card and good speakers. I prefer to buy CDs and rip to FLAC because I
can have the best quality and not lose control over the media I bought.
I have all my music divided by album (CD) with the folder titled $Artist
- $AlbumTitle. The music files are all named $TrackNo-$TrackTitle.$Ext.
This is from before I used music library applications (first Winamp,
then Amarok) to keep things in order. When I don't want to launch a big
jukebox applucation, I go directly to the music I want and play it with
vlc or dragonplayer (dragonplayer is default app for now). I used to use
Amarok more, but 2.x doesn't perform as well as 1.4.x did. It's
improving though, and every release is better than the last.
I also use Last.fm a lot. the API is open and the Last.fm app is
open-source as well. The recommendations are decent and I don't have to
listen to music I don't like. I'm sorely tempted to buy a subscription.
I use my iAudio U2 and n810 for portable music. The former plays OGG
files and the latter is just awesome. In a pinch, I can tether the n810
to my phone and listen to Internet radio stations on my data plan.
-Barry
Ben Shewmaker wrote:
> Sitting here listening to some music this morning and got to
> wondering, how do other people listen to music? All on the computer?
> CD's? LP's? iPods? How does everybody else listen to music? Here's
> how I do it:
>
> I haven't owned a "real" stereo in years. Actually I think the last
> stand alone setup I had was a Magnavox 3 CD changer I got for
> Christmas when I was around 14 and kept until I left for college. I
> started using my computer as my tv/stereo/home theater setup since
> 2000 and haven't looked back since (in fact my wife and I no longer
> have a TV, just main PC and laptops do us just fine). I still have a
> somewhat largish collection of CDs (mostly classical), but those are
> all ripped and on my computer. So our main PC is where I have my nice
> speakers and is the central location for my music listening when I'm
> at home.
>
> The PC is running Japanese Windows 7 (my wife does translation work
> from home for a company she works for) and my favorite player across
> all systems has to be Foobar2000. Even on my laptop, which runs
> Xubuntu, I often run Foobar through wine when I have it on the home
> network. I like Foobar b/c it's so flexible and powerful. I
> mentioned I have a large classical music collection. I started
> re-ripping all of these recently into lossless Flac (drive space is
> cheap and plentiful these days, I figure why not have a bit-for-bit
> copy of the CD? and another reason I'm glad I bought all that music
> in CD form rather than MP3) and I like to have very detailed
> meta-data. One of the things I like about Foobar is that I can browse
> my collection by any tag or custom tag I want. In this screenshot,
> http://www.shewbox.org/images/foobar.jpg , I'm browsing by composers,
> which I know other players like Amarok can do, but I can also browse
> by things like conductor or orchestra or label. If I want to see all
> the recordings I have with Haitink conducting or the Chicago Symphony
> I can.
>
> The second place I can find my music collection is online. I am
> running Ampache, http://ampache.org/, on a password protected
> subdomain of my hosting account (screenshot:
> http://www.shewbox.org/images/amp.JPG) . I run a program on the main
> PC that syncs select bits of my music collection to my server and a
> nightly cron job updates Ampache's catalogue. Ampache is a really
> neat open source music web app, although it does have it shortcomings,
> at least for my classical music collection. It doesn't have the
> option to browse by anything other than artist or album. A Mahler
> recording might have Solti and the Chicago Symphony as the artist and
> Mahler only in the song title or album. So if I want to view
> everything composed by Mahler, I can't do that with Ampache. That's a
> minor annoyance though because overall it's great when I want to
> listen to some of my music away from home. Amarok also has built-in
> support for an ampache install, which is also really cool. So on my
> Xubuntu laptop I have Amarok installed and will often use that while
> I'm on campus since it will automatically connect to my server and
> stream the music that way.
>
> I never had much of a pop music collection and I've found that right
> now I really don't have a need for it. There are two free music web
> apps I use when I want to listen to some random pop song that has
> popped in my head. grooveshark.com <http://grooveshark.com> is a
> bright and shiny web 2.0 music search engine thing of sorts that finds
> and streams most things I throw at it. I also use skreemr.com
> <http://skreemr.com> sometimes, mainly because it provides direct
> links to the files it finds if I want to d/l anything. I also find it
> rather amusing that the RIAA spent the last ten or so years suing
> everybody and it's easier than ever to listen to just about anything
> you want for free. Just take a walk down Youtube lane. . . .
>
> And for mobile music I have an (unlocked) iPod touch. It's a great
> piece of hardware, but with all things Apple I don't like the closed
> nature of everything. And I hate iTunes. God I hate iTunes. Nothing
> against anyone who uses it, if you like it great for you. I just
> can't stand it, as a music player and for the fact that they want to
> lock the iPod into iTunes and try force you to use it for everything
> Apple. Yuck. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But the actual iPod
> itself, that I rather like in spite of itself. Btw, I now want an
> Android phone, b/c somebody wrote an ampache app for android, so I
> would be able to listen to my music collection on my phone.
>
> Oh, and as for buying music I still do buy classical CDs from time to
> time. Honestly, I think buying music online is over priced.
> Especially if you are getting a lossy mp3 with no album art and in the
> case of classical music, often poor tags. I think most albums should
> be $5 tops for an online purchase. There is often very little
> difference in price in an album download and an actual physical CD.
> To me anyways, why not pay an extra $3 and get the better package?
> Isn't one of the reasons why Apple's app store is so popular, because
> you can purchase apps without a second thought? What if most albums
> were like $2.99 or something? Then you'd buy just because it'd be a
> cheap, easy, (and legal!) way to get new music. There is one place I
> have bought classical music that does it very well, though, and that
> is Deutsche Grammophon's site. It's still a bit pricey, but on some
> of their albums you can purchase the album encoded in FLAC, and they
> include high resolution scans of the booklet and album art. In this
> case they deliver a much better product for the money. But this could
> be a topic for an other day.
>
> Oh dear, this ended up being a bit longer than I was thinking. Sorry
> 'bout that!
>
> Ben
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