When it comes to music distribution, we’re in slightly controversial times. You’re deemed a criminal if you copy your CD to your PC or portable media device so you can listen on the train. You’re — rightly or wrongly — breaking the law when you download your favourite track from the various distribution methods such as Bit Torrent et al.
Various efforts have come about attempting to cash in on this phenomenon; Last.fm to Napster, they’ve all got their merits. Somewhat under the radar is Spotify, an iTunes-esque attempt at bridging the gap between the stubborn fat-cats running the music industry and the slick distribution medium that is the internet. Spotify has some great features, from playlists to quick but advanced search (which includes a command-like interface such as ‘genre:blues’). Spotify also runs very well under Wine non-natively; it’s completely free (ad-supported) and doesn’t seem to waste too much bandwidth.
Spotify is split into free and premium services. The former having audio ads every 50 or so minutes and banner ads throughout the GUI, the latter having no ads and higher-quality music.
It’s different to alternatives like Last.Fm. Spotify doesn’t run with the idea of suggesting music for you. You put in an artist and it’ll list all it has. It’s up to you to build your own playlists. Without knowing the advanced search feature like ‘genre:blues’ you might get frustrated, but I’ve found that the freedom to build my own playlists leaves me with the music I love, and not the tripe that Last.fm thinks I’ll like (nor it’s crappy ‘loved tracks’ idea).
A feature I’d love to have is the ability to purchase the playlists as CDs; that is, I click ‘burn to CD’ and Spotify mails me a burnt copy of my playlists. Bit of a nice to have, though 
Check Spotify out. Well worth it, in my most humble opinion.
Having purchased my awesome Sony X-Series and begun getting it to work with Linux, I was eager to begin using the OLED display to its full potential. Namely, video and lots of it. Most portable devices support the WMV and MPEG codecs and the X-series is no exception (WMV with/without DRM and MPEG-4, plus H.264 to be precise). Most AVI files you might have won’t be compatible with the device which means you have to transcode: convert from one codec to another.
There are lots of solutions for transcoding on Linux. Some more simpler than others. The solution I found to work out of the box was Mark Pilgrim’s mencoder based solution. I successfully converted from AVI to WMV by just running the following commands in a shell/terminal:
sudo aptitude install lsdvd mplayer gpac zenity mencoder
sudo wget http://diveintomark.org/public/2007/06/podencoder.txt -O /usr/local/bin/podencoder
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/podencoder
podencoder foo.avi
This worked 100% for me. I then just copied the file to the videos folder on my Walkman and it worked!
Yay.
Update: if you need to copy videos to your device with Linux, follow my transcoding howto post.
So I ended up having to purchase a new portable media player. I’d been used to my aged Samsung YP-Z MP3 player for a while with a broken screen; memorising the various menu selections to get where I needed to.
Sony have a mixed history with portable media — from MiniDisc to their Sonicstage software — so I was skeptical about choosing something from them again.
In short, the Sony NWZ-X1060 (X series) portable media player is outstanding. The OLED 3″ screen is stunning and vidid and the sound quality is unbelievable. I have Denon C751 earphones and combined with the X series I am hearing new things in tracks I’ve listened to for a while. It’s all very, very impressive.
The touch screen is great too. It’s quick, forgiving, responsive and very thumb friendly. If you’re unsure about buying it: drop your doubts and go purchase it. I got the 32 GB version and I’m really happy.
Enough of the propoganda though, there’s a point to this post. I’m an avid fan of Linux and this was my main concern when purchasing anything like this. “Will it work on Linux?!”.
In short, yes it works with Linux. It will mount just like any other mass-storage device. Good job Sony!
There are some caveats: mass copying can be a little flaky and I haven’t found anything to transcode to the WMV + Codec it requires for video (though I’ve only been look a day as of writing this).
I’ll keep looking for something that will work with regards to transcoding video.
Run update-manager -c (not -d anymore, that’s for development releases) in a shell/terminal. This is handy if you don’t get the upgrade button.
I reckon most of us have our little sayings. “I don’t believe it!” and the like. I have a few. Some ripped off from friends or family — such as “you are” in reply to anything, or “you’re an X” where X is the object of conversation — others I’ve created myself. My latest beauty, dubbed “errism” is quite affective in not only derailing any conversation you like but also bringing an equally as intense “WTF?” reaction. “Err” being the equal word to “eww” or “ugh!”. Try it.
Friend: “So I was at the beach on the weekend”
You: “Err!”
Friend: “…”
*eyes move around the room as their brain-cogs turn*
Friend: “What?”
Give it a shot on people you like or dislike, it’ll work (and you’ll look like a twat).
April 21, 2009 – 11:15 am
I’ve moved house and being nowhere near the router that connects us to the net, I had to purchase an Xbox Wireless Adapter (rip-off!). Once it was setup, I had to test the network connection. For some reason UPnP wasn’t working even when enabled on the Linksys WRT54GR, so I had to set up port forwarding. The ports needed by Xbox Live are as follows:
- TCP 80
- UDP 88
- TCP & UDP 3074
- TCP & UDP 53
I found those details on the official knowledge base article found here. Hope that helps!
That’s it citizen, keep an eye on your neighbour citizen. Tell us citizen, and we’ll look after you.
Says our friends over at the British Transport Police. Apparently they want everyone in the country to be a boiling pot of paranoia and distrust. They’re festering a nation of narrow-eyed minions hell-bent on getting one over on their comrade in the fight against terrorism.
I think this sums it up best of all. This’ll explain what’ll happen in the end:
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
Guess where that’s from?
