re: Downloading Music
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Friends, Media
Ian just wrote a post about his brother coming to grips with the legality of downloading music, and I felt an opinion of mine should see the light of an LCD screen. Your eyes will thank me later.
Or at least I hope so - if you’re still using a CRT please, purchase invest in an LCD screen.
=====
But here’s a potential problem when switching from a download mentality, to a purchase mentality.
Purchasing every song either detracts from genre experimentation, by forcing the consumer to choose tracks wisely and with more thought, or it puts a huge hole into ones pocket every month because of excessive track downloading/purchasing. When you have spent the last [however many years] with the attitude that if you like that song, you can just go grab it and listen away, it will be hard to have to stop and think about whether its good enough that its worthy of spending a dollar on. Or $10 if you’re like me and want to get the whole album to keep things organised and complete.
In an ideal situation, one could maybe learn from the movie industry and the success of Blockbuster and the like. While it may sound silly, the ability to “rent” an album for a period of a month or maybe even longer could prove to be a huge success.
Because, personally speaking, a lot of the time I find that I like a certain track or artist, but after a few weeks of repetitive listening I’ve lost their taste. After which I might not care about the album anymore, but at least I would have been able to make an informed decsion as to whether to officially own it or not.
=====
It’s definitely a thought.
Ieva’s Polka
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media
Song of the week…it has a very pleasant catchy tune.
“Ieva’s Polka” is by the Finnish Quartet “Loituma“.
And if you like the song, heres a remix version that I like. Check out youtube for the other 9,999 different versions.
(Don’t mind the video, I couldn’t find another version of this particular remix)
Tags: Media
A review of Mojo, an iTunes library sharing software
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Media, Review, Software
A little over a year ago, I bought a Linksys NSLU2 NAS, or the “Slug” as it was called, in order to hook up an external hard drive and share my MP3 collection off of it using Apple’s DAAP. It went well, but as I rarely needed my MP3 collection when I was out of the house it ended up being one of those “because I can” things and I returned the Slug.
In a nutshell the procedure went like this:
- Local machine:
- Install DAAP server
- Install SSH server
- Setup SSH key files (as opposed to passwords)
- Setup port tunneling using SSH
- Remote Machine:
- Install iTunes (unfortunately the best DAAP client at the time)
- Install SSH client
- Setup port tunneling through the the SSH client
- Attach the SSH key file to make it auto login (or not, depending on security)
- SSH into the server, and Voila!
So, if you’re still with me you can tell that is requires a bit of work, and is definitely not easy and intuitive to setup.
Fast forward to the year 2008 and “Mojo is here“.
Mojo accomplishes everything outlined above with one small intuitive little client, it actually goes above and beyond as its list of features include; zero configuration, instant download capability, and playlist synchronization.
It still relies on iTunes though unfortunately.
As of release 2.5.1, Mojo is offered as free software, with its only limitation on the number of peers in your friends list. Alternatively, for the small price of $10.95, you can upgrade to Mojo Pro, which currently gives you three licenses, and lifetime upgrade membership.
The only thing really souring the deal for me is its mac only status and iTunes dependency, but I believe there is a windows version in the works. And as for the iTunes/DAAP dependency, well I’ll have to wait till Mojo starts supporting WMP/UPNP.
Tags: Apple, daap, iTunes, Media, Mojo, Network, p2p, Review, Software, SSH
Merry Christmas!
Posted by Pavan Chander | Filed under Events, Friends
For the first time, in quite a long while I managed to see a White Christmas, in the 11 Christmas’ I’ve seen in Canada, only 2 or 3 have been white. That too, they were mostly all in the first couple of years.
My Christmas news is:
- Andrew’s back from Carleton but I’m sure the break will go by too fast to really enjoy it.
- The 540 site design is more or less done, now it’s just a matter of content, oh and actually getting the “people in high places” to notice it.
- My business is starting to really take off, and I expect to see some very solid results by the end of Jan - infact 2008 is promising to be an excellent year, can’t wait.
- Caught up on 2 old time nerdy movies, Blade Runner & Hackers.
I found Blade Runner to be a much better book than a movie, as it went a tad slow for me. But Hackers on the other hand, I saw it and went “Wow why have I not seen this before”. The movie is full of all the 1990’s stereotypes about computer nerds/hackers, which I love for their naive humour.
I learnt two things out of Hackers, thank god for cable modems, and the demise of the 28kbps world. And that I hope to heaven that your password isnt still “god”.
