It has been a long journey trying to make this jump to subscription based music listening… and I’m far from satisfied. My must haves are… intuitive user experience, great artist / album / song selection, must have some way to share what I’m listening to with friends, and of course the obvious things… offline play, accurate artist / album information, etc.

This post is meant to be a personal perspective after spending a few months testing out Spotify and Rdio. It is not meant to be a complete list (those can be found fairly easily), just my current complaints with the services. I will probably be posting more in the future as I make up my mind as to which service I like.

Current Frustrations

Spotify is losing massive points with their mobile app. When you want to listen to music you have to either know what album you want to listen to and search for it, or scroll through every track that you have starred or have in a playlist to find one. There is no personal library of artists or albums.

Generally you would expect to click on a “Library” tab then get a list of your artists. Once you choose an artist you would get a list of that artist’s albums. With Spotify this is not the case. Your “Library” is just one massive list of tracks.

I learned early that there is no native ‘Add to Library’ or ‘Add to Collection’ function in Spotify. Instead, you add artists / albums / tracks to your “Library” by starring them or adding them to a playlist. My first thought was to create a playlist called “Library” and put everything I found that I wanted to remember into it. This does not work. It is just a list of tracks. In the desktop application this is fine as it is just a normal list of tracks sortable by artist or album, but for the mobile app a long list of non-sortable tracks is not usable. So for me to get to The Naked and Famous I have to scroll down 3000+ tracks. It takes a long time and is not usable. You have the same problem if you try to star all of your library items.

I figured there has to be a better way to do this so I googled for a better way to manage your Spotify Library and I found that people are getting around this by creating playlists for each artist they want to add to their library. So they end up having 500+ playlists. What a messed up way to handle a music library.

I’m torn. Though it has it’s own problems, Rdio handles this much better. As expected you add albums to your “Collection”. Then when you navigate to your collection you get a list of artists. Once you’ve selected an artist you get a list of that artist’s albums. It works as expected.

Spotify Music Organization

Often times I’ve noticed Spotify has numerous copies of a specific album for example, any of Frightened Rabbit’s official releases. It is tough to know which album is the ‘Correct’ album. Maybe that’s not important.

Rdio Sharing

You can only share playlists and new favorite music with friends that have Rdio. Because there is no free service, like Spotify has, people can listen to 30 second clips of each track in your playlist, but nothing more. This is unfortunate as music listening is, in part, a social experience for me.

Music Selection

It is true that Spotify has more music than Rdio. That is a big deal to me, but after using Rdio, it is far less noticeable than I thought it would be. Rdio is very good at getting new music as soon as it is released. I have also found a number of albums that I would not expect them to have. It hasn’t really proven to be a large issue for me (yet). You can compare the libraries of the different services over here: http://www.mattmontag.com/smasher/.

Closing

Until these services improve I’m leaning towards… Rdio Premium for primary listening (Rdio also has a great iPad app that Spotify is missing), Spotify Free to create playlists and share them with friends, and iTunes (manual purchase) for anything Rdio and Spotify don’t have. Kind of messed up, but I knew this transition wouldn’t be easy.

(ref. http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/organize_favourite_music_in_a_library)

<style>
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</style>

<script>
$(function(){
var copy = new RegExp(‘\u00a9′,’g');
var reg = new RegExp(‘\u00ae’,'g’);
var newBody = $(‘body’).html().replace(copy, ‘<span class=”copy”>&copy;</span>’).replace(reg, ‘<span class=”reg”>&reg;</span>’);
$(‘body’).html(newBody);
});
</script>

I have been working lately… and have proof. Besides the indentation in my office chair [insert Steelcase shout-out here], I have some ‘artifacts’ worth sharing. Here are a few of the websites I’ve worked on that have recently gone live.

Whats Your Art?

View Site

Sebago

View Site

Bates Footwear

View Site

Don’t do it! (yet)

With getting a new Google Wave account, I wanted to forward my Gmail emails to my Google Wave account. I saw that my Google Wave account was [username]@googlewave.com so I figured I could do it. I went into Gmail. Followed Settings > Forward and set up Gmail to pass all of my emails on to google wave.

I left it on for a day or so, and maybe that was my big mistake. I have been getting emails every 20-30 minutes that have been telling me they cannot send my emails to Google Wave, and that they will retry for the next 2 days. They have a subject line of ‘Delivery Status Notification (Failure)’. Obviously I turned off my forwarding, however now, 3 days later, they are still coming in every 20-30 minutes telling me that the email failed.

So moral of the story. Don’t automatically forward your emails to Google Wave (yet!) and also, don’t leave that forward on any longer than you have to. Google Wave is not ready for it yet and it will get REALLY annoying.

1) Turn on Column Browser: View > Show Column Browser
2) Show Albums as well as artists: View > Column Browser > Albums
3) Show Genres as well as albums and artists: View > Column Browser > Genres
4) Setup Column Browser to show up above your song lists: View > Column Browser > On Top

1. A normal form field watermark that empties on focus and refills on blur.
2. A value that is set by the server trumps anything that the plugin does. (Note: this way, if a user has to fill out the form again because one of the fields didn’t validate, the server can send values so that the user doesn’t have to refill the whole form)
3. There may be a time when you want to ignore the plugin and keep your label visible. Just add a ‘ignore’ class to your label and the plugin doesn’t touch it.
4. This is an extra couple of lines written so that validation works correctly. What it does is it empties the fields that have not been touched by the user on submit. That way, we can run our validation against those fields, and we don’t submit our label.

This solution focuses on accessibility as it does not remove the label, just moves it off the viewport. This way, if a user does not have Javascript, CSS, or uses a screen reader, they will still get normal labels.

View a demo
Download plugin (link to jQuery plugins)

Please let me know what you think about it, or if there is anything I should do to improve.

I know that there are a lot of dependencies that go along with installing RMagick from source on Leopard.  For this reason, I was very interested in the idea of packing all of the commands into a script and just letting it run.  If you are like me, your past with scripts has been grey at best; i.e. there always seems to be some sort of problem that kills your script. Then you have to search through it to find where it broke and you spend a lot of time aligning yourself with something that might not even work.

The reason most of these scripts will fail is that references are now broken or code deprecated. If it fails, I then have to make sure that http://whatever.com still exists and is hosting the file and version that I need. I got to thinking… so often I would like (at least) the option of using something that is a bit older, but can be run smoothly.

The ‘Dependencies’/Libraries

This script uses Ruby to install ImageMagick and RMagick, with the necessary dependencies for gif, jpg, png, freetype, tiff,¬†libwmf (?),¬†littlecms (?), and¬†ghostscript (?). ¬†It rely’s on these libraries:

JPEG:
ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz

PNG:
http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2

Freetype:
http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz

TIFF:
ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz

http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz

LittleCMS:
http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz

Ghostscript:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz

Ghostscript Fonts:
ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz

ImageMagick:
ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz

When I found this script these URLs were built in so that if one of the URLs didn’t work, it would break. That is fine, but it is not built to find the newest and greatest, or make sure that the newest still works with everything else. So why not just package all of those url’s libraries together and make that downloadable here. I may be breaking a law or something… (if I am let me know) but I think these are all open-source.

The Instructions

So here is how it is done.

– Download the zip (39.5 MB)
– Unpack it
– Open Terminal.app

cd /to/inside/the/unzipped/dir
ruby setup.rb

Now just let it run. (You may have to put in your password every once in a while because of the ‘sudo’s).

I should also note that I had X11 (Applications > Utilities > X11) and Xcode 3.0 (Macintosh HD > Developer > Applications > Xcode) installed when I ran this script.  I am not sure how much this helped/effected the script running, but I do have these installed and runnable.

The Original

Again, a special thanks to Solomon White who originally posted this script at his blog.

Here are some other references for this technique.

John Ford:
http://www.aldenta.com/2007/11/26/installing-imagemagickrmagick-on-leopard/

Ben Reubenstein:
http://www.benr75.com/articles/2008/03/16/install-rmagick-on-mac-os-x-leopard-from-source

Here is what I found at Solomon’s website.

#!/bin/sh
curl -O http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases/freetype/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
tar xzvf freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz
cd freetype-2.3.5
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libpng/libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
tar jxvf libpng-1.2.22.tar.bz2
cd libpng-1.2.22
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar xzvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzvf tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd tiff-3.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/wvware/libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf libwmf-0.2.8.4.tar.gz
cd libwmf-0.2.8.4
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O http://www.littlecms.com/lcms-1.17.tar.gz
tar xzvf lcms-1.17.tar.gz
cd lcms-1.17
make clean
./configure
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs860/ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-8.60.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.60/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install
cd ..

curl -O ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
sudo mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript

curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ImageMagick-6.3.8-11.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.8
export CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-static --with-modules --without-perl --without-magick-plus-plus --with-quantum-depth=8 --with-gs-font-dir=/usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts
make
sudo make install
cd ..

sudo gem install rmagick

Deprec automatically creates the deploy group as part of it’s recipes.¬† I was stunned.¬† Upon looking for an hour or two I came across a ‘grep’ that deprec runs.¬† It runs “sudo -p ‘sudo password: ‘ grep ‘deploy:’ /etc/group || sudo /usr/sbin/groupadd deploy”.¬† This grep checks the /etc/group file for any occurances of ‘deploy’. My deploy user was named pd_deploy.¬† Users live in the /etc/group file under their group following the following convention:

group: user1,user2,user3

My /etc/group file contained the following:

admin:root,pd_deploy

Deprec found ‘deploy’ in my user, pd_’deploy’, and thought that the group already existed.¬† It therefore failed to create a new one and blew up when it was trying to change a group that did not exist.

To save yourself a lot of hassle, don’t have ‘deploy’ anywhere in your /etc/group file, meaning, don’t have a user with ‘deploy’ anywhere in the name.¬† So no ‘deployuser’ or ‘user_deploy’.

First step:

1. In the Virtual PC Console click ‘Settings’.
2. Click ‘Network’.
3. Change the ‘Adapter’ to the way you wish to connect to the internet, be it Wireless card or Ethernet card.

Second step:

1. Open Internet Explorer from the VPC Console.
2. Follow ‘Tools’ > ‘Internet Options…’ > ‘Connections’ > ‘Setup’
3. Follow ‘Next’ > ‘Connect to the Internet’ > ‘Set up my connection manually’ > ‘Connect using a broadband connection that is always on’ > ‘Finish’
4. Back in the ‘Connections’ tab select ‘LAN Settings’ and turn off the ‘Proxy server’ if it is ticked.

Thats it.

In Terminal.app:
cd /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS
./firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Sadly, instead of fixing the issue I assumed it was something with NetBean’s setup for webrick and decided to try “Instant Rails” which uses Mongrel instead of Webrick. This change was successful and now Upload Column works perfectly fine. If you know how to do this, go for it. I will paste my steps below.

1. Download Instant Rails at http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=904
   (note where you will run instant rails from… I just put mine in ‘C:/’)
2. Inside of NetBeans follow: TOOLS > OPTIONS > MISCELLANEOUS > RUBY
3. Change the ruby interpreter to you your Instant Rails folder… Mine looks like ‘C:\InstantRails\ruby\bin\ruby.exe’
4. Might have to download sync-stdio.rb and put it in your NetBeans Ruby IDE folder. Mine is ‘…/nbrubyide/ruby1/sync-stdio.rb’
5. Then Run Instant Rails
6. Install the appropriate gems in the ‘Ruby Console Window’ (Right click on the big ‘I’ in the system tray RAILS APPLICATIONS > OPEN RUBY CONSOLE WINDOW)
7. Update your database using phpMyAdmin (also via Instant Rails’ system tray)
8. In NetBeans Ruby IDE start your app

That should fix the “Not Found” error. Or at least it did for me. Let me know if I need to clarify anything else a little better. Thanks…

http://lifehacker.com/software/itunes/minimize-itunes-to-your-
taskbar-194903.php

The gist is as follows.

1. Right click on the taskbar
2. Hover over ‘toolbars’
3. Select ‘iTunes’
4. Minimize iTunes

This with iTunesKeys makes for iTunes on a PC to run somewhat to the convenience of iTunes on a Mac with SizzlingKeys installed.

Fix: In this previous sentence I meant to say – iTunes on a PC, with this toolbar enabled and while running iTunesKeys, is finally comparable to the convenience of iTunes on a Mac (that has SizzlingKeys running).

——-
Switching gears. The best song in my ears right now (by far) is ‘Fake Empire’ by The National. The National is an amazing group from Ohio (formed in New York) that writes extremely effective music. This music sometimes considered “growing” music as it takes a while to fully appreciate.

I think this song is a little different. I never had a hesitation in loving this song and I find it very accessible. I love when the drums come in and make you re-think the base movement of the song. Truth is, I think the time signature is both 4/4 and 3/4. Anybody have a way to know? I would be interested to learn. It is like an argument between the instrument that somehow is in agreement. Basically, if you like syncopation and melodious enlightenment, this is your next favorite song.