mult.ifario.us

When the Sprial Frog relationship with Universal was announced, I was tentatively intrigued and waited for the catch to come out. This is in spite of the fact that I can't think of any artists on major labels that I give a hoot about. Once the first sketchy details were out about having to watch ads, it sounded like a job for Mechanical Turk — I can have a remote human watch the ads on my behalf for a nominal fee. The idea had a certain impish appeal in that I'm certain that the advertisers wouldn't want their demographic to be people somewhere in the world who'd sit through an ad for a nickel, but it was all mooted when it the details of Spiral Frog's plans for regressive DRM came out. I'm going to have to think about other opportunities where MechTurk could provide an acceptable-cost route around other on-line annoyances.

Now, as for the obsession with DRM,...

Consumer: (in raspy falsetto) I'd like to download some music, but I don't like DRM.

Waiter: (earnestly) Well, we've got some Same-Old-Same-Old; that's got DRM, ads, music, and DRM. That's not much DRM.

Consumer: (angrily) I don't like DRM!

Chorus of Record Labels: DRM DRM DRM, D-R-M D-R-M...

Bloody Vikings.

OK, Yahoo!, you got my $1.99, but not because I'm a fan of Jessica Simpson's music. Like the vote I cast for John Kerry (i.e., against George Jr.), I'll vote for Jessica Simpson if it's a vote against DRM. So, what's next?

The kid does this bouncing thing when she hears music that she likes. (It's kind of like the way an average white guy dances...) If she's stuck in her high chair or in the car, she bobs her head to the beat to show approval. She has pretty good taste. She dances for the Beatles, for Bach, and for the musical interludes on NPR programs like This American Life or Marketplace. She also likes “indietronica” (a.k.a. modern minimalist Krautrock), which is nice, since I have plenty of it around and can get more DRM-free and on-demand from my favorite on-line music store, Bleep. The kid's picks in the genre include Boards of Canada, Plaid, Plone, I.S.A.N. (their rendition of some classic Satie is her current go-to-sleep music), b. fleischmann, and pretty much anything on Morr.

I followed the instructions and got Songbird built and running on my Mac without too much trouble. (I made a couple of very minor tweaks, as I prefer fink to darwinports, but it is essential to get the glib2 (2.10.3) and orbit2 from darwinports and in that order, as the locations of libraries are hardwired into some of the dependencies.)

I remain pleased with my minimal headless music configuration, but if I wanted something more iTunes-like, Songbird looks like it's going to be a good candidate. (Maybe the Mozilla plumbing will give Eclipse RCP a run for its money in the cross-platform rich client space...?) For a pre-alpha, it's in good shape so far. It imported most of my MP3s but turned up its beak at my FLACs and Oggs even though it looks like the embedded VLC engine should support them. It will be interesting to see how plugins and some of the network and social aspects evolve; if nothing else, Javascript as an extension language is more likely to spawn a community than iTunes's COM SDK on Windows and AppleScript API on OS X.

We've become almost exclusively digital music consumers. It's easily been six months since we bought our last CD, and a Squeezebox has replaced a CD player as the primary means of playing music in some parts of the house. After some experimentation with SoftSqueeze as a client for the Slimserver that streams music to the Squezebox, I settled on a combination of the headless squeezeslave player with some shell scripts that use the web interface to the Slimserver (via curl) to play, pause, skip, and shuffle, e.g.:

#!/bin/sh
curl -s http://slim.internal:9000/status_header.html\
\?p0=pause\&player=172.16.1.201 > /dev/null

So far, so good with leaving iTunes behind. Now I just need to write a Quicksilver integration...