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By Adam, September 25, 2011 3:00 pm

Amazon MP3 store – a phenomenonly popular online music store. Ubuntu – a phenomenonly popular version of Linux. 64-bit x86_64 CPUs – been around for years. You’d think this was a good combination, wouldn’t you? Wrong Amazon, along with Spotify and countless others, is dismally failing to support its rapidly growing set of customers who run Linux. As I’ve said elsewhere, even if 2% of your customers use Linux, that can still be a huge number. Hopefully some day these big companies will acquire some common sense.

Anyway, in the mean time a quick google brought up the following solution:

• http://www.dgf64art.com/2011/07/05/installing-amazon-mp3-downloader-on-ubuntu-11-04/

Unfortunately it doesn’t work – the step which installs the manually downloaded .deb files fails due to broken dependencies. However further googling found a post from 2008 which revealed a technique based on the very useful getlibs utility.

So here’s my solution:

1. Download the 32-bit Amazon downloader app for Ubuntu 9.10.
2. Run sudo dpkg -i --force-all AmazonMP3DownloaderInstall.deb
3. Run sudo apt-get install getlibs if you don’t already have getlibs installed.
4. Run sudo getlibs /usr/bin/amazonmp3 and answer yes to the confirmation.

At this point if you try to run /usr/bin/amazonmp3 you’ll probably hit Ubuntu bug 781870. The workaround is as follows:

export GDK_PIXBUF_MODULE_FILE=/usr/lib32/gdk-pixbuf-2.0/2.10.0/loaders.cache
/usr/bin/amazonmp3

You’ll still get an error that it’s trying to load the 64-bit version of libgvfsdbus.so thanks to Ubuntu bug 369498. I had hopes that export GIO_EXTRA_MODULES=/usr/lib32/gio/modules would fix this, but it seems that this variable only gets honoured too late. However, apparently this issue doesn’t stop the program working so can be ignored.

Another option is to use Banshee’s built-in Amazon downloader, but even without all the politics surrounding Ubuntu’s version of Banshee this didn’t suit my tastes.

UPDATE: Wow. Just found out Amazon doesn’t support re-downloading stuff you’ve already bought. This is truly pathetic, especially considering their Android app kind of implements a locker service. From now on I’ll be using 7digital whenever I can – unfortunately their selection isn’t as big though. The quest for the perfect music services continues … :-/

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By Adam, September 13, 2011 3:13 pm

I’ve been a fan of freeDB for years. It’s a great way of crowd-sourcing CD title/artist/track information and is a huge help when converting CDs into part of your digital music collection (“ripping”).

However, more recently I have noticed that the majority of times I submit a new CD to freeDB, it gets rejected due to a discid collision. This is due to a fundamental limitation in the discid hashing algorithm which freeDB inherited from CDDB – it’s only a 32-bit number, of which a mere 8 bits are used as a checksum for the individual track starting times. So it’s no surprise that we’re getting collisions galore, at an increasing frequency as the database continually grows. Even worse, CDDB attempts to deal with collisions by making CD entries in the database uniquely retrievable by (discid, category) pairs, where category is one of only 11 musical genres. Of course this is woefully inadequate, because there are countless genres and most music defies classification anyway. They attempted to deal with this by calling the 11th category “misc”, but that still has the problem of restricting entries to one unique discid per genre. Unsurprisingly this has caused a huge number of collisions, especially in the “misc” category. As a result, people have been re-submitting collided entries into the wrong genre, simply because having an entry with the wrong genre in the database is still better than not having it at all.

Gracenote, the eventual owner of CDDB have developed a new generation database imaginatively called CDDB2 which adds a much richer meta-data structure. Gracenote has taken advantage of this to clean up the mess caused by attempting to shoe-horn classical CDs into an inadequate schema, and license the results to Apple for iTunes. Unfortunately that’s no use to those of us who recognise the value of freedom over vendor lock-in.

It seems that the freeDB server software hasn’t been updated since 2006, so presumably there’s not much of an active community left. So there’s a ripe opportunity for a smart philanthropist hacker to breathe new life into this valuable project. Sounds ideal for Google Summer of Code task, for instance. As this is largely a lazyweb blog post, here are my thoughts on what needs to be done; it’s unlikely I’ll ever manage to prioritise it above other things already on my plate:

• Design a new collision-proof hashing algorithm. It should produce at least 128-bit hashes, and include as much information about the contents of the physical CD as possible, namely:
  1. number of tracks
  2. starting times of all tracks
  3. total playing time

  This algorithm could be as simple as calculating the MD5 digest of a delimiter-separated concatenation of the above items represented as integers.

  Notice that this should be limited to information which can be retrieved very quickly; for instance producing MD5 digests of the contents of each track takes too long to be useful in practice.

• Design the next level of the CDDB protocol (which at the time of writing would be level 7), which allows additional querying by this new 128-bit (or larger) digest.
• Extend the existing freeDB server software to support this new level whilst remaining backwards-compatible with existing clients. In other words, database entries should be retrievable both by the old (32-bit discid, category) pair and the new digest. This would require iterating once through all existing entries to recalculate the new digest for each.
• (Optional) Extend one or more F/OSS clients to use the new protocol level, and advocate other clients to do the same …

For bonus points, you could extend the database schema in a similar way to CDDB2, and then start a crowd-sourcing project for cleaning up the database with respect to all those pesky classical tracks which have distinct composer / performer metadata.

So, any takers? You’d win the admiration and gratitude of a few, the satisfaction of knowing you helped slightly improve the lives of millions, and a place in heaven

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By Adam, August 12, 2011 5:18 am

I’m sitting on a plane from LA to Chicago. This is my fifth flight in the last two months, having already been to New York, Ohio, Florida, and California, and it’s probably about time I explain what the hell I’m doing, as I have friends and family who have seen various confusing status updates I’ve posted on Facebook and Twitter whom I owe the full story.

Just over two years ago, I blogged about taking a leap of faith and turning down two great jobs because they didn’t involve doing something I was truly passionate about. It was a gamble, but even after two months I could tell it was going to pay off. Sure enough, two years later, I found myself with a wealth of new experience and knowledge which I’d had a ton of fun acquiring, plus a healthy boost to my CV and set of friends and connections within the industry.

Then the stars aligned again, and I found myself with another life-changing dilemma: take an even more awesome job than the one I was in, or quit IT altogether and face an indefinite period of zero income. Pretty obvious what to do, right? I quit.

If that sounds crazy, it’s because it probably was – definitely another leap into the unknown. But I’ll try to explain my decision. Continue reading 'Rediscovering music'»

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By Adam, August 1, 2011 10:17 pm

When flying, most cellists are faced with either buying an extra ticket or getting a flight case, paying oversized baggage fees, and praying. Experiences vary widely and are in places well documented and full of useful advice, e.g.

• http://cellobello.com/blog/chamber_music/cello-is-my-co-pilot/
• http://cellofun.yuku.com/topic/4483

My situation is different because I have a Luis and Clark carbon fiber cello which is incredibly robust and generally does not even go out of tune when checked in as normal baggage and placed in the hold of the aircraft in a normal hard case. My case is a Bam Hightech measuring 54.5 × 21 × 88.7″.  It seems virtually all airlines policies regarding oversized baggage operate in “linear” or total dimensions, i.e. by summing up the 3 separate dimensions together.  This means my case has a linear dimension of 88.7″ which unfortunately is outside the 62″ standard limit, and even just outside Delta’s second tier limit of 80″.  Having said that, so far I have always managed to get it treated as normal sized baggage simply by confidently pointing out that the height is 55″ which is under 62″. In my experience, most staff at the check-in gate are not familiar with the exact terms in their airline’s policies, so having the right attitude (confidently knowledgeable and up-front but non-confrontational) can go a long way.

I’ve done some research on the policies of some popular airlines and referenced the relevant extracts below, with one section per airline. The quotes I’ve taken are focused mainly on national flights within the USA, because despite being from the UK, I’m currently flying around the USA a lot. However the policies for international flights seem similar, although sometimes with higher fees.
Continue reading 'Flying with a (carbon fibre) cello'»

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By Adam, July 13, 2011 8:24 am

I’m currently on a musical pilgrimage around the USA.  I brought my Digitech JamMan Delay unit with me, because I was attending Christian Howes‘ phenomenal Creative Strings Workshop in Columbus, Ohio, where I knew I would learn how to turn this gadget into a hugely useful practice tool.  (Incidentally, I was not disappointed, and will blog more when I get time about how awesome Chris’ various educational offerings are.  Until then, click the links!)  Unfortunately at some point after leaving Ohio, the JamMan stopped working.  I guess it didn’t like being surrounded by a bunch of smelly clothes and then getting thrown in the hold of a plane. (UPDATE Sept 22nd: actually it turns out that it was fine – the power adapter just needed the UK standard of 240 Volts, and the US standard of 110V wasn’t sufficient …)

So the other night I found myself desperate for a replacement.  I do have a Boss ME-70 with me which has a built-in phrase looper, but it only stores 38 seconds which is barely enough to get to the bridge of Cherokee.  Even worse, there is no way to undo/redo loop layers or store the whole thing after you power the unit off.

Then it occurred to me that I could potentially combine my laptop (a cheap Samsung N150 netbook) with a microphone, headphones (as a poor man’s substitute for an amp), and some software to achieve the same thing.  At this point, those of you with a Mac will exclaim “sure – use GarageBand!”  However, as shiny as Macs are, they are expensive and I also can’t stand Apple for philosophical reasons.  (I can’t stand Microsoft either, which is why I use Linux, but I digress.)  If you are interested in an alternative approach to looping with software, read on!

Continue reading 'Audio looping with Free Software'»