Posts Tagged music
Getting Audiogalaxy running on Ubuntu 11.04
Posted by George Nixon in Tips and Tricks on 10 October, 2011
I recently started using Ubuntu as my main OS, and in fact I successfully chmodded something for the first time today, so I’m not exactly an expert. But this was painful so once again, hopefully I’ll save others some time by writing it up.
Audiogalaxy is a platform for streaming your music from a pc to any number of other web-enabled devices (web browsers, smartphones, tablets). It’s not supported for Linux yet, but I found this post encouraging me to try using WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator, as if that clears anything up 
). so I gave it a go.
It installed just fine with WINE, but then sat there doing nothing. It didn’t seem to notice any music files that it would be able to stream. I checked that WINE was set up, and indeed the fake Windows filesystem in ~/.wine/drive_c/users/MY_USERNAME/My Music was a symlink (I think!) correctly pointing to my actual music directory (~/Music).
As the post above alludes to, I had to “hack the sqlite”, but I had to take a guess at what that meant. It’s working for me, but use at your own risk. I don’t even know what the “download” column in the appropriate table is for, so if at some point it chooses to overwrite your files with new downloads… let’s just say backups are important. So, that said…
Update: have a screenshot, on the house:
Uploaded with Shutter. Hosted by ImageShack.us. Click to make big.
- Close the Audiogalaxy helper, if it’s open.
- Open the file ~/.wine/drive_c/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/Local Settings/Application Data/Audiogalaxy/ag.dat with your favourite SQLite browser thing (never having used one before, I picked Sqliteman from the Ubuntu Software Center, which worked just fine).
- Find the table called shares_v1, and add a row (the table was initially empty for me, which suggested I’d found the issue!) with the values “C:\users\YOUR_USERNAME_HERE\My Music” in both “path” and “downloads” columns. Commit the change to the database if you haven’t already.
- Start the Audiogalaxy helper again.
- Hopefully now if you go to Audiogalaxy.com and log in, you’ll see your collection is starting to fill up with music! Play something triumphant and bask in the glory of success. Well, that’s what I did, YMMV.
How to Mute Adverts in Spotify
Posted by George Nixon in Tips and Tricks on 6 July, 2009
I realise I may be shooting myself in the foot, revealing this tip – if word gets out, I’m sure the Spotify team will patch it immediately – but I’ve found a way to quieten those pesky commercials.
If you’re not aware, Spotify is a free music streaming service that you browse with a super-fast, proprietary media player. It boasts millions of tracks and many thousands of albums, playing at high quality and with instant access. The price you pay is occasional adverts, which are significantly less frequent or annoying than those on commercial radio. They are still quite annoying though, nonetheless. And, cleverly, turning the volume down actually pauses the ad, so you’ve no choice but to listen to it. Until now.
So here’s what you do: when the advert starts playing, hit pause. You can then turn down the volume on the player and press play, and the advert will resume playing silently. You can watch the little timer to see when it’s done, and then just turn the volume back up. I haven’t tried pausing and then using the system volume to turn down the sound, so I’ll report on that soon.
Before I go, I’d just like to plead with Spotify to open-source the software, so people like me can start making add-ons for it, just like with Songbird. Your service has rocketed in popularity, leaving a small team to service over a million users. Right now, all we want is an equaliser. Oh and a lyrics plug-in. And not to mention…! So open-source the player and we’ll fill in the gaps. Come on, you know it makes sense.
edit: this article used to be titled “How to Mute Adverts in Spotify – July 2009″. However, as of April 2010, this technique still works just as well as it ever did – Spotify have taken no actions to close this loophole. I’ve taken the July part of the title out in order to make it obvious that the article is still relevant today.
Open in Songbird add-on for Firefox
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 8 May, 2009
Tools menu after installing the Open in Songbird add-on
Songbird is a great piece of software – a halfway-home between media player and browser that turns the web into a playlist. Since version 1.1 added the possibility of opening a Songbird tab from Firefox through a special ‘songbird:’ protocol, I’ve been meaning to try to make an extension that does just that, and in a user-friendly manner. Having never made a Mozilla add-on before, it also seemed a relatively simple project to get help me get my feet wet.
Skip much head-scratching and cursing and here is is: Open in Songbird for Firefox. It adds what it says on the tin: an ‘Open this page in Songbird’ option to Tools, right-click and toolbar menus in the browser. If you want the toolbar button, you have to add it manually after installation, as Mozilla try to prevent users’ virtual real estate from clogging with each new extension by hiding buttons by default. Just click ‘customize’ and drag the Songbird icon to the toolbar.
I’m no artist so I’ve re-used the icon file that comes with Songbird 1.1 in Windows. If this is a problem I am happy to change it, but as it is I’m hoping this extension could be of use to the Songbird faithful. Props also to Chris Castiglione for this post on using bookmarklets to achieve similar results as my extension – it’s a simple operation behind-the-scenes, but Open in Songbird should make it a lot more pleasant for those lacking the requisite javascript know-how.
Introducing Twistband – read music tweets from Twitter
Posted by George Nixon in Projects on 15 March, 2009
Update: Appjet has ceased hosting little projects such as Twistband in order to focus on their runaway hit, Etherpad – an online notepad that people can edit simultaneously and see the results live. I can’t blame them, as it’s a cool and innovative app with a million uses, and apparently business customers want in. As Twistband was just an experiment, I won’t be migrating it to another host.
I was reading an article on TechCrunch about Twitter, or rather how its uniquely opinionated and blunt content combines with a good API to give it a huge potential as a search weapon of the future. Having watched from afar the gold rush as early iPhone apps made massive bundles of cash even for lone developers, I wanted in this time! Er, that is to say, I had an idea for a search-based Twitter app and was in no way tempted by fame and/or fortune. So I introduce <drum roll>… Twistband:
Twistband screenshot
As you can see, my page takes the band or artist name that you are interested in, and searches the latest Twitter posts, or ‘tweets’. If you aren’t aware what Twitter does, try watching the short video, Twitter In Plain English. Done? Good. So, why use Twistband and not just search.twitter.com?
Well, very simply, mine is more specific. Try searching for “the Killers” normally and you’ll get results about murderers as well as musicians. “Bush” will render more tweets about a certain ex(phew!)-president than briefly popular 90s post-grunge band, Bush. I’ve tried to narrow down the results by adding keywords behind the scenes, such as “listening” or “mp3″. It works quite well, though it’s not going to change the world.
No, it doesn’t have any serious applications (I can think of!), and perhaps it won’t make me rich, but maybe someone will get a kick out of it. Try a few bands you really love; it’s kind of nice to see how they fit into the daily lives of strangers too. But I guess I’m going to have to think harder if I want to harness Twitter and be a millionair this time next year…
Hi!
I also make music…
