Acquiring Music

A few weeks back when I was wracking my brains for inspiration for my first re-attempt at the whole blogging thing, I drafted up a relatively self-righteous ranty post about how I had been getting hold of music for a long time, and what I thought was the main points the ‘industry’ was missing. After about four re-writes I canned it and that, I thought, was that.

Then along came Spotify.

First a bit of background (sorry history is the standard filler out there, even if we were warned against using it in our scientific essays…): Most people know my past thoughts on buying music in CD format – suffice it to say that I have a large iTunes library and own three physical CDs. I refused to pay for music with DRM included. I won’t be told what I can and can’t do with my media. If I want to copy it for a friend then I will. I actually get the reason that piracy has the music industry shit-scared, but that doesn’t mean that for a second I condone how they have gone about ‘protecting’ their copyrights. Therefore, in lieu of real alternatives, less conventional methods were employed for getting hold of my music.

I never really wanted to buy something like music without sampling first. I have no one taste in a genre, and so I can’t say that I will like everything by, say, R.E.M. and everything by their similar artists. To this end I usually tried to use the radio (whenever I listened to that – not really going to be a constant source of new music then..), hearing and tagging with Shazam or googling a line I remembered, and then getting the album which that track was on. My interest in David Bowie was sparked by hearing ‘Changes’ on the radio and then pulling down a copy of the Greatest Hits.

This worked up to a point, but there was no real way of sampling an entire album fully before paying for it. Last.fm worked up to a point when they introduced the ability to listen to full tracks, but they didn’t all of what I wanted. Recently I have come across Spotify, and was invited by @alexmuller. Finally I have somewhere to go to where I can search for a track, legally play it in full, and indeed play entire albums in full before I pay for them. There is the odd advert (oddly enough they all seem to be somehow related to the UK Government so far), which pays for my access to the content, and I am more than happy with that. They are not intrusive and I am happy with their presence. Of course I ignore every word between the beginning and the end, but then having been bombared with advertising on almost every entertainment vessel since I was born (God save the BBC and the licence fee I suppose, for the little respite it provides) I am pretty accustomed to that.

Once I am happy I like something, I can simply head over to Amazon MP3 (now my full time port of call for buying music), and within a few minutes (or hours depending on if I am connecting via LSOXS or not) I have my tracks in my library, importantly, in a format I can do whatever I like with. Regardless of the talk that MP3 is still copyrighted etc, the format is ubiquitous and has been the format of choice since day one. Maybe I will eat my words when I have a library full of music in a defunct format in a few years, but I think it will likely be a cold day in hell before that happens.

So I am finally happy. By now you have probably figured that is something I tend to admit to relatively infrequently. I can get my music in a way that is a) legal, b) convenient, and c) exactly how I always thought I should be able to. There is an R.E.M. album (Document, for those interested) sat in my Amazon basket along with some Kinks songs about to be purchased. The artist will get their very meagre cut from my payment, and I won’t get sued, arrested, black-bagged or any other form of financial/physical torture for enjoying it.

This has not been a comprehensive rundown of Spotify. Adam tested it a little more intensively, and seems to be using it in almost the same fashion as I am. Great minds think alike I suppose. Night all.

Scrobble the iPod touch/iPhone

Over the past few months, I have gotten quite used to being able to scrobble the plays I record on my iPod. Being out and about quite a bit, I find myself listening to a fair chunk of my music on my iPod, and so not being able to record these to last.fm was very annoying. When I searched the forums at last.fm, all I could find were some quite convoluted ways of doing it, and nothing particularly simplistic. This is where Google comes in…

This morning, did a quick search, and found this. Perfect guide for a Mac user to get his/her iPod touch or iPhone scrobbling its plays when synced. This blog has since ceased to be, so I am reposting the info this article contained. Full credit to the original author though:

I found some very useful information last night on how to scrobble your tracks from your iPhone or iPod Touch. As you know I’m a big last.fm’er (?) and I’ve really been missing my iPod tracks on Last.fm. Here’s where I cobbled all this info from if you have any problems.

So here’s what you need to do:

• Don’t use the official Last.fm client and download iScrobbler currently at 1.5.1 here.

• Download this ‘Fake iPod’ .dmg file here.

• Make this AppleScript:

tell application “Finder”

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

delay 15

eject disk “Fake Ipod”

end tell

• Put this script in your Library/iTunes/scripts folder (if it doesn’t exist just create the folder, it’ll work fine).

• Be sure to have iScrobbler setup to scrobble iPod tracks and set the playlist to ‘Recently Played’

• When you sync your iPod/Phone just click the script in the new ’scripts’ menu in iTunes and the .dmg will mount make iTunes think an iPod is attached and cause iScrobbler to scrobble your recent tracks from the iPod.

• The .dmg will then unmount. To be honest it probably doesn’t need to be 15 secs. Just 1 would probably do

The only thing I found didn’t work from that guide was the POSIX addressing of the Fake iPod.dmg. Whenever I ran the script, I got an error about not being able to find the file. To circumvent this I replaced the line:

open file (“/path/to/fake ipod.dmg” as POSIX path)

With:

open document file “Fake iPod.dmg” of folder “Scrobble” of folder “username” of folder “Users” of startup disk

To Windows users, I am sure this will be rectified eventually, either through the last.fm official application, or through a similar method to the above. To Mac users, good luck!

Last.fm & iPods – a match made in hell… or is it? Part 2

The second option I tried, and the one which worked for me, was using the Last.fm client. Before I did this, I bought my latest shiny new toy – the 15.4″ Santa Rosa MacBook Pro – and so this section is using the Mac OS X version of the Last.fm client. Having installed the program I noticed that there was an iPod section in the Settings menu. Once I set up my (Dad’s) 5.5G 30GB iPod to sync with the MacBook Pro’s iTunes, to a playlist called ‘iPod Music’, I tried to get it to scrobble. According to the Last.fm website, the iPod must not be manually managed for this to work, and this was how I found it to be as well.

In my experience, iTunes on the Mac must be closed before the iPod is connected. Whenever I have had iTunes open the ’scrobble your iPod’ window hasn’t appeared. Remember that this is still an experimental feature at the time of writing, and so this may change in the future. If you do have iTunes closed when you connect the iPod, then it will automatically open when the iPod is connected, and the Last.fm window will also open (although sometimes it opens behind the iTunes window, so make sure to look for it). Also note that the scrobbling process is not totally automatic. The scrobble window presents you with a list of your plays, with checkboxes next to each so that you can choose to not scrobble some tracks, because for example, you have scrobbled another play later than that one, and so scrobbling it would trigger Last.fm’s spam protection. When you are happy, simply click ‘Scrobble Selected’, and these plays automagically appear on your Last.fm account. Simple as that.

I have not yet been able to try this with Windows, because the only Windows-managed iPod we now have here is my brother’s 2G Nano, and this is manually managed. I will at some point sync one of the iPods to Vista and see if those plays will scrobble too, although Adam Zethraeus has told me that he can’t get this working on Windows with his 5G.

Good Luck and Good Scrobbling…

Last.fm & iPods – a match made in hell… or is it?

I am a big fan of the music social networking site Last.fm (find my profile here), but one thing that I was never able to get working satisfactorily was ’scrobbling’ of my iPod plays.

The first path I tried was taking my (ancient) 3rd Gen. 10GB iPod, and installing the open-source Rockbox firmware. This was a disaster. Rockbox was not originally designed for the iPod, but was ported over – while the programmers that work on it have done an amazing job – and bear in mind that the iPod I was trying this on was very old, and very battered – it wasn’t working well for me. It frequently crashed, forcing me to do a hard reset. When it did eventually play it would hang every 10 seconds, or so, while playing. I found the solution to this to be not having the song info open while listening, but to simply have the display set to the main menu – playback was then flawless (mostly…). The reason for this experiment was that the Rockbox firmware has a built-in option to create a ‘.scrobbler.log’ file which contains all the information of what you played, for how long, when etc. This is then uploaded to Last.fm either by a php script written by Paul Stead (found here), or by a .NET application called LogScrobbler (found here). The scrobbling side of things worked perfectly, and for the adventurous who want to try it, and who may have more success than I did, I wholly recommend it. If you have a DAP that is fully supported by Rockbox then this could be the way for you to scrobble your plays.

Part 2 – The more successful scrobbling attempts to follow later