Songbird hatching progress
After installing Songbird version 0.30 last night, I looked at my quickstart bar. Thought I either had a burned out pixel or some food particle on the screen. Turns out “The Songbird Team” (the developers of this application) have a good sense of humor, even with the little details.
Songbird 0.25 Icon
Songbird 0.30 Icon
Open Source Life: Songbird, everyone deserves music
Songbird
Current Homepage: http://songbirdnest.com/
Created by: “The Songbird Team”
Abstract
Songbird may spawn a new breed of media players. The application’s paradigm of “playing the web” provides a fresh media experience currently only for the adventurous.
Synopsis
What was the impetus for beginning use of Songbird? I liked iTunes, but got tired of the DRM‘d music.
With what other programs did I compare it? Winamp, Windows Media Player, iTunes
How technical do you have to be to use Songbird? Be a nerd, be very a nerd.
Who do I believe will benefit the most from using it? Those who like to preview applications in the early development stages.
Do I recommend Songbird for general use? As of this writing no. I only recommend it for those who like to experiment with new software.
The Details
When iTunes first came out I celebrated. I could finally buy just the songs I wanted at only $0.99 a pop. My library of songs grew. I bought a first generation iPod from a friend. Loved the 10 Gigabytes of music it held, along with the cool, oldschool mechanical wheel.
The novelty passed. Carrying around the iPod “brick” became annoying. My old car, a Ford Focus SE, had a CD/MP3 player in the dash and a permanent impression of my butt in the drivers seat. Since the iPod was an old version 1, there wasn’t any converter I could find that connected it to my radio. Not a problem, I thought, I’ll just make an MP3 CD of my iTunes library music.
News to Jeremy: all of the music I bought from the iTunes Music Store could not be translated onto an MP3 CD. The music was protected by Apple’s special DRM called FairPlay.
It may be hard to believe in this day and age, but I have a legal music library, and I was annoyed at Apple for “selling” me protected music. I spent a lot of time in my car, and I wanted the opportunity to make long, MP3 CDs with the music I legally owned.
Found a nice way to crack the DRM on all of my iTunes protected music. After all the effort to get a library full of unprotected MP3s, I decided to take a look and see what other Media Players existed. Lots of people survived just fine without an iPod and iTunes. Why should I keep using them if all I was going to do was buy some music and then waste extra time cracking the files I purchased?
Another internet search turned up the following video, which demonstrates how Songbird works better than I could describe.
The video, simple as it looks, showed me things I had been missing. Before this, I had no idea that there were such things as MP3 blogs, robust music stores other than that provided by Apple, and lots of Creative Commons licensed music available for download.
It didn’t take long to remove iTunes from my computer. Songbird loaded up nice and easy. I dropped in my well organized music library and things started working immediately.
I find it hard to give a full review of Songbird when they openly admit the following:
Songbird is not yet fully-developed or bug-free.
Yes, I find little bugs and errors in it every time I use it. Hell, it’s version 0.25, bugs are expected! Even so, I look forward to each release just like those crazy Mac owners look forward to the next dot release of their Mac OS. (I just downloaded Version 0.3 of Songbird while writing this. YAY DOT RELEASE!)
Bugs aside, I love Songbird for the freedom it provides, especially in terms of support for:
- MPEG Audio (mpga)
- MPEG Layer 3 (mp3)
- MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b)
- Ogg Vorbis
- Speex
- AAC
- WMA
- WMADRM
- FLAC
- and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR.
Conclusion
Songbird is fun like every application should be. Use it now only if you like to try new things.
A short review is appropriate for this pre-release application. A long review will come when the long-awaited application is complete.
Reflections on a writers workshop
Last Sunday I attended an excellent writers workshop. The California Writers Club, Southbay Branch hosted and James Dalessandro led. Too information rich to perform a total brain dump here, but some highlights were:
- You’re allowed one big lie in any story, but the rest has to be logical.
- Take the movie Big. The lie: a 13 year old boy has his wish fulfilled and becomes a 30 year old man. The rest of the movie: A logical presentation of a 13 year old trapped in a 30 year old body.
- The main character needs two problems: internal and external
- Take Star Wars. Luke Skywalker has an external problem of saving the Universe, and the internal struggle that he has to fight his dad to do so. External: be a hero. Internal: “But I just want my daddy back.”
- Keep adding tension
- You can write anything you want about the famous and the dead.
- If you do really write about the famous, make sure that the person is really famous
- People remember the last thing they hear. Put the most important information last
- Remind people, through character dialog, about open plot threads
- Humor is your greatest ally. You don’t have to ever use it, but no story is too dark that it couldn’t benefit from a moment of lightness.
Animator vs. Animation, a bit of humor
This is pure genius. Original website (and larger size version) found here.
FriendFeed, one more article short
Not open source, but potentially very cool, is FriendFeed. To me, FriendFeed seems to promise to take some of the ‘H’ out of ADHD web browsing and article reading. As the number of separate feeds grows in my newsreader, I am beginning to collect multiple feeds from the same person. For example, I have Person X’s Blog and Person X’s Twitter feed. For Person X in this example, if they had a FriendFeed account, all I’d have to do is subscribe to one newsfeed and collect everything. FriendFeed creates the very cool paradigm of getting a “personal feed” vs. the standard “website feed.”
It’s new, there are things to work out, but it has promise. It also paves the way for other, simplified RSS feed aggregation.
Open Source Life: OpenID (an article short)
This is not the official next article in this series.
I just signed up for my OpenID today at MyOpenID. I’ve been reading snippets about OpenID for the last couple of months for one reason only: I HATE HAVING MULTIPLE LOGINS AND PASSWORDS AND EVERY DAMN WEBSITE NOWADAYS REQUIRES A LOGIN AND PASSWORD AND SEEMS TO HAVE DIFFERENT G*$&%&^ F*&%*$& IDEAS ABOUT WHAT A SECURE PASSWORD IS SO NO ONE PASSWORD WORKS ANYMORE!!!!!
I’ve had it with a website that’s a poor excuse for advertising worse than Saturday morning cartoons telling me I now need a minimum of 10 characters, while another site tells me I must have between 7 and 9 characters, 4 of which must be non-alpha characters, and another site doesn’t give a damn, but oh, you must change your password every so often and the new password can’t be the same as the previous password. Geez you guys, I understand identity theft is a real problem, but it’s not like you’re preventing access to the WOPR.
So why am I excited about OpenID? If it really kicks in and becomes popular, I’ll only need one password and one login provided by a non-proprietary, decentralized system. And if I’m ever worried that password has gotten compromised, I’ll just go change it. AMEN BROTHAS AND SISTAS, I’VE BEEN SAYYAYAYAYAYAVED!
No opinions yet, but I’ll provide feedback in the near future. Time for some OpenID experimentation.
My fascination with Alan Rickman
Looking over IMDB.com, I see that he has a future movie based on the Napa Valley wine industry. Yes, I’m going to watch this movie.
my wife, my new blog editor
Lord knows I’m not the best editor out there, and editing my own works goes against my rules of playing to my strengths. Welcome my wife, Janna Mordan, also known as jannamo, as my first hard working editor.
I’ve given her complete edit access to my blog. If you notice changes between the time you get your RSS feed and the time you look at it on my blog, you can thank my wife (for making it better).
Yay wife!
where discover fire comes from
Three and a half years ago I needed a poem. Why I needed the poem is a story for another time. Short story: the poem made more of an impression on me than the woman for whom I needed it.
The poet is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the poem is as follows:
Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity,
we shall harness the energies of love. And then,
for the second time in the history of the world,
man will discover fire.
Thanks to the Ferrydust blog for making this poem easily accessible via a Google search.
Wikis in Plain English
Browsing through backarticles of Becoming a Writer Seriously, I ran across a Youtube director codenamed leelefever. After watching his RSS in Plain English, I noticed he has a great video about wikis. Following up my previous post, here’s Wikis in Plain English for those who are still wiki curious.