Brave New (Digital) World

My brother-in-law John (on the right on the album cover) plays bass in a band - Monkeytin - who released their new album Brave last October, but they recently announced that it was now available on iTunes. Being the “freedom-hating” person I am (Christmas saw the household iPod count rise to 4, plus various Apple related accessories, and I’m seriously considering a Shuffle for running and waiting to see if the Mac Mini is updated at MacWorld this week) I duly checked it out and there it was: £6.32 for the full album, or 79p per track. It was also nice to see that they were only available as iTunes Plus (256kb AAC and DRM free).

Before I bought the album I decided to check out Amazon, and I was pleased to see that it’s also availble through their MP3 download service from both the UK and US stores. This time the album was £4.99 or 69p per track.

Since I’ve never tried Amazon’s download service (and I’m a cheapskate!) I decided to go with them. A brief download/install of their helper application, the purchase of the album and subsequent download later and all was good. Very impressed, both with the price and the service. I’ll be using them again.

Album review coming soon.

bzr status schwuk

Well it’s been a while I wrote here (if you ignore the Twitter spam :)) - in fact July was the last time I blogged in earnest - and a few things have changed, so I thought I’d talk about some of them.

First of all I’ve moved to the Distro QA team here at Canonical. This means that I’m now working directly on Ubuntu, and my work will be much more visible - both in the distribution and here on this blog. I’m working with a great team here within Canonical - Henrik, Leann, Brian, Steve, Ara, Pedro, and Marc - and the wider Ubuntu QA community, as well as the rest of the Distro team and of course the whole Ubuntu community. At the moment I’m focused on hardware testing, and you’ll be seeing a lot more attention given to testing in Ubuntu over the next few releases.

Apart from working I attended the “last” LugRadio Live - see you all again next year! - and had a great holiday in the South of France. I also spent a long weekend in the woods in Wales at the Bushcraft UK Bushmoot where I got the chance to meet Mors Kochanski who is an amazing, inspiring and above all friendly guy. The ‘moot itself was well worth the trip, just like LugRadio Live is, but meeting him made it absolutely worthwhile.

Last November I pondered moving to 64-bit. Last week after a few stability and performance problems (entirely self-inflicted) I decided to bite the bullet, wipe Vista from my hard drive forever (it came with the laptop, and I left it around “just in case” but it never really got used) and perform a fresh install. This was my first “real” install (if you ignore my testing work) since I first put Feisty on the laptop when I got it, and the install experience is really nice these days. Since I had the opportunity I decided to go with 64-bit, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve had zero problems with it. Flash is commonly criticised as being difficult under 64-bit, but it installed via the package in Synaptic and has worked since. If anything Firefox + Flash has been more reliable than it was under 32-bit.

In August I succumbed and got myself an iPhone 3G, even though I’m months away from the end of my current contract with my N95. So far I have been seriously impressed with it - browsing is excellent, and it is by far the best e-mail experience I’ve had on any mobile device to date. Oh, and it’s a decent phone too! I’ve not really encountered any of the performance/stability problems many others have complained about, except when I had it configured to sync OTA with Google via NeuvaSync when it would occasionally get a bit sluggish. That was with the 2.0.2 firmware, and I’ve not re-enabled OTA syncing since upgrading to 2.1 yesterday. This is my first iPod as well - the only other current iPod in the house belongs to Schwuklet #1, although Schwuklet #2 has put an order in with Santa Claus for a 4th generation Nano. The iPhone has increased my podcast consumption as well, which can only be a good thing.

That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll think of more things to post soon.

Stuck on you

It was remiss of me not to mention it at the time, but during that traditional British pastime known as Easter Weekend I left the comfort of Cumbria and ventured south. After a completely uneventful journey (although there was KFC of the boneless variety) I found myself in the company of Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Ciemon Dunville, a significantly svelter (than the last time I saw him) Tony Whitmore, Laura Cowen, a bunch of audio equipment, several EeePCs, an Openmoko Neo 1793, and cake (no lie).

Such a gathering could only mean one thing…

No, not that!

It was the recording of the second episode of the official (because we said so) Ubuntu UK Podcast which, thanks to certain stars and planets being aligned (and the fact I was in the area anyway), I was able to take part in.

This was my third attempt at participating in a podcast - the first two involved (separately) a phone and attending the Linux User and Developer Exposition - and was very enjoyable. It took me bit to get used talking into the microphone and not at whoever I was talking/replying to, but I got there. I’ve met all except Ciemon numerous times in the past, so it really was more like getting together with friends than recording a show. Considering this is only their second episode, it all felt very professional.

I’d love to take part in more episodes, but geography is against that, so I’ll continue to be involved in planning, promotion and the site of course.

We’ve added a Twitter account for the show where we’ll announce items of pertinence. If you’re a Twitterer make sure you follow us.

Anyway, go listen, (hopefully) enjoy and more importantly let us know what you thought.

Media Management Misery

I’m sure I’ll get some heat for this, but here goes…

Why is managing media so painful under Linux?

I have a significant amount of audio on my laptop, and a phone that is a fairly capable music player. However if I want to copy some of that audio to my phone, I have to resort to manually copying and arranging the files, as well as ensuring the tags are right (as the N95 relies on these). It’s an awkward, but manageable process that I don’t do so often.

Podcasts are a different story though. My phone is capable of downloading podcasts itself, but they are slow to download and awkward to manage. Copying podcasts from the laptop to the phone can be fraught with peril.

By contrast I had to reset my daughter’s iPod today after I tried to manage it under Linux.  The reset and re-population through iTunes was painless. I know it is because Apple control the software and hardware, but it can’t be that hard to get right can it?

Don’t even get me started on photos and movies…

Ubuntu UK Podcast

Some folks from the Ubuntu UK Local Community team have got together and made a podcast:

Ubuntu UK Podcast

“No, we’re not ready…”

“…OK, now we’re ready.”

This year I’m going to attempt to join the annual LugRadio marathon - initiated by mrBen (pictured below) - in the build up to LugRadio Live (the original and best UK version, unless someone wants to sponsor me to go to the USA one).

photo credit: andy.d

I’ve already started with Season 1, Episode 1 “The Phantom Message“. Even though they’ve improved in both technical and professional terms over the years, listening to that first episode again reminded me why I like(d*) listening so much. Indeed I became their first official fan!

In the spirit of competition I’m going to see mrBen’s challenge and raise it by including all of hashlugradio as well. This is, of course, in preparation for hashlugradio Live 2008 - the event that allows LugRadio Live to share the same time, dates and venue.

* I can’t remember when or exactly why I stopped listening regularly. Maybe I’ll be able to spot it as I go through.

Musical Reset

A post from Ryan Singer of 37signals about how to take control of a massive iTunes library got me thinking about my own music collection. Obviously I’m not using iTunes, but according to Rhythmbox my music collection isn’t small. Right now it claims I have 2,884 songs taking up 14.3GB of space which would provide me with 7 days, 19 hours and 14 minutes of non-stop, non-repetitive (barring duplicates) music. I’m sure there are lots of people who can (and will) boast of larger music collections, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a lot of music. This, coupled with the fact that my Top Rated and Recently Played automatic playlists encompass only a fraction of my collection inspires me to do something about it.

Initially I was going to follow Ryan’s approach – archive off all the music and only add it back into my collection when I had a real desire to listen to it – but after mulling the idea over for a few days I’ve decided to take an additional step: instead of simply rebuilding my collection from, er, my collection, I’m going to actively seek out new music.

My collection is wide and varied, but I do tend to listen to the same stuff over and over again. Now I’m going to enlist the likes of , Last.fm, Jamendo, and Magnatune to discover something new. I’m also going to try and tune into a few more musical podcasts like Podrunner and Groovelectric to add some variety.

Any suggestions of artists/bands or podcasts for me?

Multimediocre

Nik Butler put out a vlog, vodcast, video today commenting on the state of multimedia in FOSS. This is my response.

Read the rest »

Adventures in digital distribution

Although I’m a big consumer of digital media, I’ve never really been much of a purchaser. Apart from a few exceptions (which I’ll come to) the vast majority of my media is either a) ripped from physical media, b) shared with friends or c) free. The latter encompasses things like YouTube and podcasts, or stuff from the like of Jamendo or Magnatune.

The few pieces of media I’ve purchased have been exclusively through iTunes because they make the whole damn process so easy. The trouble is that now my house is mostly¹ free of that operating system I can no longer use iTunes to purchase any new music (or even listen to/watch the stuff I have purchased – DRM sucks). So I’ve avoided purchasing anything new digitally since then.

Yesterday I was introduced to a couple of new bands: Flood of Red and Enter Shikari. I’m always keen to support artists I like, but I don’t really buy CDs anymore. However Enter Shikari’s site linked me to 7digital who had both bands and – even better – they were available as unencumbered MP3 (as well as the more typical WMA and AAC) so I grabbed both Flood’s EP and Enter’s album as well as The White Stripes latest (Icky Thump) in said format. Checkout was painless as they support PayPal (so I don’t have to give my card details to yet another company), and my only criticism of the whole process was that I had to download each track separately. If I was using another OS I could have used their software to speed this up but it was only an inconvenience, not a show stopper.

So I’ve got new music, almost instantaneous satisfaction, and a warm fuzzy feeling from knowing that I’m supporting the artists (and their labels, and the distributors etc.) whilst not supporting DRM.

Another criticism – but this is not 7digital’s fault – is that not all music is available in a choice of formats or unencumbered by DRM, but the simple fact is I won’t be buying anything that has those restrictions.

¹ My laptop came with Vista on it, and it’s still in there somewhere but never gets booted. One of these days I’ll get around to getting rid of it.