, amarok, musicbrainz, geek, picard, how to, ex falso

Mash that up with the bits and pieces of our psyche that loves kittens and puppies and you’ve got yourself a burning desire to posses a babydinosaur.  Now make that baby dinosaur a robot and if you’re like me, you’ve got a little plastic and metal slice of heaven with silicon brains.

Pleos from Ugobe are a lot of fun, but they’ll run you $349 each.  Sure, that’s less than a purebred rat dog and they eat less too but it’s still a chunk of change.  Thankfully, Pleoworld has turned 1 year old today – and here I’m thankfull for its very existence and also the fact that you can get a Pleo for the next two weeks at the low, low cost of $235 (plus S/H).  Huzzah!

You’ve got two weeks to act on this deal, possibly a little less by the time you read this.  Just go to the Get Pleo portion of Pleoword and add one to your cart.  Then at check out, use the code PLEOWORLDISONE and up to July 12, you’ll get the special dino discount.    I know I and my whole family really enjoy our Pleo.

Technorati Tags: deals, pleo, ugobe, robots, technology, dinosaurs, cool, discounts, huzzah

With gas prices now over the four dollar mark (Road Warriors still plays in my head when I think about that).

Seth Sandler, you’re my new hero. With merely a cardboard box, tape, a piece of glass, paper and a webcam; he was able to create a Multi-Touch pad. His parents should be proud.

With the $10,000 you save, you can actually afford that tank of gas.

By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service
February 21, 2008

In a major turnaround for Microsoft, the company Thursday promised “greater transparency” in its development and business practices, outlining a new strategy to provide more access to APIs and previously proprietary protocols for some of its major software products, including Windows and Office.

The move, inspired by the ongoing antitrust case against Microsoft in the European Union, shows the company finally acknowledging the significant impact open source and open standards have had on the industry and the company’s own business. It also should mean the end of Microsoft’s patent threats against Linux and interoperability concerns surrounding Office 2007 file formats.During a news conference with top executives Thursday, Microsoft said it is implementing four new interoperability principles and actions across its business products to ensure open connections, promote data portability, enhance support for industry standards, and foster more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open-source communities.

These steps are “important” and represent “significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency.”

Under increased global pressure, Microsoft has limped toward a more open development policy for some time with strategies like the Open Specification Promise, which it published in September 2006 as a pledge that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against those who use certain technology APIs (application programming interfaces). The company launched an open-source Web site last year, a move that was notable for one of the first official uses of the term “open source” by the company. Microsoft previously would release APIs and code to developers and other companies through something it called the Shared Source Initiative rather than specifically calling its policy open source.

However, at the same time as it appeared to be more open, Microsoft continued to make bold claims and threats against technologies like Linux that it said violated many patents the company holds. While the open-source community mostly scoffed at Microsoft’s claims, some companies — including Novell — signed specific deals with the vendor to protect customers from indemnification and promote interoperability with Microsoft software.

Microsoft also continued to promote proprietary file formats it designed as the default for Office 2007 — Office Open XML (OOXML) — in favor of another file format, ODF (Open Document Format for XML), which already has been approved as a global technology standard by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Microsoft submitted the OOXML specification to another standards body, Ecma International, in November 2005 in an effort to have it fast-tracked through the ISO. However, approval by the ISO has been stalled and the process riddled with complaints that Microsoft is not acting in the transparent way typical of an international standards process.

The announcements on Thursday don’t affect the company’s continued efforts to standardize OOXML, Ballmer said during the press conference.

Thursday’s news includes broad, royalty-free publishing of APIs and the establishment of an Open Source Interoperability Initiative to provide ongoing resources and documentation to the community, and marks more commitment than the notoriously proprietary software maker has ever shown toward embracing open standards and open source.

Microsoft plans to publish on its Web site documentation for APIs and communications protocols that are used by what it calls its “high-volume products.” Microsoft includes Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 — as well as their future versions — under this umbrella. Microsoft will not require developers to license or pay royalties for this information, the company said.

To get this ball rolling, Microsoft Thursday will publish on its Microsoft Developer Network Web site more than 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade-secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program. Microsoft will publish protocol documentation for the other high-volume products in upcoming months, the company said.

Microsoft also is providing a covenant not to sue open-source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols — a huge move for any Linux or open-source developers that may have feared litigation from Microsoft. The company said Thursday that developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. However, companies that want to commercially distribute implementations of the protocols still must obtain a patent license from Microsoft, it said.

On the OOXML front, Microsoft promised Thursday to design new APIs for its Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications so developers can plug in additional document formats and enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents. While there are add-on technologies that can translate between OOXML — the default file format in Office 2007 — and other file formats, Microsoft has not included the ability to set other file formats as default in the product suite.

Microsoft said Thursday it will use a new Open Source Interoperability Initiative to provide resources, facilities and events to the community, including labs, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development. Microsoft also is seeking an ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open-source communities through an online Interoperability Forum. And Microsoft will launch a Document Interoperability Initiative to address the issue of data exchange between widely deployed formats, the company said.

The announcement reflects a change in the market in the past couple of decades, said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, during a question and answer session at the press conference. “When Microsoft entered the game in the mid-1980s, people focused on using the PC. They tended to use a small number of programs,” he said. Today, people use many more applications, and they expect data from one program to be available in other products, he said. The changes Microsoft is making adapt to that change in the market, he said.

Still, Ballmer cautioned that end-users shouldn’t expect to see much change for some time. “Any opening up doesn’t happen overnight,” he said during the Q&A session. “I think it will be more like years than days” before end-users notice the effects of Thursday’s announcements, he said.

Microsoft finds it hard to predict what kinds of new products might become available to users because of this change. “One thing the Net has shown is that sometimes, constraints around standards can be quite liberating to developers,” said Ozzie. “Many times, new services pop out of nowhere once a standard is there and once interoperability principles are established because we can’t think of the different potential uses of customer data and how to interface with products.”

Ballmer said he doesn’t expect the licensing changes to affect Microsoft’s bottom line. “The amount of trade secrets licensing fees we forgo will be minimal,” he said. The licensing changes are risky, he acknowledged, but the potential benefit for third parties to add value around Microsoft offerings balances the risk, he said.

While Thursday’s announcements are related to Microsoft’s legal problems in Europe, Ballmer argued that the changes were more driven by the market. “The announcement today is driven by what we’re hearing from industry participants,” he said.

Microsoft’s Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council will oversee the new principles and initiatives to help keep the company honest. The IEC is an advisory board established in 2006 and comprised mainly of chief information and technology officers from more than 40 companies and government institutions worldwide.

More information about the news can be found on Microsoft interoperability Web site.

This story was update on February 21, 2008

Time to dump Windows?
Can it be done? Is it the right time? Find out what it’ll take to finally switch to desktop Mac OS X or Linux

By Galen Gruman at InfoWorld

InfoWorld’s “Save XP” petition asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP available indefinitely, not end most sales on June 30 as currently planned, has prompted many readers to suggest that maybe the best answer for those who don’t like Vista is to switch to another operating system completely.

“Don’t be afraid. Just switch to Linux and become a member of a really free society,” wrote Carlos Raul Gutierrez.

[ Find out the deployment secrets of early Vista adopters ]

“Windows Vista was the reason I bought a Mac mini. I didn’t want my only choices to be an operating system that would soon be obsolete (XP) or one that was buggy and would break much existing hardware (Vista), and I’m not enough of a geek to use Linux (do things from the command line? Puhleeze…),” wrote “Jack.”

How realistic is a switch to Linux or Apple’s Mac OS X? For some users — often technically savvy people such as engineers, consultants, designers and CTOs — it is clearly an option that already works quite well. In the past year, running Mac OS X or Linux as your default OS has been made easier by the capability to run Windows in a virtual machine, giving you access to both Windows-only applications and Web sites that rely on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer-only ActiveX technology. But in a business environment, switching to a Mac or Linux PC may not be quite as easy.

The Mac OS X option
Of the plausible alternatives to Windows, Apple’s Mac OS X has the largest market share and history. InfoWorld chief technologist Tom Yager has written that the latest version of the Mac OS, Leopard (10.5), is simply the best operating system available. And Macs are indeed popping up more frequently even within IT circles — I’ve seen more MacBook Pros in the hands of CTOs and IT execs at conferences in the past year more than I’ve seen Mac notebooks in such venues ever. Although there are no real numbers on just the business adoption of Macs, it’s clear that Apple is in growth mode, gaining an increasing proportion of all new computer sales for more than a year now.

InfoWorld’s Yager has chronicled the adventures of one PC user who switched to the Mac OS, showing that for an individual, the conversion was ultimately a rewarding one. The TechWeb site has also provided a good guide on how to make the switch to Mac OS X.

A key tool for any Mac OS X switcher is a virtual machine to run Windows for those apps and Web sites that require it. Both Parallels Desktop 3.0 and EMC VMware’s Fusion software will do the trick, as InfoWorld’s comparative review has shown.

Although Macs are compatible with most typical hardware, such as monitors and drives, fitting a Mac into an enterprise’s management systems and ERP applications can be a different story. Yager’s Mac Enterprise blog and the Mac Enterprise user group both provide advice on managing Macs in a traditional IT environment.

The Linux option
The more technically inclined may be attracted to Linux, the most popular form of desktop Unix. Linux desktops typically are challenged by limited hardware compatibility (due to lack of drivers), limited application options, and user interfaces that require active participation to get work done, which tends to keep Linux away from the general user population. But those who work with a Linux server all day may find that using it on the desktop as well actually makes their lives easier.

Just as Mac users need occasional access to Windows, so do Linux users. Because Linux distributions run on Windows-compatible hardware, it’s straightforward to use desktop virtualization software, such as Parallels Workstation, Sun’s (formerly Innotek’s) VirtualBox, and EMC VMware’s Workstation software, to provide access to both environments.

Although some enterprises have committed to wide Linux deployment — such as automaker Peugeot Citroën’s plans to install 20,000 Novell Suse Linux desktops — most have left Linux to the engineering and development staff.

InfoWorld Enterprise Desktop blogger Randall Kennedy argues that desktop Linux is doomed to remain a tiny niche OS, given the Linux community’s lack of interest in providing a UI that regular people could use. Kennedy tried to spend a week working on nothing but the Ubuntu distribution of Linux but gave up on the fifth day.

But Kennedy’s take isn’t the last word on desktop Linux. Frequent InfoWorld contributor Neil McAllister put together a special report on how to move from Windows to Linux, concluding that the effort was not as hard as you might think.

Who’s right? As with any platform choice, they both may be. A one-size-fits-all approach may be unrealistic. And that likely explains why many businesses will have a mix, dominated by Windows XP today (and perhaps Vista in a few years) but not exclusively tied to Microsoft’s OS.

read more | digg story

Apricot intends to take on this challenge by recruiting a team of six who will have six months to create a fully 3D game using Blender and Crystal Space.  One of the goals of this project, which I fully support is ” to improve open source tools to better fit to the professional gamedev industry.”

Actually creating a game using open source tools only will certainly go a long way towards doing this as the developers will be able to point out all of the good and bad bits in Blender and Crystal Space by the time they’re done.

They’ve also launched a DVD pre-sale event with the hopes of selling 1000 DVDs prior to February 1st.  What will be on the DVD?  “Expect on the DVD the complete game, all content in Creative Commons Attribute, video blog material, and clear examples and/or tutorials for how to extend the game, add levels, change characters, and so on. Early purchasers of the Apricot game will get their names credited on the game intro and final credit roll.”  The DVD costs 34 Euro, or about $50 US and goes to support not only this project but Blender or Crystal Space.  Pre-ordering will also get your name in the credits.

The game is based on project Peach, an open source movie created entirely in Blender.

Let’s hope the end up with an amazing game and take Linux gaming one gigantic step forward by not only making a game that’s in the public’s eye but by helping to improve development tools and giving game developers easier access to open source products.

Technorati Tags: gaming, linux, windows, osx, open source, project peach,   apricot

Read the article

Recording films, television shows, and video game play in real time has become something I am increasingly taking for granted. It pains me to pull up those pre-Neuros times as I am now able to store my DVD collection on my external hard drive, and to put downloaded content like YouTube onto my Neuros. Granted I can’t access menu items from the recorded file, but if I want to… I can always record the special features and commentaries to view later. Additionally you can store a film to a thumbdrive and toss it to a friend for viewing or sneak it onto your laptop (or any portable device) to watch during a long winded seminar or meeting.

Feel like surfing through Youtube while you’re watching television? You can. Want to pull up your entire music collection? You can. Anything that you store on your hard drive, you can access via your television using Neuros. It’s created a relationship between my computer and television- two platforms I love.

Have you ever been stuck on a part of a video game and you’ve found frustration in trying to explain your issue to someone who has conquered the game? Fret not, just record your failure and e-mail it to your friend or post it on a forum for assistance. How did I ever live without this?

Being open sourced and having frequent easily downloadable upgrades, I’m looking forward to what the future has in store for this delightful little device I’ve named, “George”.

Yes George has sucked out my passion to write, draw, and complete my plans for world peace as I have a ton of films to store and watch, but I just see mental vegetation as one step closer to Zen. I AM the Buddha. Thank you Neuros!

I’m certain there’s SO much more that I haven’t covered or tried out yet, but baby, I’ve just gotten started on my road to media addiction.

Miro (formerly Democracy Player) has reached 1.o! This is a fantastic, open source, online video/tv player that’s available for Linux, Windows or OSX. It uses the VLC engine and can play just about any format under the sun.

What are a few things that makes this player so fantastic?

• Over 2,500 channels (compared to Joost’s 250).
• Lots of HD content available (none on Joost!)
• A completely open platform.
• Built in Bittorrent.
• Download and save Youtube videos.
• Play just about anything already on your computer.

Want to get it? Go grab the Linux, Windows or OSX client and start enjoying yourself.

Welcome to Zombies, a turn-based game where the only goal is to outlast and destroy the zombies before they do the same to you. Can you save humanity from being overrun?

Find out if you can hack it (nyuck nyuck!) by downloading it for Windows or OSX.

Technorati Tags: zombies, evil dead, headshot, oss, windows, osx, braaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnssssss

Everyone likes to listen to music, to some extents. Some will just like the background noise, some will appreciate the music they hear and some, like me, want it tidied-up the best way possible. I currently use, on windows systems, musikCube to do my biddings.

What I like about it

It is a quite powerful audio player with integrated library management, quite iTunes-like. You can view and edit tags of your music from within the player. It can also work for you by either tagging your audio by the filenames or by renaming your file by the tags.

The library is maintained through a SQLite backend. It means that I can create some queries with an SQL-like syntax easily to create a Dynamic Playlist. It is possible, let’s say, to create a playlist which contains only the less-played songs from your library which are tagged 0 stars or more (-1 are disliked songs) randomized.

MusikCube has integrated crossfade feature, something Quod Libet (my favorite Linux audio player) has not and I would want. It might seem stupid, but I find it is nice.

The player also has a plugin system. Last.fm support is available through a plugin. There’s also a winamp emulation plugin; it will allow other programs that use the underlying functions of winamp to work with MusikCube.

What I don’t like

It has no integrated album art feature! This is something that I would really want. Maybe I’m blind and/or stupid and I missed something, but it doesn’t seem to exist from within the program.

Balloon tips won’t work with Vista. Well, they won’t work for me, I don’t know if it is a known behavior, but I can live without that.

It lacks some finish in some places.  As an example, there’s the place where I can see how much time I’m into a song, when I click onto it, I can see how much time is left to the song. This setting doesn’t register and I have to click on it every time the program is started.

Other than that, it could be nice to have a better skinning system, but personally, I wouldn’t use it. I want a useful music manager, not a fancy player that’ll eat all my resources!

Even with those little problems, I still haven’t found a better music player/audio management software for Windows. On Linux platforms, there’s the fabulous Quod Libet, but that’s going to be a matter for another time, I need to have something to write about later!