Re: [BLUG] How do you listen to music?

In the car, I listen to Sirius. Can barely live without it.

 

At home/office I usually listen to internet radio. The links below are mp3 streams.

 

wfpk.org (Public radio Louisville, KY. Huge variety. See playlists online.)

http://streaming.win.net:7070/wfpk_hb.mp3

 

kuwl.org (Public radio Laramie, Wyoming. All Jazz.)

http://wprhqstream4.uwyo.edu:8000/kuwl128.mp3

 

grooveradio.com (All electronic, DJ)

http://mp3-hb.grooveradio.com

 

I also like to listen to live recordings of concerts from the Live Music Archive. And other stuff on archive.org.

http://www.archive.org/details/etree

 

Enjoy,

Weldon

 

From: blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu [mailto:blug-bounces@cs.indiana.edu] On Behalf Of Ben Shewmaker
Sent: Friday, November 06, 2009 11:47
To: Bloomington LINUX Users Group
Subject: [BLUG] How do you listen to music?

 

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 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 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