I came across a cool little tool called Nuvola that is a wrapper around various cloud music services such as Grooveshark and Google Music. It not only makes them into full applications but does things like add support for scrobbling and multimedia controls. I quite like having my web apps appear as full applications and use the "Make Application" function in Epiphany to do it quite often. That way typing "gma" will either switch to the running app or start up an new Gmail window from anywhere on the desktop and I find that regular desktop controls like alt-tab are easier to manage than tabs in a browser for apps that I am using regularly.

This rambling post does have another point to it though. A lot of the cloud music sites still use Flash to play the music. Flash has always caused problems because it's closed source and so people can't fix all the niggling issues. Instead we have hacky work arounds. I present a stack of them here.

When my laptop is docked at work I have two sound cards and for the most part it works okay. I can switch between them without any problems and use my headphones or speakers that are always plugged into my dock. When I tried Nuvola it refused to send the sound to the dock sound card and was not even showing up on the list of apps using the sound card.

TL;DR: apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386

I will go into some more detail now. Nuvola is quite new and used the GTK3 toolkit. Flash is quite old and uses the GTK2 tool kit and we are waiting on Adobe to update it. So in the mean time we have to make them play nice together. To do this we use nspluginwrapper which runs flash in it's own process space. There is a howto on the Nuvola site for installing a compatible version of flash and that should at least get you flash running and some sound coming out.

Next up is the problem that this wraps an i386 version of flash and if you are running on amd64 like I am then it needs some extra libraries to make it work. To do that you need to setup multiarch support. Simply run dpkg --add-architecture i386 and run apt-get update as root. You can then install the asound plugins for i386 so that the Flash plugin can talk to pulseaudio. Run apt-get install libasound2-plugins:i386. Restart Nuvola and you should be good to go.

Spacial Widening on the Nokia phones

I am normally not somebody to turn on equalizers or sound processors and I can see no reason why you would want to have your music altered so that it shoulds like you are in your bathroom but I turned on the spacial widening on my phone and I think that I like it.

I have been thinking recently how, when using headphones, you get a really tiny sound stage. The band feels like it is playing about a gig on the bridge of your nose. Now this is okay for most things and I think that it helps with the feeling that you are not interfering with other people on the train or bus but it is missing something.

Spacial widening settings have always left me cold, giving a feeling that you have somehow just taken the heart out of the music. Nokia's new system on the other hand still keeps the majority of the sound at the bridge of the nose gig but just pushes some of it out beyond your head on either side. It does sound pretty nice. Having said all that it still fails for some tracks, sounding too open and washy but for the majority it's an improvement.

It looks like they have stopped thinking "What else can we do with this DSP?" and started to think "How can we improve the sound?".

Time will tell but for now it's getting left on.

Flights in WMA

Now if only they did it in mp3 then I might buy it. Perhaps I can download it somewhere else then come back and pay for it.

Media Masters of the Universe

I came across a site called mediamaster while watching a podtech podcast the other day. Basically its an online site to store your music. There is a webapp, currently in Java, that allows you to upload your music and even supports direct import from iTunes if you use it. Then you can make playlist and do all the usual music management stuff. Then no matter where you are you can just lauch the player, in a browser, and get to all your music.

I have just started using it, uploaded a few files, and played with it on the PC. Seems to work okay with Linux so that is good and if nothing else acts as a nice backup of your music collection!

Now to the Internet Tablet but. The web player is written in flash but it does not seem to work with the current browsers on the n800 so that's a bit of a shame. There is however a mobile version of mediamaster, http://www.mediamaster.com/mobile/, that lists all your playlist. Click on one of the links and it loads it straight up into media player. So now I can play my entire music collection whereever I am, as long as I have wi-fi :-)

There is apparently a new version of the interface coming out in the next few weeks so this may all change but for now it looks okay.

The podcast that I watched is available here as well if you want: http://www.podtech.net/home/4429/the-future-of-home-entertainment-mediamaster

Final Weather Report

"Jazz ledgend Joe Zawinul dies at age 75". He was one of the founding members of the jazz band Weather Report which apparently was always good to drop into any jazz dj set.