Amazon.com not only has an outstanding collection of digital downloads in their music section (as covered by Martin in his insightful article “Amazon DRM Free MP3 Store“), they offer a completely cross-platform tool to make this process simple. The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a very simple (as well as required) tool that enables you to purchase music from Amazon.com and use it at your leisure. And since the files are DRM-free, you aren’t limited to putting them on one device and only one device. Instead you can download your music, burn it on to CD, copy it to your device, copy it to your friends device…what have you.

But in order to take advantage of this service, you MUST have the MP3 downloader installed. That’s where this tutorial comes into play. Here you will see how to install and use the Amazon MP3 Downloader on your Linux box.

Getting and installing

Point your browser to the download page and download the proper file for your distribution. As of this writing you have the choice of files for the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 8.10/9.04
• Debian 5
• Fedora 10
• OpenSuSE 11

Yes, Amazon is a bit behind the times, but you can get around this (at least on Ubuntu 9.10). Below you will find the steps to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader on Ubuntu 9.10.

Download the .deb file for Ubuntu.

Open up a terminal window and issue the command (from within the directory the file was saved) sudo dpkg -i amazonmp3.deb.

You will see a bunch of errors that will end with the warning: Errors were encountered while processing: amazonmp3.

• Issue the command sudo synaptic.
• You will get a warning that you have 1 broken package.
• Go to the Edit menu and select Fix Broken Packages.
• Click Apply in the new window.
• Close Synaptic when the packages have been fixed.

Using Amazon MP3 Downloader

There are two ways you can use the downloader. The first is to start up the application by clicking on Internet submenu of the Applications menu. From within this menu click on the Amazon MP3 Downloader entry.

When you first launch it your default web browser will start up with a “congratulations” page informing you that the Downloader will launch the next time you download a song from Amazon.com. You also will get the chance to download a free song. When you click on the button (on Amazon.com) to download a free song you will taken to the Amazon.com login page. Log in and then you will have the chance to download your free song.  Go ahead and download your free song.

What you will download is an .amz file that links to your download. Your browser, by default, will ask you what to do with the file. Go ahead and let the Amazon MP3 Downloader open that file and the download will being.

But where did that file go? The Downloader will, by default, download all files to ~/Music/Amazon MP3/. If you open up that directory (after you download your file) you will see the sub-directory containing your new download.

Figure 1

Another way to use the Downloader is to open up the tool and click the

Configuring the Downloader

There aren’t many options in the Downloader’s preference window.  From within that window you can click the button “Shop Amazon MP3 Store”. This will automatically open your default browser to the store.

In order to configure the tool click on the File menu and then select Preferences. From within this window you can configure the following:

• Download directory.
• Automatically check for updates.
• Proxy settings.

And that’s it. But what more would you need to configure for such a simple tool? The only option I always change, by default, is the Download Directory. I tend to change this to the directory used by my multimedia player so I don’t always have to add the new media to the player when I download something. Of course, in order to have this work you have to have your media player set up to automatically scan for new files.

Final thoughts

If you are a Linux user, and a purchaser of digital music, you should do yourself a favor and give the Amazon MP3 Downloader a try. If for another other reason, all Linux users should give it a go in order to show support for Amazon’s support for Linux.

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You can watch that video directly at Youtube by following this link. The 1080p videos seem to make use of the &fmt=37 parameter which can be added to the url to see if the Youtube video supports 1080p.

The second feature consists actually of two technologies: automatic captions and automatic timing.

Auto-Timing: Upload a transcript (a simple file with the text of what’s said in the video), and through speech recognition technology we’ll turn it into synchronized captions. Timing is the toughest part of creating captions, but now this should be much easier. The technology works best for videos with good sound quality and clear spoken English.

Automatic timing ensures that an external transcript is being used to avoid errors during speech recognition. This does however mean that a transcript of the video needs to be available. Youtube will automatically turn the transcript into synchronized captions through the use of speech recognition technologies.

Auto-Captions: We use the same speech recognition technology to create machine-generated captions (which can then be translated into 51 languages). You can see auto-caps in action right now on a range of educational channels, such as UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and most Google channels, including YouTube’s. Click on the menu button at the bottom right of the video player, then click CC and the arrow to its left, then click the new “Transcribe Audio” button. In time, we hope to expand this feature for many more YouTube videos.

Automatic captions on the other hand uses speech recognition not only for timing purposes but also for creating the video transcript.

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• The web browser and the flash plugin should be up to date. Youtube uses Adobe’s Flash technology to stream the videos. There is unfortunately no official option to switch to a different technology like Apple’s Quicktime or Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. (Websites like Gametrailers.com offer this for example, read on to find out how to do this).
• The computer itself has to be capable of playing the Youtube videos. Nothing can be done if the cpu or Internet connection is not fast enough to play the new 1080p videos. A switch to a lower resolution will do the trick in those situations. It might also be a good idea to open a performance monitor (or a task manager) to see if the cpu, memory or hard disk activity raises to critical levels during Youtube video playback. You can also check if it is related to your computer’s performance by downloading the video and playing it locally.

But lets say the computer and the Internet connection are fast enough and that the web browser, Flash plugin and audio and video drivers are also up to date. What if Youtube videos still stutter during playback? The best option here is to find out if it is web browser related. This can be done easily by downloading and testing Youtube video playback with other web browsers. Suggested browsers are Google’s Chome browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Opera.

The test can either lead to the conclusion that Youtube video playback is broken in all web browsers, in some or just in the one web browser that happens to be the default web browser that the user likes to use. The first conclusion seems to suggest either a hardware problem or Flash plugin problem while the last suggests a problem with the single web browser.

Here are a few solutions that have been posted by users around the web (remember to restart Firefox after making those changes).

• Firefox Session Restore: The Firefox web browser will save sessions every ten seconds. This is a great way to save data automatically in case the web browser crashes. If Firefox does not crash regularly then there is not a need to save sessions every ten seconds as this can also be one of the reasons why Youtube videos stutter in Firefox. The fix is simple: Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar, filter for the term browser.sessionstore.interval, double-click that term and enter a new time for the session restore interval. The time has to be entered in milliseconds and a session store interval of 120000 or higher is recommended
• Moving the disk cache to another hard drive or location: This can usually be done in any web browser. The idea is to move the disk cache, that is a temporary storage of data on the hard drive, to another faster drive. The disk cache is usually on the same drive as the operating system. If the computer has more than one drive it might be a good idea to move the cache to the second drive. Firefox users need to add the parameter in about:config by right-clicking, selecting Add, pasting the value browser.cache.disk.parent_directory and entering a location on the local computer system, e.g. d:\cache\ in the second form.
• Disable hardware accelerator for Flash videos. This can be done by right-clicking a Youtube video, selecting Settings, switching to the Display tab (leftmost icon) and unchecking Enable Hardware Acceleration in the menu.
• Try playing Youtube videos in their own web browser window without additional tabs open.
• Increase the memory cache of the web browser. Open about:config, enter browser.cache.memory.capacity in the filter and change the default value to a higher memory cache capacity, e.g. 96000 (which would be 96 Megabytes).
• Open the global Flash settings here and to set “always deny” in global security settings, and to set to unlimited in both ’storage’ tabs. A restart is required. (Thanks Charlie M)
• Replace the Youtube Flash player with the default video processor of the computer system. This can be done using the Greasemonkey script No Flash Player. This can be the perfect solution for many users who only have problems with Adobe Flash and Youtube videos. This does however remove some of the controls like showing the code to embed Youtube videos in other websites.

Workarounds if the above solutions to play Youtube videos without pauses did not help:

• The Play and Pause trick: Hit the pause button once the Youtube video starts playing. The web browser will continue caching the video. Start playback again once the video caching has reached a comfortable lead.
• Download the Youtube videos: This is not a very comfortable solution and maybe not even practicable if many Youtube videos are watched throughout the day. It can however be the solution for individual Youtube videos that do not play normally on the site.
• Switch to another web browser for Youtube. If you discovered that another web browser does not have the playback problems when playing videos on Youtube you might want to consider switching to that web browser for playing Youtube videos.
• You could also try the Firefox add-on Media Player Connectivity which makes it possible to play Youtube videos in a separate media player that is installed on the computer system.

One of these suggestions and fixes hopefully helped fix Youtube video playback problems. If you know of another fix for this problem let us know in the comments. We would like to add it then to the article to make it a comprehensive resource for fixing Youtube playback problems. We would also like to hear from you if one of the fixes did solve your video playback problems.

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The current maximum resolution for Youtube videos is 720p (1280 × 720) which will be raised to the new maximum of 1080p (1920×1080) from next week on. The highest quality level of the video still depends on the video source according to the post at the Youtube blog.

A test video was uploaded to Youtube to showcase the new maximum resolution. This video cannot be embedded and interested users need to visit Youtube to view the video there.

Videos that have already been uploaded in 1080p have previously been encoded for 720p. These videos will automatically be encoded again so that they can be shown in 1080p from next week on at the video portal. A search for 1080p on Youtube reveals many videos that are already available in that new format (or have been improperly tagged with the 1080p tag).

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The Firefly Media Server (formerly mt-daap) is a fast DAAP server that is simple to install and even easier to configure. Firefly resides on a single Linux machine that doesn’t have to be a powerhouse. In fact, you can install this lightweight server on Ubuntu Server and you’re almost ready to go. In this article you will see how to do just that – install and configure Firefly Media Server on Ubuntu Server.

Features

The Firefly server has all of the features you will want in a DAAP server:

• Supports Unix/POSIX
• Beta for Windows in the works
• On the fly transcoding of OGG, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and WM
• User-created smart playlist support
• Integrates with iTunes and many other DAAP-supporting media players
• Serve streaming radio stations

Installation

Since we are installing on a Ubuntu Server, the installation is simple:

1. Open up a terminal (or just log into your servers’ console)
2. Issue the command sudo apt-get install mt-daap
3. Enter your user password

That’s it. Now it’s time to set it up.

Configuration file

There is only one configuration file for Firefly: /etc/mt-daapd.conf. This file is quite easy to set up. For a basic DAAP server, out of the box, there is really only one option you must configure. If you open up the configuration file look for the line:

mp3_dir = /home/media/music

This is the line you will need to change to reflect the directory you will serve your media from. For my setup I created a new sub-directory in /opt called music. Do this with the command:

sudo mkdir /opt/media

Now you have to make that directory readable by the DAAP server with the command:

sudo chmod ug+r -R /opt/media

Now all files and sub-directories created with the /opt/media directory will have the proper permissions such that the DAAP server can serve up the files.

Of course what you have just set up is a very basic DAAP server. There are a lot of other options within the configuration file you can set up, such as:

• servername: This is the name your DAAP server will broadcast. By default the server will be listed as Firefly RELEASE_NUMBER HOSTNAME (Where RELEASE_NUMBER is the release number of the Firefly installation and HOSTNAME is the hostname of the server.)
• password protection: This will cause any user attempting to access the DAAP server to have to enter a password in order to see the files.
• port: If you need to use a port other than the default (3689), configure it here.
• extensions: The file types you want to allow to be served by your DAAP server.
• Valid codectypes: These are the configurations for the format conversion. There are already lines for this in the configuration file – you just have to uncomment the ones you want to add for internal conversion.
• rescan_interval: If you want to enable background scanning you need to uncomment this entry and set an interval. This will enable you to add new files without having to restart the DAAP server to pick up the new files. Very handy if you frequently add new files.

There are other configuration options, but those are the ones you will want to focus on first.

Start the daemon

After your configuration file is complete, go ahead and move your media files into the directory and then start the server with the command:

sudo /etc/init.d/mt-daap start

With the server up and running you can fire up a DAAP enabled client, like iTunes or Songbird (Note: Songbird requires the addition of a DAAP add on), and you should automatically see the files on the DAAP server.

Final thoughts

Setting up a DAAP server is a great idea for a small internal network where you want to be able to share out a multi-media library. Anyone looking to set this up, and has a Linux server up and running, would do well to give Firefly a try. The simplicity, size, and speed of this server makes it the perfect candidate.

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TubeRadio is another service that makes use of that principle. It offers an interface that resembles that of Apple’s iTunes software. Here is how it works. It begins by entering a song or artist into the form on the homepage of the service. It is alternatively possible to pick one of the artists or genres that are prominently displayed on the homepage.

TubeRadio will search its database for albums that match the song or artist. All of the albums that are found will be displayed with their album cover and name.

Albums are selected with a left mouse click. It is possible to select multiple albums. TubeRadio will then perform a search on Youtube for those songs in the selected albums which are then added to playlists from where they can be played. Registered users have options to save playlists so that they can reopen them whenever they re-visit the website. Another option is to go back to the search and add additional albums by performing new searches. It is furthermore possible to search directly on Youtube instead of the discography search option.

The music is played on the TubeRadio website with a small video being displayed. Basic controls like switching songs, changing the playback volume, repeating, muting or shuffling songs are available. Users can also look at lyrics, biographies or similar songs (if available) while listening to the music.

There is also an option to display albums and artists that are currently in the charts to listen to these songs instead. The only aspect that users might criticize is something that all of these services have to cope with: the quality of the Youtube videos. It can happen that the service does not retrieve the song by the artist but a cover that is performed by another artist.

Just visit the TubeRadio website if you are interested in trying out the service. (via Make Use Of)

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Of course, ideally, you will want to install XBMC on a machine intended for multi-media use. It will work on lower-end video cards, but the interface will be somewhat slower. For a complete listing of supported hardware check out the XBMC hardware page. Now, let’s get on with the installation.

Ubuntu

I will give you a warning here: The most recently supported Ubuntu is 8.10. That does not, however, mean it will not install on anything later. I have XBMC installed and working fine on Ubuntu 9.04. With that in mind here are the installation steps for Ubuntu.

Open up your /etc/apt/sources.list file and add the following to the end:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-hardy/ubuntu hardy main

Save that file and then issue the command:

sudo apt-get update

Once the update is complete issue the following command:

sudo apt-get install xbmc

If you want to install extra skins, issue this command:

sudo apt-get install xbmc-skin-*

Figure 1

You will find the XBMC menu entry in the Sound And Video sub-menu of the Applications menu. When XBMC opens you will see a very user-friendly interface (see Figure 1).

Now it’s time for a less than user-friendly installation. Because there have been no rpm files created for Fedora, the installation requires a number of steps which will lead you to compiling XBMC. These steps will work for Fedora 8, 9, and 10 as well as CentOS 5.2. Here we go. NOTE: You will need to be the root user for this installation.

If you don’t already have Subversion install, do so now with the command:

yum install subversion

Once Subversion is installed, check out XBMC from subversion with the command:

svn co https://xbmc.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xbmc/trunk

Now install the rpmfusion repository with one of the following commands:

Fedora:

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm

and

rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rmpfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

CentOS 5 (32 bit):
rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/redhat/e15/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.e15.rf.i386.rpm

CentOS 5 (64 bit):

rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/redhat/e15/en/x86_64/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.e15.rf.x86_64.rpm

Now the fun begins. This installation command is all one line:
yum install SDL* glew glew-devel libmad-devel tre tre-devel libogg libogg-devel libvorbis libvorbis-devel boost boost-devel bzip2-devel bzip2-libs fribidi* lzo lzo-devel mysql-libs mysql-devel jasper jasper-devel faac faac-devel enca enca-devel hal hal-devel hal-libs cmake gperf nasm libXmu-devel fontconfig-devel freetype-devel libXinerama-devel pcre-devel gcc-c++ sqlite-devel curl-devel mysql-devel libcdio-devel libmms-devel faad2-devel flac-devel libsmbclient-devel libXtst-devel

The next step creates a symbolic link for the libmysqlclient.so file. The command is one of these two (depending upon your architecture):

For i386:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib/libmysqlclient.so

For x64:
sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/mysql/libmysqlclient.so.15.0.0 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so

Now cd into the XBMC directory (should be in the directory you are currently working in) and issue the following commands:

./bootstrap

and

./configure

and

make

If you see an error related to jpegint.h, then you might have to issue the following command:

cp XBMC/xbmx/lib/cximage-6.0/jpeg/jpegint.h /usr/include

If you have to issue the above command, then issue the make command again.

Finally issue the command:

make install

And XBMC will install.

On Fedora distributions you might have an issue with SELinux. If so you will need to issue the following commands:
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avutil-50-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avcodec-52-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/avformat-52-i486-linux.so'
chcon -t textrel_shlib_t '/usr/local/share/xbmc/system/players/dvdplayer/swscale-0.6.1-i486-linux.so'

That’s it for the Fedora/CentOS installation. You should find XBMC in your Video menu. If you can’t seem to find a menu entry you can always enter xbmc in either a terminal window or the run dialog.

Final thoughts

XBMC is an outstanding media center software. It will play your CDs and DVDs flawlessly. If you have the hardware for this software, it is a much better solution than most other Linux video solutions.

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Banshee is strongly tied to the GNOME desktop manager. These two together make managing your Android phone music as simple as it gets. Now, Banshee is not a complete replacement for iTunes. There is no way to purchase music through Banshee (which is fine because most Android phones can purchase music straight from the Amazon MP3 market). But Banshee does a bang up job of managing your music – and a simple job interacting with the Android phone. Now, let’s take a look at how this is done.

Installing Banshee

If you don’t already have Banshee installed you will need to do so. And you will need to make sure you have a version >= 1.4. To install go to your Add/Remove Software tool and follow these steps:

1. Search for “banshee” (no quotes).
2. Select Banshee for installation.
3. Click Apply to install.

That’s it.

Now that Banshee is installed, you are ready to have Banshee and your Android working together.

Connecting your Android

Figure 1

When you connect your Android phone to your Linux machine you will be asked (on the phone) if you want to mount your SD card. Go ahead and do that so your Linux machine can see the SD card on the phone. This SD card will show up in the Nautilus file manager (shown in Figure 1) as a 2.0 GB Media. You can actually drag and drop files to this directory – but we’re managing music, so we’re going to use Banshee and not a file manager.

Now open up Banshee and your Android phone will automatically show up (see Figure 2).

As you can see, the interface gives you a clear view of the space

Figure 2

available on your phone’s card. You can also see that there are two options:

Manually sync

Automatically sync

Most likely you will want to manually sync your phone. If your Banshee library is like mine there is WAY more music than will fit on a 2 Gig card. of course you can replace that 2 Gig card with a much larger card and then have Banshee automatically sync.

For manually syncing all you need to do is navigate through your music collection and then drag and drop the files you want to put on your phone.

Upon completion of the music management you can then click the Eject Android G1 Phone button in the upper right corner of Banshee. Now, before you actually unplug your phone from your computer you need to turn off USB storage on your phone. Once USB storage is off you can then unplug your phone and check to make sure your new music is present and accounted for.

Final thoughts

I certainly hope the Linux community and the Android community can work together further so that the Linux operating system can enjoy a complete sync. Once this happens wireless companies can be sure that Linux users/fans will flock to their Android offerings.

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This desktop widget is now available for Windows, Mac, and (are you ready for it?) Linux! Yes, it’s available for Linux, so all of us Penguinistas can enjoy our Hulu as it was meant to be enjoyed. And best of all, it’s easy to install. Let’s see just how easy the Hulu desktop client is to install and use.

Distributions and installations

As of now the only distributions Hulu is available for are Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11. So if you’re not running either of them you’re out of luck. Hulu does hope to, over time, support other distributions. But both Ubuntu and Fedora make sense. Now, I will tell you that I did successfully install the Hulu client on Elive Compiz which is a Debian-based installation. So – if you can install a .deb package on your machine, and you meet the requirements, you might be golden.

Let’s take a look at the installation process. The Hulu client depends upon:

• GTK+ 2.12 or higher
• GLib 2.16 or higher
• LIRC 0.8.2 or higher (required for remote control functionality)
• Adobe Flash Player 9.0.124

Most likely, if you are running either Ubuntu 9.04 or Fedora 11, you already have everything you need installed (minus Flash). Installing Flash is as simple (at least in Ubuntu) as visiting a site that requires Flash, and then walk through the steps for installation when prompted. To install Hulu you will need to download the file from the Hulu Linux page. When you have downloaded that file you will need to issue one of the following commands (from within the directory the file was downloaded).

For Ubuntu:

dpkg -i huludesktop*

For Fedora:

rpm -ivh huludesktop*

Once the command finishes up, you are ready to run the client.

Using Hulu desktop

To start up the desktop client, issue the following command:

huludesktop

Figure 1

You will most likely find Hulu desktop in your Audio/Video menu. If not, you can always add it. When the client opens (see Figure 1) you can immediately begin searching and watching your favorite television episodes.

The menu and overall interface are amazingly simple and sleek. More than likely you will be surprised just how well done this Linux client is (considering it is still in beta).

Figure 2

As you can see (in Figure 2) the player runs seamlessly on the Linux desktop. What you can not see is that the client requires very little in desktop resources. In fact, it’s no more noticeable than running a browser.

Final thoughts

The Hulu Linux desktop client makes watching TV (and movies) a breeze. I am thrilled that Hulu has brought out a Linux client without making the Linux community wait as the Windows and Mac community enjoy it’s services.

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Users from unsupported countries can enter their email address to be informed when Spotify opens registration for their countries as well. There is however a way to register an account right away even if you are living in a country that is currently blocked from registration.

All that needs to be done to bypass the country check during registration is to use a web proxy from the United Kingdom. Why United Kingdom? Because users from this country can register without invitation. Spotify did a good job of blocking many UK web proxy servers and it might take some time before you locate one that is actually working for you. Someone let me know that this one is working quite well currently. You then need to paste the following url into the web proxy form:

https://www.spotify.com/en/products/overview/

The registration asks for the usual information including email address, username and password. Make sure you remember the username and password as these are used to log into the software program that is downloaded after the registration has finished.

Spotify does not perform country checks in the Spotify application which means that the web proxy is currently only needed to create the account. Another solution would be to ask a friend from the United Kingdom to create the account for you.

Feel free to add comments (and working proxies) in the comment section.

Update: Spotify will block access to the software after 14 days if the IP did not resolve to a country currently supported officially by the application.

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Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

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I needed a software program to merge mp3 to be able to have enough music for all the photos that would be displayed in the DVD slideshow.

Merge Mp3 is a free and portable software program for the Windows operating system that can do exactly that. Mp3 can be dragged and dropped into the application’s interface or selected through the file browser. It is also possible to specify folders or playlists to add and merge their mp3.

The order of the mp3 can be changed in the interface in case it needs to be. Basic controls for playing the added mp3 files are available. As are options to add ID3 tags for the new merged mp3. The biggest benefit of Merge Mp3 is its simplicity. It takes less than a minute to select the mp3 and join them. There are additional options where merging mp3 might make sense. This includes merging all chapters of an audiobook or the tracks of a ripped CD.

Merge Mp3 is compatible with Windows and available from the developer’s website.

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ScreenTunes is a new music search engine that tries to help the user who is looking for a name of a song that has been played in the movie or that was featured in a tv show. It’s a basic music search engine that can be used to search for songs, lyrics or music in movies and tv shows. The user has to switch to the movie search option that is located beneath the search form on the website before the search for a song or songs of a movie or tv show can be conducted.

The music search engine will display results immediately if a correct movie title has been entered in the search form. It will otherwise display movie suggestions (did you mean..) of which one has to be selected. Movie and tv show music are divided into two tabs. It is important to switch to the TV Shows tab to find music from tv shows.

Entering Bourne for example will not only display the three Jason Bourne movies as an option but also several others while a search for Dawson’s Creek will not display any results in the movie tab but the right tv show in the TV Shows tab.

Music from those movies and tv shows is then displayed in the search results including the music title, artist (if known) and three links. Many of the songs can be listened to right away by clicking on the Listen button. This will open a Grooveshark player on the website to play the song right there.

The two other options are to open the page of the song at Amazon or iTunes to purchase it. Results can vary a lot from none or only a few songs to dozens of songs. ScreenTunes (via Download Squad) offers an interesting option to users who want to identify a movie or tv show song.

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Now the problem lies in the fact that I have a fairly large collection of music files that are all in mp3 format. Having to convert 5,000+ files, one by one, via command line would cause even me to pull out my hair. So I decided it was time to search for a tool that would handle the conversion for me. The criteria for this conversion was that the tool had to be easily installed and easily used. My goal is to try to convince new users to shy away from either DRM formats or closed formats. And we all know, when dealing with new users, the easier the better. And so with that in mind, my hunt for the perfect tool landed me with Sound Converter.

Sound Converter is a GNOME-based conversion tool that can read anything the GStreamer library can read, which includes:

• Ogg Vorbis
• AAC
• MP3
• FLAC
• WAV
• AVI
• MPEG
• MOV
• M4A
• AC3
• DTS
• ALAC
• MPC

Once read, Sound Converter can then convert the file into:

• WAV
• FLAC
• MP3
• AAC
• Ogg Vorbis

The best feature of Sound Converter is that it can convert a single file or a directory of files. Add to that the usaual simplicty of most GNOME applications and you have the ingredients for a perfect solution. With that said, let’s get to it.

Installing Sound Converter

You will be glad to know Sound Converter is located in the Ubuntu repositories (as well as in the repos for most distributions).  So all you need to do is fire up your Add/Remove Software utility and do the following:

1. Search for “converter” (no quotes).
2. Select (or mark) the Sound Converter entry for installation.
3. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. After a brief moment Sound Converter will be installed.

Running Sound Converter

Figure 1

You will find the Sound Converter application in the Sound and Video sub-menu of the Applications menu of the GNOME desktop. When you open up Sound Converter you will be greeted by a very simple main window (see Figure 1). It should be obvious, from the looks of the main window, the developer had simplicity in mind when creating the interface for this tool.

Figure 2

Pretty much all you do is add files/folders to the list and click convert. Of course you first will need to configure Sound converter to meet your needs. Before you add a single file or folder to the list click on the Edit menu and select Preferences. When the preferences window opens (see Figure 2) you will want to take care of the following options:

• Location: Where you want the converted files to be placed (if it is to be different that where the input files are located.)
• Create Subfolders: Do you want Sound Converter to create subfolders for you? This is used only if you configure Sound Converter to store the output folders in a non-default location.
• Format: What format do you want the output files to be in?

The most important option is the Format. For my needs the format will be Ogg Vorbis. Once that is complete click Close and you are ready to convert.

Converting

There are two ways to add files/folders to the Sound Converter list. The most obvious way is to click either  the Add File or Add Folder buttons and navigate to the file/folder you want to add. Another method is to open the Nautilus file browser and drag and drop the files/folders into the Sound Converter window.

Once you have all of the files/folders listed in the main windows click the Convert button and Sound Converter will do its thing. In the end what you will have is solid quality converted files in the format of your desire. No command line necessary!

Final thoughts

Thank goodness for simple GUI tools that would have previously required creating bash scripts to handle batch conversion. Most users do not have the time or inclination to research creating such scripts. It’s a good thing Sound Converter is there to handle the job.

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The tool I eventually settled upon is Elltube. Of  all the available tools this was the easiest to install, get working, and the most reliable. With this tool you will find download and converting Youtube videos a nobrainer. There is only one small hitch. If you want to add mp3 support you will have to do some extra installation (In this case it means installing unsupported files). The distribution I will use for this tutorial is Ubuntu 9.04. I will illustrate converting videos into audio-only mp3 format. This is the format that causes issues with most users due to the necessary installation of mp3-supporting libraries.

Preparing for the installation of Elltube

The good news is that everything you need, outside of Elltube itself, will be located in the default repositories. The bad news? You will have to install restricted applications. What this means is that Canonical is not responsible for the updating of these files. With that said you will need to fire up Synaptic. I do not suggest you just open up the Add/Remove Software utility from the menu. Instead open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo synaptic

The above command will open up the full-blown Synaptic tool where you will need to do the following:

1. Search for “lame” (no quotes).
2. Scroll down until you see the “ubuntu-restricted-extras”.
3. Mark “ubuntu-restricted-extras” for installation.
4. Search for “ffmpeg” (no quotes).
5. Mark “ffmpeg” for installation.
6. Click Apply to install.

Once all of this has installed download the Elltube .deb file and save it to your ~/ directory. After this file download has completed open up a terminal window and issue the following command to install:

sudo dpkg -i ~/elltube_0.3-1_all.deb

which will install Elltube. You are ready to convert.

Converting a video to mp3 format

Figure 1

You will find Elltube in your Internet sub-menu of either your Main or Applications menu. When the Elltube application opens you will see the Main window (see Figure1). There isn’t much to this application from the GUI perspective – but it serves the purpose well.

The first thing you need to do is find a video you want to convert on Youtube. Let’s convert a live version of Rush’s La Villa Strangiato. Find the URl and then copy and paste into the

Figure 2

Youtube URL area. When you do this the details of the file will appear in the main window (see Figure 2). Now what you have to do is to select MP3 (audio only) from the Format drop-down and select a Save to location for the download and conversion. When the details are done, click the Download button and the process will begin.

When the conversion process is complete the “Video found!” message will change to let you know it is finished. When it has completed you will have your mp3 file in the Save to folder. You are ready to rock!

Final thoughts

Elltube makes the downloading and conversion of Youtube videos as simple as it gets. The ease at which this process is done makes the installation well worth it.

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You find a good mixture of established artists in the list including songs by Bif Naked, Underoath or Warren G but the majority of songs comes from artists that most visitors probably never heard of. This does not necessarily mean that this is bad music. It is actually a good way of discovering new artists that are not that in the focus of mass media.

The downloaded songs have been encoded with 192 Kbit and it is likely that all songs are encoded in this bitrate. Music can be sorted by letter or genre which helps to find the right music genre or artist.

There is no word yet on the duration of this promotion. Thanks goes to jagslive for sending us the tip.

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Cheese is not one of those applications that is going to make or break your desktop experience. But it certainly will enhance it. You can take standard pictures and even add effects to those pictures And Cheese doesn’t just do pics, it can do videos as well.

Getting and installing

Even though Cheese is a part of the GNOME desktop, it isn’t always installed by default. To install Cheese open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for “cheese” (no quotes), select the results, and click Apply. To start Cheese look in the Graphics submenu of the Applications menu.

Figure 1

When you fire Cheese up it will instantly start seeing you. Figure 1 shows me stalking a penguin through the eyes of Cheese. You will also see two photos I have already taken of myself.

To snap a photo of yourself place yourself in the position (or goofy face) you want and press the Take A Photo button.

When the photo is snapped it will appear in the lower pane of the application.

Now those photos you have taken have not been saved. You must actually save them before you can use them. To save a photo right click the photo and select “Save As”. By default photos are saved in the ~/Pictures/Webcam directory and can only be saved in .jpg format.

From that same right menu you can choose to send a picture to a removeable device, import the photo into F-Spot, open the photo, or send the photo to the trash. There is one other option “Set as Account Photo”, which is supposed to set a photo to your About me and your login photo. I have yet to get this to work.

Effects

You can even add effects to a photo. You actually add the effects before the photo is taken, and you can add more than one effect  if you like. To add effects click the Effects button to list all of the possible effects.

Figure 2

As you click on an effect it will be highlighted. Click on as many effects as you like, but know that the more effects you add the slower Cheese will get (especially when adding effects like Vertigo and Warp.)

After you select the effects you want click the Effects button again and you will be returned to the normal screen, only now your photo will be “enhanced” by the effects you have chosen.

You can see the right photo of me was with the Vertigo and the Warp effects running.

Countdown

You will notice, in the Cheese main menu, a Countdown entry. If this entry is checked there will be a delay in the photo taking (so you can make yourself as photogenic as possible.) If you would prefer instant results uncheck that entry and photos will be snapped as soon as you hit the Take a Photo button.

Final thoughts

Cheese is not going to make you a more productive worker. In fact, it’s just fun enough that it might make you a less productive worker. But when you need that interface to your trusty webcam, just say “Cheese” and you’ll be ready every time.

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I was looking at a player to connect to a DAAP server to centralize my home music collection. Songbird was the ticket. With that in mind I thought it might be good to illustrate how to use this player on Linux. Since most users here are Windows users, you are used to pointing and clicking an application into existence. With some Linux applications, this isn’t quite the case. Unlike most Linux applications, Songbird has yet to reach the repositories of the main distributions. Because of this you will have to download the application from the Songbird website and use the downloaded file.

Since Songbird is based on Firefox, it is used very similarly. The first thing you need to do is download the necessary file. You will find a link to the download from the main Songbird page. Once you have the file you will have to open up terminal window and change to the directory it was downloaded to. For simplicity sake let’s assume the file was downloaded to ~/Download/firefox/.

From within the terminal window issue the command:

cd ~/Download/firefox

Now move the file Songbird_XXX.tar.gz

Where XXX is the release and architecture of your file name.

Now change to your home directory with the command cd. Now you are ready to unpack the file. Run the command:

tar xvfz Songbird_XXX.tar.gz

which will result in a new directory ~/Songbird.

Figure 1

Within this new directory is everything you need run the application, which is done with the command ~/Songbird/songbird. It would be nice if you could create a link from the ~/Songbird/songbird to /usr/bin but this will not work. Instead what you need to do is create either a desktop or panel application launcher in order to open up Songbird. In GNOME you can create a panel launcher by right clicking the panel and selecting “Add to panel”.

The next step is to enter the details for the launcher. Here is what you’ll need:

• Type: Application
• Name: Songbird (This can actually be anything you want)
• Command: /home/USERNAME/Songbird/songbird NOTE: Where USERNAME is the actual user name. You must use the explicit path to the Songbird executable.
• Comment: Songbird Media Player (This can be anything you want)
• Icon: This will be located in /home/USERNAME/Songbird/chrome/icons/default/ Where USERNAME is the actual username. The icon name is default.xpm

Figure 2

For KDE 4 you actually have to add the Songbird entry to the menu. A launcher widget is planned for 4.2 but has yet to find its way into the repositories. To add Songbird to the menu  right click the Start Menu icon and select Menu Editor from the resulting menu.  In the window that opens you will want to add this menu entry to the Multimedia sub menu. Highlight the Multimedia entry and then click New Item. In the resulting General tab fill out the entries like you see in Figure 2. The only difference will be to make sure you use the explicit path to your Songbird executable. After you have filled everything out click the Save button. Now you will find Songbird in your KDE menu.

Final Thoughts

Songbird is really one of the more user-friendly audio/video management tools for any platform. If you are looking for a replacement for iTunes, that will allow you to work in any OS, Songbird should fit the bill.

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In fact even getting to the web-based administration screen isn’t easy from the Linux point of view. The instructions say point your browser to http://bubba and log in. When using a browser on Linux this will take you to search results for “bubba”. And the only mention of an IP address in the instructions is 192.168.10.1. Since my local network uses 192.168.1.x I couldn’t see the address. So what could I do? Let’s take a look.

Figure 1

Once you have the Bubba 2 plugged in (the instructions are quite clear and simple for this step) your first task is to locate the IP address for the machine. For this I employed Wireshark. As you can see, in Figure 1, there is some external traffic (some of which is from Facebook – must look into that) but the IP address of interest is the .16 address. Since there is a lot of traffic coming from that address it is a safe bet that address is attached to the Bubba 2.

So I point my browser to 192.168.1.16 and voila!, the Bubba 2 network admin screen is up. Wireshark has done its job for the day.

Since the Bubba 2 can stream music there has to be a way to place music into the /home/storage/music folder. Any music in this folder will be served up via DAAP. Problem is, how to get it there? It took me a bit of time, but I found a solution.

The first thing to do is to log into the web admin tool. By default the user/password is admin/admin. You can change this to meet your needs of course. Log in as your admin and click on the Fileserver section. Here you can upload all the music you need. Problem is, you can only load one file at a time (you can’t load directories.) With over 15,000 music files to copy this wasn’t an option. My next attempt found me using FTP to transfer directories to the Bubba 2. This worked to a point. What I now had was a standard user with a directory full of music which could not be streamed. This lead me to my next problem: I couldn’t move the directories from the users ~/ directory to /home/storage/music because of permissions issues.

The work around came about with the help of an external USB hard drive. This is the same drive that contains my entire music collection. By connecting this drive to the Bubba 2 I was then able to copy the entire contents of this drive to the /home/storage/music directory which was then ready for streaming.

Streaming to Linux

Figure 2

The easiest method of listening to the music on the Bubba 2 is with a DAAP-enalbed piece of software. Out of the box Rhythmbox was able to connect to the stream. To do this you right click in an empty area of the left nav where a new menu will open (see Figure 2). In this new menu you will see an entry “Connect to DAAP share”. Select that and enter the IP address of your Bubba 2.

Shortly after you do this, your Shared library will populate with music from your Bubba 2. Listen away.

Final Thoughts

The Bubba 2 isn’t limited to only music streaming. You can share out printers and email as well. But when you’re having to connect from a Linux box, you might have to go through a few more steps than you would with either Windows or Mac. Even with these extra steps, it’s worth it. The Bubba 2 is an outstanding piece of hardware that makes sharing to small networks a snap.

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With Streamtuner you will find plenty of music genres at your fingertips waiting for you to stream them to your speakers. But just how easy is Streamtune? You will be surprised just how easy. And Streamtuner isn’t limited to Shoutcast. You can stream:

• Live365
• Xiph.org
• basic.ch
• local streams

and many more.

Getting and installing

Streamtuner should be included in your distributions’ repositories so you can open up your Add/Remove Software utility, search for Streamtuner, select Streamtune, and apply the changes.

Once stream tuner is installed you will most likely find it located in your Audio sub menu of your main menu. If you can not locate it, you can start it by issuing the command streamtuner from the command line.

How it works

Figure 1

Streamtuner is quite easy to use. Once open (see Figure 1) you navigate through the various streams, select the stream you want, and click the Tune in button. You can even record a stream (defaulting to mp3 format) by clicking the Record button.

Options

Figure 2

Streamtuner will default to whatever application you have set up to play the particular stream. By default, my installation optioned XMMS to play streams. You can, however, configure Streamtuner to use any application that will play the stream.

To configure Streamtuner to use a different application click on the Preferences entry in the Edit menu which will open the Preferences window (see Figure 2). In this window you will see the various types of Actions for Streamtuner. To change a command to handle this action double click on the particular action, delete the command used, and replace the command. You do have to know the exact command to run the application you want to use. Make sure you do keep the ” %q” suffix on the command (otherwise the application will open but not to the particular stream.)

Figure 3

From this same Preferences window you can define how many streams for each server type are loaded by clicking on the particular server plugin. By default each will load 100 available streams. You can up that by simply clicking the checkbox by the “Load at most” entry and upping the amount (see Figure 3).

Search for music

You can search for a particular genre of music, artist, song, etc within Streamtuner. To do this either click the Find entry in the Edit menu or hit the Ctrl-f key combination. This will bring up a find dialog box. Enter your search string and click Find. The resuls will appear in the main window where you can then select from the various streams. In order to do another search you first have to click the Reload button and then run your next search.This search method will only search the server type you currently in. So if you want to go from searching Shoutcast to searching Live365 you will have to click on the server tab and then run your search.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking for a means to listen to streaming music on a Linux desktop, search no further than Streamtune. It’s easy to use, reliable, and offers quite a large amount of music genres and stations to stream.

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