Qtrax First Look: Nice Interface, But Where Are the Tunes?
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Simply announcing that you've got major-label music on your pretty new P2P service doesn't make it so. Listening Post looks at Qtrax's just-launched service, with a few questions about what went wrong.
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By Bruno Dieter Chan  THIS week I have some interesting software for you. We'll start off with the useful and work our way down to the could-be-useful.
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Development of native Linux audio plugins and softsynths may not be so relentlessly rapid as it is in the Windows and Mac sound software worlds, but new things do appear. This week I profile a cool new (well, relatively new) Linux softsynth, William Weston's Phase Harmonic Advanced Synthesis EXperiment, also known as Phasex. read more
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Popular music notation software adds sound library, 'snippets' database, and new options.
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An 'export to iTunes' feature is included in GarageBand 4.1.1, released last week.
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On Christmas day, after the potlatch subsided, I headed out for a run. When I flicked on my MP3 player, however, I heard ... nothing. Glancing down at the display of my Creative Nomad MuVo TX I saw an unwelcome message: "File system error." Grrr.
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Killing two birds with one stone Hands on Iâve been fascinated by cross-platform programming for more years than I care to remember, and my interest has recently been sharpened by the acquisition of a number of Apple Macs â both Intel and PPC (PowerPC). This article focuses primarily on some technical aspects of Qt, Trolltechâs cross-platform C++ toolkit which, as you may know, is the architectural core behind the KDE desktop on Linux. At the end, I show how easy it is to create a simple application without writing a line of code.â¦
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Chris Hartjes has posted the first part of a series on the "rebirth" of a component that was contributed to the Zend Framework - Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler (to interface with the Audioscrobbler service from Last.fm).   Many moons ago I set out (along with my friend Derek) to make a contribution to Zend Framework in the form of an add-on to let people easily access the Audioscrobbler web service. We worked really hard, implemented all the features of the web service at that time. Imagine our surprise when it got accepted as part of the 1.0 release of Zend Framework! Awesome! It even has it's own entry in the manual and everything.   He admits, though, that the code is not all that it could be and cites some examples as well as ways he would make it all work so much better.
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Qtrax, a new legal online file-sharing  service that allows fans to download songs for free, said on  Sunday it will launch with 25 million to 30 million copyrighted  tracks with backing from major labels.
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In the coming weeks and months you'll probably see me writing about issues of podcatchers here, because I'm working on one. It's the third one I've written, so this time maybe I'll get it right.  A lot of things have changed since I wrote my first podcatcher back in 2001. 1. Back then there were no podcasts, so it was a proof of concept, a chicken without an egg (or an egg with no chicken), a step in a bootstrap. Today there are lots of podcasts. An embarassment of riches. 2. Back then implementing a podcatcher was simple, there was exactly one format to support, RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Today, luckily, it's still fairly simple, as far as the format goes. The only variability is the iTunes namespace, which complicates things, just a little.  3. Today there are enough users to make it possible to support lists of podcasts published by fans, and instead of just subscribing to the podcast feeds, you can subscribe to lists of feeds. I will publish one of these lists, in OPML 2.0 format, as a proof of concept.  4. The first version of this new podcatcher will run in the OPML Editor because that's where all my software runs at first. But the goal is to port it to run in other environments, some with millions of users. I want to provide a popular alternative to the one that Apple publishes which currently dominates the market. (Note: I'm generally pleased with the way Apple dominates, they've been very fair about allowing users to export their subscription lists. But if we want to create the opportunity for others to innovate in the area of podcast players, there has to be choice at the podcatcher level. That's my main motive for revisiting this area.) There probably are some other changes, and I'll write about them as the project moves forward. Now.... To people who say that Apple has the market sewn up, I say Bah! I think iPods are great, but they're designed to play music, not podcasts. Every bit of music is something you want to keep forever, a podcast loses almost all its value after you've listened to it once. You have to pay for music (in theory at least) but podcasts are free.  Podcasts beg to have a player that can download them without synching with a desktop computer. Okay that's something podcasts have in common with music.  I buy Apple products all the time. I've gone from resenting Apple so much that I wouldn't buy their products, as recently as 2005, to today when not only do I only use Macs, but I'm constantly telling people why they'd be better off using Macs. I can't help but evangelize the products, I think they're that much better than Windows PCs.  But as much as I love Apple (can't believe I actually said that) I still don't trust them with a whole medium. We need them to have competition. The rest of the tech industry seems to think they're immune to it, that creates a huge opportunity with someone with enough chutzpah to think they can do it. Yours truly, Dave Winer
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If you're using FlickrFan, you should have a copy of podcatcher.root in your Tool folder. If not now, at the top of the next hour (launch the OPML app so it can do the update). I want to get started with a small group of people, develop features, and then figure out how to broaden it, if that turns out to be the right thing to do. For now, I just want a testbed to develop, and a group of interested users. I've put together a brief cheat sheet for FlickrFan users. http://codecasting.org/podcatcher/00001.html  If you have a question please post it there and we'll try to get you the answer. Hope it works, and hope you like it.
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There is a new release of Rosegarden, a MIDI and Audio Sequencer and Notation Editor for Linux. This exciting release includes a number of significant new features, including true multitrack MIDI recording, ramped tempos, cut and paste of time ranges across all segments, better Lilypond output, better support for transposing instruments, and a database of acoustic instrument ranges, transpositions, and clefs.   To download, go to this page: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=4932
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(Source: Symphoniq) Learn why traditional performance tools can't deliver the visibility and control required to manage today's complex architectures as well as requirements an optimal solution should provide.  Listen to this podcast now!
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A look at three GUI front-ends for the LilyPond music notation software.
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Tycho:   One of the questions during a a panel at PAX had to do with the italicised line at the end of each day's post.  They're almost always song lyrics, and back before we were paying for bandwidth (and before RIAA rape gangs were prowling the web) these lines used to link directly to the MP3.  I maintained the practice afterward because it's sort of like a song of the day, and I like the idea that someone might be struck by a strange turn of phrase and seek out a piece of music.  It also serves as a gauge of my mental state at the moment.  Today's song, for example, is Stan Rodgers' incredible live version of the sea shanty "Rolling Down To Old Maui," which Pandora kicked out after about a week of tuning the station.  I've listened to it about thirty times today.    The person who asked the question at the con complimented my musical tastes, and I accepted the compliment, but I'm almost always late to the scene.  I just bought Interpol's "Turn On The Bright Lights," for chrissakes.  I'm mostly lucky to know people who do have unique library.  I told him I would mention a few of my favorite bands on the site, but then I forgot.  Essentially, it's music that cool people were listening to a decade ago (where applicable).  I am a musical carrion bird.    He wanted me to list off a few bands, and I said I would last week, but then I forgot.  These are the first ten albums I could think of.    "Starless" by Shiner
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Sebastian Bergmann has posted about a new contest to his blog today centering around the phpOpenTracker software.    After two years in which I did not have the time to work on it, the development of phpOpenTracker is slowly commencing again. The first step to restart the development has been the migration from BerliOS to a Trac setup that is generously provided by Tobias Schlitt.   While setting up Trac it occured to me that I do not have a logo for phpOpenTracker. To get to such a logo I try something new: I ask you to participate in the phpOpenTracker Logo Contest.    He sets up some rules for the competition including that the design should convey flexibility and that the winner's work will go under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license. Check out the post, though, for the full details on rules and submission guidelines.
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Q:I HAVE SOME SONGS that play fine with the iTunes program, but when I look for the song files on my hard drive, I can&#39;t find them.