I was on the phone with a friend in Germany the other day, and he reminded me that I used to make it possible for him to listen to my music collection via streaming a few months ago, & then he asked if I would set that up again. I remembered that I'd been using gnump3d, and due to some reshuffling of my boxes & my music, that had disappeared. So I ran apt-get install gnump3d, made a few changes to /etc/gnump3d/gnump3d.conf, ran /etc/init.d/gnump3d restart, & I was in business. Well, not really. I had to wait for gnump3d to index all my tunes, and that takes a long, long, loooooong time when you have as many tunes as I do. Several hours later, it was ready. And now I can listen to my music no matter when I am in the world, as long as I have a Net connection, & my buddy Matt can listen in from Germany whenever he feels like it. If you need free streaming software for your music (mp3, ogg, & more!), check out gnump3d. It's very, very cool. (Check out all of my posts on music ...

What's new in Amarok 1.4? Oh baby! Amarok is the best - & I mean the best - music jukebox on Linux (too bad it doesn't run on Windows or Mac OS). It's already killer, but some new goodies are coming, like support for metadata in other file formats, support for scriptable lyrics, podcast support, statistics, & lots more. Can't wait! (Check out all of our posts on Amarok.) ...

Banshee is an extremely attractive, open source media player, which looks as if it's trying to be an open source competitor to iTunes. Banshee lets you import music from CDs, transfer music to your iPod, and unlike iTunes, you can even play music directly from your iPod. Banshee is written in Mono and is aimed at the GNOME desktop. It comes with SuSE, Ubuntu, and Mandriva distributions, so you may even have it installed already! (Check out all of our posts on music.) ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine, but it doesn't appear on the web until 3 months after the print pub date. My column from the December 2004 issue has hit the web: "Rip, Convert, Listen: The Sequel" (in order to understand it best, read the first column in the series, "Rip, Convert, Listen"). The first column was about converting your music from CD to OGG using Grip and the command line, but in this month's web-published column I look at KRename, a program that does batch renaming of files, and EasyTAG, which edits ID3 & other tags found in digital music files. If you're into digital music, you might find this short overview helpful. And by the way - KRename can be used for any type of file, not just music, so it's a good one to learn no matter what. I use it for text files, pictures, OpenOffice.org documents, and so on. It's really an excellent app. ...

Well, I just spent a few frustrating hours the other night, & I wanted to help prevent the same from happening to any of you. I was trying to use SMBFS to mount a Samba share, & it just wasn't working. Samba was set up on Chaucer (whose IP is 192.168.0.25), & I was sharing the music directory, & I could connect via smbclient, so I thought everything was good. I tried mounting with this line: smbmount //192.168.0.25/music /home/scott/chaucer_music/ -o credentials=/home/scott/credentials,fmask=644,dmask=755, uid=1000,gid=1000,workgroup=HOME Seemed to work just fine. But Konqueror wouldn't display the contents of /home/scott, & just showed a blank screen (!), while ls ~/ on the CLI finally, after a minute or so, gave me this error message: ls: chaucer_music: Input/output error The only solution was to unmount the share: sudo umount /home/scott/chaucer_data Unfortunately, sometimes that didn't even work, & I had to pull out the big guns (normally, this is ...

Holy freakin' mackeral, I've just discovered SSHFS (pathetic of me, I know), and this thing is awesomely cool! Most of you know that you can mount Samba-shared drives using smbfs. In other words, you enable Samba on a machine, share a directory, and then go to another machine & mount that shared directory via smbfs, which makes it appear as though that remote directory is actually directly connected to your machine. Pretty freaking cool, except that (a) you have to have Samba set up, which can be a PITA, and (b) you can't share drives over the Net. But don't despair - now there's a better way. Using SSHFS, if you can ssh into machine BAR from machine FOO, you can mount a directory that's located on BAR and then access it on FOO, as though it was directly connected to FOO. It's super easy to do it - much easier than with Samba - and better still, everything is encrypted! To add icing on the cake, you can set things up in fstab to make the whole process more automated, if you so desire. ...

My buddy Rich emailed me today and asked me how to rip CDs to mp3 files so he can to them on his new Cowon music player. Yeah, I know he's a bit behind the times, but the important thing is that he's on the train now. So here's what I told him. OK, download Quintessential Player: http://www.quinnware.com/ It's not open source, but it's the best media player I know of for Windows, as it handles EVERYTHING - music, video, ripping, managing, etc. Also download these plugins: http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?plugin=126http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?plugin=42http://www.quinnware.com/list_plugins.php?plugin=25 <-- THE MOST IMPORTANT Install Quintessential Player and then the plugins. Now open Quintessential Player. Right-click in the player & go to Preferences (or press ctrl p). On the Settings tab, go to the Encoder section & choose Encode Format. Make these changes: Select Encoding Format: MP3 Audio Encoder Method: Average Bitrate, and move the slider all the way to the ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine called Do It Yourself. LM has a policy that they don't publish stuff online until 60 days after it's published in print, which is fine with me - at least everything in the mag makes its way online, which is more than a lot of pubs do. One of my columns from a few months ago just went up: "Rip, Convert, Listen". As I say at the beginning, "If you don't know how to convert CDs into audio files on Linux, this column is for you." This is actually part one of a two-parter on converting CDs to digital music; in this one, I look at Grip and oggenc, two programs that together get your music off of CDs and into the patent-free, smaller-than-mp3-while-sounding-better OGG format. Check the column out - I know you'll learn something. ...

I write a monthly column for Linux Magazine called Do It Yourself. LM has a policy that they don't publish stuff online until 60 days after it's published in print, which is fine with me - at least everything in the mag makes its way online, which is more than a lot of pubs do. One of my columns from a few months ago just went up: "Rip, Convert, Listen: The Sequel". This is the final part of a two-parter on converting CDs to digital music. The first one covered Grip and oggenc; in this one, I introduce readers to two of my favorite programs, KRename and EasyTAG. I use KRename to change the names of the OGGs I created using Grip and oggenc, and then I use EasyTAG to make sure that meta tags that identify the songs are just exactly the way I want them. Trust me: even if you never work with digital music, you'll still find KRename in particular very useful. It's an essential item for your toolkit. ...

I'm really pumped about this one, since I have very fond places in my heart for both KDE and Wikipedia - after all, I use both virtually every day! Basically, KDE and Wikipedia are going to integrate the fantastic wealth of info available at Wikipedia into more and more KDE apps, as seamlessly as possible. For instance: playing a tune in Amarok, the great music player. Now info about the artist & the album will appear, courtesy of Wikipedia. If there's nothin' there, then enter something! Other programs mentioned: KStars (of course!), Kalzium, Scribus, Screensaver, & more. This is so cool! Read about it at KDE.News and (duh) Wikipedia. (Check out all of my posts on KDE, Wikipedia, & Amarok.) ...

When it comes to digital music players on Linux, much as I love Amarok, I keep returning to XMMS, a (very) oldie but still very goodie. I especially love it because I can control it remotely, from another machine, by using ncxmms, an ncurses frontend for XMMS. To install it, just get the package from your favorite source, or, if you're using Debian, just do apt-get install ncxmms (you may need to add deb http://www.rarewares.org/debian/packages/unstable ./ to your sources.list file first). To use ncxmms, ssh to the machine running the program and start it. To control ncxmms, use tab to move between the directory list, the files list, & the play list. Use Enter to select a song. And use your normal xmms keyboard shortcuts to control playback (z goes back a song, x plays, c pauses, v stops playback, & b skips ahead to the next song. And best of all, it reccognizes - and displays! - ID3 tags. Sweet! PS: Other folks like xcplay, but I've never used it. Anyone got an opinion ...

OK, here's the situation: you have some sounds, but you don't like they sound. Sounds like you want your sounds to sound like another sound. So it sounds like you need to convert those sounds to another sound. So how do you do that? SoundConverter, of course! It outputs as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, or WAV, & for OGG & MP3 you can choose a quality level, which is as it should be. OK, fine, but what's it accept as input? Why, anything that GStreamer can read. On my system, that means the following, plus a WHOLE lot more: mp3, wav, FLAC, Windows Media Audio, Real, Shorten, and the list goes on and on and on. SoundConverter does its job quickly, and it just … works. Sounds like you should give it a try! (Check out all of our posts on OGG, mp3, FLAC, sound, & music.) ...

Ubuntu Linux 5.04, also known as "Hoary Hedgehog", is now available for download as a 500 MB ISO in either install or Live CD editions (& you can download via FTP or HTTP, or, better yet, use BitTorrent). Software includes GNOME 2.10.1, Firefox 1.0.2, OpenOffice.org, and X.org 6.8.2. If you want to do some reading, check out the announcement or the release notes (and I strongly encourage you to read the release notes!). Ubuntu, as you probably know, is a GNOME-based distro; for the KDE fans (I'm one), there's Kubuntu, also newly released at 5.04. It's also available for download as a 572 MB ISO in either install or Live CD editions (FTP, HTTP, or BitTorrent). Software includes KDE 3.4, that very nice Ubuntu-powered hardware config, OpenOffice.org, Gwenview for images, amaroK for music, K3b CD or DVD burner, and Kaffeine for videos & music. Read the announcement. I've actually installed Kubuntu, & it was pretty good, & I've played with Ubuntu as a Live CD, and it ...

On the CWELUG mailing list, Robert asks for someone to explain podcasting. So I jump in with this message, which I hope you find useful. <begin my message> The following assumes you know what RSS is. If you don't, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_29. 1. Get an RSS feedreader that supports enclosures (the mp3 files that are the basis for the podcasts). One that runs on your client machine will hopefully download enclosures; one that is web-based, like Bloglines, will provide a link to the enclosure that you can download. or, you can get a specific podcast client tool that only works with RSS feeds that contain enclosures, like these fine open source tools: a. Windows: ipodder b. Linux: bashpodder c. Mac OS X: ipodder You can find a list of podcast clients at http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware. 2. subscribe to RSS feeds that contain podcasts/enclosures (later today I'll provide a list of podcast feeds I'm subscribed to). 3. Once ...

If SUSE continues down this path, they are screwing up in a big way. Red Hat/Fedora also does this - leaves MP3 support out of the install - but you can re-enable MP3 support by installing a single RPM. SUSE, however, according to a review of the forthcoming 9.3 release, has actually compiled GStreamer, Arts, & the KDE Multimedia packages WITHOUT SUPPORT FOR MP3. That means it's not just a matter of installing a single RPM & getting MP3 support back, oh no. Instead, you have to recompile all of those multimedia packages, which is a total PITA and, frankly, a load of bull. Oh … and the reviewer actually did the recompiles, and then guess what? An update broke 'em all again! Joy! OK, there is one package that does support MP3 playback: Real player. Wheeeeee! Now, I'm quite thrilled that the Real player isn't the stinking pile of poo that it used to be, but c'mon. It's no Amarok. Or Juk. Or XMMS. Or Rhythmbox. Ridiculous. Who the heck wants to use the Real player to manage all of ...