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.

PostScript, PDFs and Distiller – a Trial of the Ages

I decided to bring the blog out of mothballs in the middle of my exams for a very simple reason: It took me a really bloody long time to find out how to do something which strikes me as a feature which should be simple and intuitive. Onwards with the tail of creating PDFs on Mac:

It all began when a friend, Nilpesh, approached me about making the Word Document of the Diary he has been putting together from our School trip to China and Tibet last summer into a PDF. This has been a labour of love from the beginning and he has put a lot into it, and so when he asked me to help with the last section I was more than happy to. He is using Lulu to professionally print the diary, and they have a comprehensive list of requirements for PDFs if that is the format to be submitted.

With this in mind, I headed to Microsoft Word. Here we encountered the first problem – Word 2008 on the Mac totally ignored almost all of the formatting he had put together in Word 2007 on Windows. Saved in a docx file, one would assume that the two would be totally compatible, but apparently not. Why? Ask Microsoft, but God help us if this is to be the open format of the ages… Some two days later after Pesh had reformatted the entire document and saved in doc format, I fired up Word 2008 again, and to my delight it opened and formatted correctly. Head over to the print dialogue and click “Save as PostScript”. Word churned away, and eventually produced some .ps files. “Some?” we wondered. Why is there more than one .ps file? For some reason I still don’t understand, the export to PostScript function seems to randomly split the file at arbitrary points. As this is a 70-page document, I expect it is some processing issue or the file becoming too large, although each time I made a revision to the document and re-PostScripted, the spilts were in new places so I have no clue.

Now the question was, how to make a single PDF from these numerous .ps files? Distiller happily accepted all of the settings I entered from the Lulu support pages, and also happily churned out separate PDFs for each of the PostScript files, but I could not find an easy way to make a single file. To preserve the specific settings of the PDF I did not want to simply combine them using Acrobat. This would have been nice, but although Acrobat and Distiller are related and can do some of the same things, there seems to be no way to enter the specfic PDF settings into Acrobat in the same way as you can in Distiller.

Much Googling ensued. I found some places which told me how to create a ‘merge.ps’ file which basically contained some Distillerese telling it where to find the separate PostScript files and to process them in turn to create a single PDF. However, it seems that to close a security hole, the functionality which Distiller used to have has been disabled, and so the processing of ‘merge.ps’ promptly failed with a log file cheerily telling me “%%[ Warning: Empty job. No PDF file produced. ] %%”. So I guess that wasn’t going to work then…

A lot more Googling ensued, with me trying various alterations on the commands in the merge file to try to get Distiller to behave, to no avail. One final lucky search of ‘distiller 8 combine ps’ revealed the Holy Grail of PostScript magic I had suspected was lurking out there for the hunter who didn’t do the sensible thing hours before and throw up his hands. Fourth result was a macosxhints.com page. With nothing to lose, I downloaded the script and ran it. First thing it asked for was the location of ‘Distiller 6′. Thinking to myself that this was probably going to fail considering I was trying to use Distiller 8, I pointed it to the app anyway and proceeded. The script asked for the folder containing the PostScripts, which I duly supplied, and to my surprise Distiller sprung to life and began processing the files. A few minutes later, the final PDF was done with all the settings I asked for, and importantly, as a single file. Cue angelic chorus of ‘Hallelulia!’.

All credit to Carlo Notarianni for this script, to whom I owe a lot and who likely saved me many more hours trying to cobble together something to make this work.

Twitter while out and about

Yesterday (Wednesday 11th) was the school’s founder’s day, meaning that from about 12:30pm the process of shipping all 1000+ pupils and staff over to St Paul’s Cathedral in central London took place. This meant that myself and the others on twitter were split up in during the transit and service, and so we found that twitter was to be the desired medium for communication. Worked surprisingly well, and was an amazing use of it.

When there are seven or eight twitterers out and about, doing similar things in the same area it works very well. Whether it be for covet mass communication during the service (not actually used of course…) or for coordinating the after-service jovialities, twitter was very useful. I use my twitter as much as possible in the every day environment of school, but the use of mobile phones in classrooms is understandably frowned upon, and this means that this is limited at best, except for the odd uncontrollable outbust of anger or hilarity…

An added bonus is that it in fact turns out to be a much cheaper way of mass texting. We all have our phones connected to our twitter accounts, and have notifications set up for each other, meaning that when we post from our phones, this is automatically forwarded to all of the others, and so I am getting a text to 8 people for the price of one. The way that twitter is established means that we can also reply to the sender directly (albeit less privately) and achieve much the same results as we would if we used bog-standard texting.

Being able to access the status updates from many different platforms, be it the web via a browser, the desktop via one of the many twitter apps (I am currently testing the mutli-platform multi-service AIR app Appily for this), or via the phone through texting, there isn’t really much else I could ask for from twitter. It has moved on from its original purpose of posting status updates though I think. While it is still used for status updates, it is also used to a large extent for general communication on the same level as a service like MSN Messenger or SMS. This can only be a good thing, provided those involved are using protected updates…

LogMeIn Free

Just a quick software recommendation today. When away from home, even if I am able to take my laptop with me, there is always something that I want to do that can only be done while sat at my desk, in front of my Desktop machine. This is where LogMeIn Free comes in. This is some software which you install on your machines, and then sign into the website. There you see a list of all the machines associated with your account, and tells you which ones are connected to the internet and are accessible.

In the free version what you can do is limited, but I have found that it does all I need – offers Remote Control of my machine, and allows me some basic Admin control. I can take control of my screen from any web browser in the world (even I found, those in censored China!) and so from there can use something like GMail to send myself a file or print a document to the local printer at home. The Admin offers the basics, allowing control of Windows security, such as password changing etc, but also offers a very useful range of system restart options, ranging from Normal to ‘Hard Reset’.

At home I am the de facto IT Support, and considering I am the only one who knows the passwords to nearly everything, it is likely to stay this way. If I am away on a trip and something goes horribly wrong, this allows a quick check and hopefully fix, instead of trying to visualise the screens the user is seeing, and guide them through the troubleshooting and fix process.

Overall a really useful app which I think is irreplaceable! See more and get it here