In this first post, I’m going to talk a bit about how I’m currently using the set up to serve my music collection around the flat, to work, and to my phone for on-the-go listening. It’s worth noting at this point that everything here relies on an old machine running Ubuntu server that’s currently sat in my cupboard, a solution that won’t work for everyone…

I’ve mentioned previously that I was looking into using DAAP to get at my music. This ended pretty quickly when I realised the clients available for listening are fairly crap. The actual configuration is fiddly, and I was after a nice functional GUI to access my music through. DAAP failed at pretty much all of this, so I went in search of another solution. After trying many different software packages (commercial and otherwise), I struck upon Subsonic, which seemed at first glance to do everything I was after. Essentially, it requires a server (available for all platforms) with access to your music collection, and will then spit the content back out to its own web UI (accessible through a personal URL if you’re not like me and running some kind of dynamic DNS service) plus it has a number of native players available for different platforms (including mobile). Best of all – it’s free! They withhold some features until you’ve given a small donation, but it’s entirely usable as a free package!

The web UI is basic, but skinnable (I’m still working with the basic skin – works well), and gives you access at a glance to all your artists, albums and playlists (although I’ve not done much with playlists yet, that part does seem a bit tricky). This UI also lets you play with the ID3 tags on your music, including the grabbing of album artwork off the internet, so if you’re as OCD as me about music tagging, your needs are well catered for! Within the web application your play queue appears at the bottom, with the current playing song in a lovely flash player. From the main window you can add things onto the end of the play queue, or change the playing song entirely. It’s basic, but functional, and if you want anything more advanced there are a number of native players available for all operating systems.

What interested me most was the quality of the iOS native applications. I’ve tried all of the ones recommended on Subsonics App page, and a couple that are in the app store but not endorsed officially, but I have now struck upon iSub as a favourite. It allows the caching of songs on your phone for playback when no data signal is available (although you have to have played the song for it to be cached – I’d like a feature where you could pre-cache songs to the phone), plus it integrates nicely with the iOS player API (play/pause whilst locked etc).

One other massive bonus was my discovery of a XMBC plugin for Subsonic (XMBC is what I use to browse media on my TV, as I’ve mentioned previously, more in a future post). This lets me listen to songs through my TV in the flat without having to bother turning a computer on – a massive bonus, and much more sociable if you have company!

The only downside of Subsonic is the reliance on a stable internet connection to an always-on music server. There are commercially hosted solutions available, but since I already had a machine running 24/7, and have recently splashed out on Virgin Media’s 30Mb fibre connection, it made sense to run the package from home.

So there it is – a whole-hearted recommendation for Subsonic (they’re honestly not paying me for this!) and it’s associated other applications. Tune in soon for a peek into the world of my TV/Movie system!

The feature that finally sold it for me is the inclusion of your existing music library within Spotify. As someone with a fairly large music collection built up and organised over many years, it would have been a horrific task to transfer everything across from iTunes into Spotify, but thankfully the new version makes this extremely easy to do, albeit with a few issues with tracks being lost in the process. I’ve noticed that as soon as tracks are imported into Spotify, it queries Gracenote CDDB to try and find the best information possible, however this does not play very nicely when iTunes is trying to organise your music for you, since I’m a fan of having my music sorted into folders automatically!

As an iPhone owner, I obviously want to take some music with me on the go, and my main gripe with having Spotify as a primary music store is the lack of ability to easily sync across to my phone. Although Spotify released this a while ago, I never really had chance to play with their iPhone app, but again – I’m impressed! The wireless sync is brilliant for me, as I hate iTunes tying up my phone for ages at a time to update my library (I download quite a lot of music, which I inevitably want on my phone straight away, at least to start with). As soon as iPhone OS 4.0 drops this summer, and Spotify supports background playing – I’ll be resigning the iPod application to far far down in my pages of apps! However, having to remember to start the Spotify app when you get home could be a bit of an issue, I don’t know if iPhone 4.0 will support anything to allow Spotify to download in the background – but we shall see.

The other new feature of this latest Spotify update is the ability to link back to your Facebook account, giving a whole new depth of social networking with regards to music. I’m happy that Spotify didn’t try to create their own network, but decided to tie it in with what is probably the one website everyone uses! The ability to have friends suggest tracks and share playlists right from within the Spotify application is a brilliant (but rather open to abuse – how many people have you rickrolled already?!!) feature. I’m amazed someone else (Apple?) didn’t come to the market with this feature first!

One major feature I think is missing is the lack of support for podcast downloading within Spotify. I know it’s not really what they set out to do, but they’re clearly going after iTunes with all these new features, and quite a few people I know do like having podcasts downloaded automatically, and transferring to their phone/media device for playing on the move. I really hope this one comes along soon, as I’ll then have no need to carry on syncing my phone with iTunes on a regular basis, instead relying on Spotify syncing over the air whenever I’m at home and the app is running.

All in all, I’m very happy with my subscription – money well spent. However, I think I’ll probably wait until the iPhone update before renewing my subscription so that I can make full use of its features. Well done Spotify – you’ve earned yourself another happy customer!

Been trying out the ‘Boffin’ tool from Last.fm this evening – and I’m astounded!

Basically, it scans your PC for music, groups it by tag, and then lets you play only music with a specific tag. For instance, I’ve had “Trance” selected for a while now, and it just keeps shoving on amazing tunes I didn’t even know I had!

Obviously, its on an Alpha release, but the technology demonstrated behind it is superb. Didn’t take long to scan my entire music library, and did a pretty good job (so far) of getting the tags and grouping them.

Its also nice to see what my music library mainly consists of (hope the picture works!):

Can’t wait to see this incorporated into the main Last.fm program!

The title track is pretty awesome, and ‘Omen’ is epic (I owned that before), however a lot of the other stuff just isn’t their style, neither old school Prodigy or new-electro Prodigy.

I’d say I do regret buying this one, but its definitely one to get for free (not that I encourage that!)

Daniel Bedingfield – Gotta Get Thru This – He Don’t Love You Like I Love You

And I’m enjoying… catchy lyrics, and he’s got a pretty good voice. I’m sure this is Music Tech eating me from the inside out!

Someone kill me or make me do something manly – QUICK!