Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Okay, not long after my rant about Amazon dropping support for Linux in their MP3 market place, I cooled down and did a second look. I'd rather fix my problem than bitch - here's what I figured out. In case you missed it, here's what prompted my outrage: to download albums from Amazon, you download an AMZ file, which is essentially an encoded list of URLs to the MP3s in the album. After supporting this functionality for Linux for a number of years, they suddenly dropped it. If you are a Linux user, they now inform you that you will need to download your MP3s from their Cloud Player, one file at a time . Click, download, click, download (repeat ad nauseum). If you purchase much music, this is a completely unacceptable solution. First rule of computer troubleshooting: no matter how outlandish or obscure the problem, somebody has experienced it before you. I did what any self-respecting geek did: I Googled. Breaking this down, there are actually 2 problems to solve. O...

And now for a short break from ponderous holiday thoughts. Here's my latest geeky thing. I confess, I love my tunes, which is one of the reasons I finally opted for an iPhone -- it's a great portable music device. And not just when using it as an MP3 player. Lots of devices do that. It also has great streaming audio functionality. Apps like Pandora , Slacker and Shoutcast (to mention but a few) were what sold me. But when I'm home I don't always feel like listening to streams on my iPhone. I've got other stream players, such as my Roku Soundbridge and Linksys WMLS11B . Here's a brief discussion about one way (out of many) to manage tunes for these two devices. Both of these have remotes that let you browse for music servers on your network or  select preselected streams. While useful, both devices have only low-res displays which means a lot of drilling down using the remote -- not a very fast or intuitive method of looking for stuff. Since I can...

My good friend and occasional intellectual sparring partner, the Whited Sepulchre , recently complained on Facebook, " I want to know why we have to tolerate living in a country where you're only allowed one iPod account per computer. " To which I say: if you choose to use iTunes, you choose to accept that limitation. Don't like it? There are alternatives. Let's start with what's wrong with iTunes -- why you can only have one iPod account per computer. Think this was some weakness or deficiency in the iPod or iTunes? Wrong: this is broken by design, on purpose. Consider this: iTunes is not just a music manager. It's the front end to Apple's extremely lucrative digital music store. You can only have one iPod per computer because that fits their business model. If you had more than one iPod per computer, you might be able to (god forbid) share music between devices. Fear not: alternatives abound. An old Windows favorite is Winamp . It's gone from a...

Okay, after a week two weeks of dealing with the Jaunty Jackalope upgrade, I'm here to pronounce Audex a worthy successor to Kaudiocreator. I used to rip a lot of CDs, in the past primarily wih Kaudiocreator- (Kaudiocreater was an app that ran under KDE 3.5). After the upgrade to KDE 4.2 , it (along with several other apps) disappeared. I was aghast. I loved Kaudiocreator: it was, in my opinion, one of the best Linux rippers out there. Then it disappeared! I found Audex while googling at work ( during lunch! I swear! ) which promised to be more or less a replacement. I installed with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension, but quickly became a fan. Like Kaudiocreator, Audex has a clean simple mostly intuitive interface, which integrates well with KDE 4. It doesn't have its predecessor's annoying habit of failing to encode a CD if the tag editor doesn't like the genre/label pulled down by the CDDB lookup. One can set multiple encoding profiles using Ogg, MP3, Flac,...