Lucas Gonze blog

CC Mixter has changed hands and is now in private ownership. It’s a supercool development that reflects AIUI a profound vision of the future of record companies and recording artists:

Social sites generating music are the next generation of both bands and labels.

Have a local gathering of members making live music? It’s the same as the band doing a live show. Have more than one of these? The band is on tour. Etc. From this vantage point, 8Bit Peoples is both a label and a band, for example.

(Note that this is my own observation and not based on inside information!)

If you put the Chatzilla plugin for Firefox into a process separate from your main browser, you can alt+tab to get there. Here’s the command line I use for that:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -chat -quiet -no-remote -P "IRC" &

Officially speaking, you can’t view an image on a Kindle without enclosing it in a Mobipocket ebook. But there is an undocumented workaround. Sheet music is usually in static formats like GIF or PDF, so the workaround makes it easier to use legacy sheet music on a Kindle.

So here is a script to automatically handle the labor.

#!/bin/sh

#
# Given an image in the console, copy it to a mounted Kindle in such a
# way that the Kindle will include it in listings.
#
# Depends on Image Magick


IMG=$1
TITLE=$2
MOUNTPOINT=$3
if [ "$IMG" == "" -o "$TITLE" == "" -o "$MOUNTPOINT" == "" ]
then
    echo 'usage: kindleizeimage [image file] [title] [Kindle mount point]'
    exit
fi
if [ ! -f "$IMG" ]
then
    echo "$IMG :("
    exit 1
fi
if [ ! -d "$MOUNTPOINT" ]
then
    echo "$MOUNTPOINT :("
    exit 1
fi

tgtD="$MOUNTPOINT/pictures/$TITLE"
if [ ! -d "$tgtD" ]
then
    mkdir -pv "$tgtD" || exit $!
fi

tgtF="$tgtD/"`basename "$IMG"`

convert -rotate "-90>" "$IMG" "$tgtF" || exit $!

echo "Kindle -> Alt + z"

Internet triumphalists often fail to understand the human price of change.

Eric Garland interviewed by Greg Sandoval at CNet:

These are tough lessons. By the way, I don’t want to sound
like the armchair pundit. You end up sounding not very empathetic. You
sound like some ass who says “This is how it’s going to be and if you
don’t like too bad.” I’m not trying to be dismissive. I’m not trying
to be glib about this. I understand the implication may well be
tens-of-thousands of jobs lost, billions of dollars pouring out of the
industry, shutterings, downsizings…I’m not trying to make light of
that. I’m just telling you that in the final accounting i think some
things we now know. Some of them are very unpopular even in concept
and some of them are very hard to incorporate into strategic thinking,
but that doesn’t make them any less avoidable or inevitable.

Which is to say: have a fucking heart. Just because the steam engine beat John Henry doesn’t mean John Henry got what he deserved.

Apparently the new Myspace is a music business, not a social business.

I remember not so long ago when Imeem decided it was a social network enhanced by music rather than the reverse, I assume because the social features had a better chance of being profitable.

I remember not so long ago when Myspace’s edge as a music provider was that it didn’t pay royalties, so had a chance of surviving. The sense I get now is that Rupert and Fox are culturally from the media business, they were unable to run Myspace as a tech company, and now they’re retreating to familiar ground out of habit.

I dunno, man. The whole internet music industry is fishy, and this particular fish makes even less sense than the norm.

Crazy Alex reports that the Firefox MAFF format does _not_ support indexing into remote jar files using the “jar” scheme, so a URL like jar:http://www.foo.com/bar/baz.jar!/index.html won’t work:

I tried to use jar: prefix, but with no success. Firefox geves download dialog or writes an error stating ”Unsafe File Type. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it is contained in a file type that may not be safe to open. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.”

The reason I’m blogging about this hopelessly obscure technical point is that the Apple format for digital music packaging, the ePub and MOBI formats for ebooks, and many other ad hoc formats are exploring this same space of multi-file archives. MAFF is a candidate for an open and common implementation.

A few Playdar-related developments from Lucas Hrabovsky of Amie St (aka __lucas) —

He set up a page with song listings marked up using the hAudio microformat. hAudio allows code to know that one bit of text is the title of the song and another bit of text is the name of the performer. Here’s what his hAudio markup looks like:

            <div class="haudio">
               <img src="/static/assets/album-default-55w_55h.jpg" class="photo" />
               <div class="top">
               <span class="fn">Lucky Dutch</span> by 
               <span class="contributor">Radio Moscow</span>
               </div>
            </div>

Notice that nowhere in there is a direct link to an MP3. The labeled bits of text are fed to Playdar, which uses them to search the user’s MP3s (and other sources) for a song file with the same title and performer. If it finds one, it makes it available over an HTTP connection. In this format any in-browser player, like Quicktime, WMP, or a Flash player, can take over.

Amie Street is a web site that sells songs. If the user has one of their songs on their machine already, the content resolver will find it and make it available for playback in the browser. This mechanism enables web sites to play music without actually supplying it. No webcasting, no hosting, no transmission, no copying.

What if there is an MP3 on Amie Street’s servers that the user doesn’t have yet? __lucas wrote a content resolver plugin that does a lookup to Amie Street’s web API. If the lookup succeeds, the MP3 is made available from Amie Street’s server instead of the user’s local machine.

His code is available at http://gist.github.com/113795. It’s only 58 lines of dead simple PHP — the heavy lifting is all in the web service on the other end of the line.

For that to work with no further development the MP3 on Amie Street’s server has to be freely available. They’re really an ecommerce site, though, so what if they’re not giving the MP3 away but do have it available to purchase? That’s a frontier.

He and I got into a dialog about that frontier. I asked How does the ecommerce part work? I’m wondering about what the user flow would be when there needs to be an interruption to make a purchase. He proposed the following:

1. Playdar should just nudge you that some of the items you’ve requested can’t be resolved (ie via a Tooltip).
2. Click on tooltip to open review/login in jQuery.dialog
3. Confirm purchase and kick off download
4. The AS resolver could then stream you the full tracks while you wait for the download
5. Once downloaded and scanned in, can now be resolved by playdar on it’s own for next tme

The Amie Street API could make this happen easily with a couple more additions.

The next step would be applying this to stores other than Amie Street. For example, you should be able to set a preference to go through emusic or automatically find the lowest price and go there. We need to make it as simple and convenient for people to buy [as possible].

So where things stand is that we’re on the cusp of ecommerce integration, a feature which would drive business at stores, enable users to access gigantic repositories on the fly, and allow interoperability between stores.

That said, automatically purchasing and downloading in a uniform way is a can of worms. It would be like the Amazon, eMusic, and iTunes MP3 downloaders, but in a single integrated form. Maybe the downloader can come with the resolver, so that each store supplies its own…

Look, I know nothing, and I realize the potential for creepiness in hearing this from _me_, but I think the Miley song is better. What I know for sure is that the Van Halen song isn’t any less perky.

C. Joel goes ape for Playdar:

I read recently on Wired’s Epicenter blog about a new application that really excites me. It excites me because this is what computers are supposed to do.

Playdar works with streaming sites like Last.fm, Pandora, Spotify, etc and examines any music files you have on your computer. If you’re listening to a streaming site and that site wants to play a song you already have on your hard drive, it plays the file on your hard drive instead of streaming it. This is brilliant because it saves the streaming company money, which keeps them in business longer. For the listener, it means you’ll probably get a better sounding song because typically the stuff on your computer is higher quality than what is streamed.

Hopefully, all the streaming companies and music players (*cough* iTunes *cough*) will support this as a plugin soon, so as Van Halen sang, we can get the best of both worlds!