Fedora Music Update

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Not a lot of traffic on the list.  That's ok -- not ideal, but ok.  Baby
steps.  :)  So I'm here to give an update on what I, and some other folks,
have been working on.
 
Some Red Hatters had a meeting here at Red Hat this afternoon to talk
about the "free music" roadmap as we see it.  Lots of baby steps in a
number of directions.  

These were the action items that fell out.  The owners are Redhatters and
are listed in (parens) after each action item.  All of us could use any
help you'd like to offer.  

Here were the attendees at the meeting:
 
  * Luke Macken (lmacken(a)redhat.com)
  * Steve Salevan (ssalevan(a)redhat.com)
  * Adrian Likins (alikins(a)redhat.com)
  * Myself (gdk(a)redhat.com)

And the action items:
 
* JAMENDO STREAMS IN RHYTHMBOX FOR FC6 (lmacken).  It should be relatively
simple to get Rhythmbox, default music player in FC6, to stream Ogg music
out of the box.  One of the strongest sources for free Ogg content is
jamendo.com.  (Laurent, we may ask for your help here.)
 
* TORRENT SERVER FOR JAMENDO OGG FILES (gdk).  The nice thing about 
Jamendo is that it allows not just streaming, but actual download of files 
through BitTorrent.  We're going to invest in some hardware to help 
support with Ogg support: a system with lots of disk and decent bandwidth.  
(This server will probably also help us with the Live CD project.)
 
* RHYTHMBOX PLUG-IN EXPERIMENTATION (lmacken, ssalevan).  Jamendo has some 
great xmlrpc calls.  We'd like to hook into them so that Rhythmbox can 
show artist info -- maybe even in the notifications field for Rhythmbox.  
Like, say, where an artist will be playing, or where you can buy a 
t-shirt.  Mostly, we'll just be playing around to figure out how this will 
work.  Luke/Steve, it might be worth finding some CVS space in Fedora-land 
if other people are interested in this.
 
* TALK TO CCMIXTER FOLKS ABOUT OGG (gdk).  How much of the content 
uploaded to ccMixter is available in Ogg format?  Not much.  We'd like to 
see if we can fix this.
 
* TALK TO MAGNATUNE FOLKS ABOUT OGG (gdk).  Same goes for Magnatune.  I 
know they're working on making their content available as Ogg files, but a 
little nudge in the right direction might help.  :)
 
* GET TAMTAM RUNNING IN OUR LAB (alikins).  The OLPC folks have actual 
code working in the Tamtam project, woo hoo!  It's based on gtk2+csound.  
The screenshots look cool, but I'd like to see it in action.  We're going 
to try to get it running here.  This is going to be a music production 
application that will be available to millions of kids in the next year, 
if all goes well -- meaning it will have more users than Garage Band.  
It's potentially A Big Deal.
 
* GET CSOUND APPROVED FOR FEDORA EXTRAS (gdk).  As part of the effort to 
get Tamtam working on as many systems as possible, I'm begging our Fedora 
Extras community to review the csound package that Dan Williams has 
submitted.  I am willing to bribe people, by the way.  :)
 
* FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and Fripp 
have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
guys.  :)
 
* INSTALL CCHOST IN RH COLO (lmacken).  We want to learn a lot more about 
the award-winning ccHost application, especially as a potential backend 
for people using Fedora (or one day OLPC) to collaborate on musical 
projects.  Luke is going to get that running for us.
 
* MUSICIAN SURVEY (gdk, ssalevan).  We've been trying to figure out some 
questions to ask musicians about how they work.  Steve is program director 
for a college radio station, so he's going to take a strong role here.
 
So that's what we're working on.  Any questions or offers of help, send 
them to the list.  :)

--g

-------------------------------------------------------------
Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
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[Luke Macken]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 04:29:20PM -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>  * JAMENDO STREAMS IN RHYTHMBOX FOR FC6 (lmacken).  It should be
> relatively
>  simple to get Rhythmbox, default music player in FC6, to stream Ogg music
>  out of the box.  One of the strongest sources for free Ogg content is
>  jamendo.com.  (Laurent, we may ask for your help here.) 
As far as I can tell, Jamendo does not have any sort of per-category/tag
streaming.  It seems like the most you can do for a category is 'Listen
to the albums of this page', which just dynamically generates an m3u
that points directly to a handfull of oggs.

I'm not sure of the best way to integrate Jamendo into Rhythmbox in the
short-term (the plugin would be the long term solution).  Laurent, any
ideas ?

>  * RHYTHMBOX PLUG-IN EXPERIMENTATION (lmacken, ssalevan).  Jamendo has
> some 
>  great xmlrpc calls.  We'd like to hook into them so that Rhythmbox can 
>  show artist info -- maybe even in the notifications field for Rhythmbox.  
>  Like, say, where an artist will be playing, or where you can buy a 
>  t-shirt.  Mostly, we'll just be playing around to figure out how this will 
>  work.  Luke/Steve, it might be worth finding some CVS space in Fedora-land 
>  if other people are interested in this. 
We can probably do some pretty cool stuff with this.  I haven't looked
at the API in great detail, but it doesn't look like there is a way to
retrieve album covers?

>  * INSTALL CCHOST IN RH COLO (lmacken).  We want to learn a lot more
> about 
>  the award-winning ccHost application, especially as a potential backend 
>  for people using Fedora (or one day OLPC) to collaborate on musical 
>  projects.  Luke is going to get that running for us. 
We have a bunch of new hardware making its way to the colo.  I'll see
what I can do about setting up a ccHost playground in a xen guest once
we get them up and running.


luke

[Bryan Clark]

Luke Macken wrote:
>  On Fri, Aug 25, 2006 at 04:29:20PM -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>    
> > * JAMENDO STREAMS IN RHYTHMBOX FOR FC6 (lmacken).  It should be relatively
> > simple to get Rhythmbox, default music player in FC6, to stream Ogg music
> > out of the box.  One of the strongest sources for free Ogg content is
> > jamendo.com.  (Laurent, we may ask for your help here.)
> >     
>
>  As far as I can tell, Jamendo does not have any sort of per-category/tag
>  streaming.  It seems like the most you can do for a category is 'Listen
>  to the albums of this page', which just dynamically generates an m3u
>  that points directly to a handfull of oggs.
>     
Looks like it to me.  Something like this URL
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/list/album/page/plain/?tag=electronica

Which will get you a list of albums tagged electronica.  Retrieving more 
than "plain" would get you all the albums ogg files, artwork, or other 
stuff.
>  I'm not sure of the best way to integrate Jamendo into Rhythmbox
> in the
>  short-term (the plugin would be the long term solution).  Laurent, any
>  ideas ?
>     
Perhaps if you already had the downloading of the ogg files to a 
specified directory say in a separate little python program.  You could 
just add that directory to Rhythmbox since I believe it does an imported 
directory watch for file changes?  Then I guess you'd just need to have 
an auto-playlist that looks in that path for files.  A Rube Goldberg 
contraption of music craziness that just might work...
> > * RHYTHMBOX PLUG-IN EXPERIMENTATION (lmacken, ssalevan).  Jamendo
> has some 
> > great xmlrpc calls.  We'd like to hook into them so that Rhythmbox can 
> > show artist info -- maybe even in the notifications field for Rhythmbox.  
> > Like, say, where an artist will be playing, or where you can buy a 
> > t-shirt.  Mostly, we'll just be playing around to figure out how this will 
> > work.  Luke/Steve, it might be worth finding some CVS space in Fedora-land 
> > if other people are interested in this.
> >     
>
>  We can probably do some pretty cool stuff with this.  I haven't looked
>  at the API in great detail, but it doesn't look like there is a way to
>  retrieve album covers?
>     
It looks like they have an API to get Album covers
http://wiki.jamendo.com/index.php/EnMusicApi#Get_the_cover_of_the_album_116

 From their page it looks all requests are handled by building a URL 
with the correct parameters.

    A sample request : Get all the tracks from the album with ID 33 :
    http://www.jamendo.com/get/track/id/album/audio/plain/33/
    The addresses are built this way :
    www.jamendo.com/get/_TARGETUNIT_/_LOADMETHOD_/_PARAMUNIT_/_TARGET_/_FORMAT_/

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Bryan Clark wrote:

>  > I'm not sure of the best way to integrate Jamendo into
> Rhythmbox in the
>  > short-term (the plugin would be the long term solution).  Laurent, any
>  > ideas ?
>  >   
>  Perhaps if you already had the downloading of the ogg files to a 
>  specified directory say in a separate little python program.  You could 
>  just add that directory to Rhythmbox since I believe it does an imported 
>  directory watch for file changes?  Then I guess you'd just need to have 
>  an auto-playlist that looks in that path for files.  A Rube Goldberg 
>  contraption of music craziness that just might work... 
Yeah.  Looks like a plug-in, basically.  I'm looking at that in what spare 
time I can muster.

--g

-------------------------------------------------------------
Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
-------------------------------------------------------------

[Callum Lerwick]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 16:29 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>  * FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and
> Fripp 
>  have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
>  find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
>  guys.  :) 
Start up a contest for independent artists to create a startup sound to
be put into, err, if we start now we might be able to get it into FC6.
Or just release it as an update for FC6. Make a big PR event out of it.

[Fermin Molina]

On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 04:47 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
>  On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 16:29 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>  > * FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and Fripp 
>  > have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
>  > find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
>  > guys.  :) 
A famous musician? Do you want to pay the royalties to this "famous
musician"? ;-)

>  Start up a contest for independent artists to create a startup sound
> to
>  be put into, err, if we start now we might be able to get it into FC6.
>  Or just release it as an update for FC6. Make a big PR event out of it. 
That's a great idea! I think the contest will be moving around the
Creative Commons world. A lot of great musicians are waiting in Jamendo
(for example) for an oportunity like this ;-)

Fermin - www.dilo.org

[Sylvain ZIMMER]

Fermin Molina a écrit :
>  On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 04:47 -0500, Callum Lerwick wrote:
>    
> > On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 16:29 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> >     
> >> * FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and Fripp 
> >> have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
> >> find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
> >> guys.  :)
> >>       
>
>  A famous musician? Do you want to pay the royalties to this "famous
>  musician"? ;-)
>
>    
> > Start up a contest for independent artists to create a startup sound to
> > be put into, err, if we start now we might be able to get it into FC6.
> > Or just release it as an update for FC6. Make a big PR event out of it.
> >     
>
>  That's a great idea! I think the contest will be moving around the
>  Creative Commons world. A lot of great musicians are waiting in Jamendo
>  (for example) for an oportunity like this ;-)
>
>     
Yeah that would be great.

Maybe we (jamendo) can set up with fedora a contest like the CC/Fedora 
Open Video one, this time for a Fedora soundtrack ?

--
Sylvain
CTO, www.jamendo.com

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

On Sat, 26 Aug 2006, Sylvain ZIMMER wrote:

>  > That's a great idea! I think the contest will be moving
> around the
>  > Creative Commons world. A lot of great musicians are waiting in Jamendo
>  > (for example) for an oportunity like this ;-)
>  >   
>  Yeah that would be great.
>  
>  Maybe we (jamendo) can set up with fedora a contest like the CC/Fedora 
>  Open Video one, this time for a Fedora soundtrack ? 
I would certainly be open to this.  Let me talk to some folks.

--g

-------------------------------------------------------------
Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org
Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors
-------------------------------------------------------------

[Anthony Green]

On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 16:29 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
>  * RHYTHMBOX PLUG-IN EXPERIMENTATION (lmacken, ssalevan).  Jamendo has
> some 
>  great xmlrpc calls.  We'd like to hook into them so that Rhythmbox can 
>  show artist info -- maybe even in the notifications field for Rhythmbox.  
>  Like, say, where an artist will be playing, or where you can buy a 
>  t-shirt.  Mostly, we'll just be playing around to figure out how this will 
>  work.  Luke/Steve, it might be worth finding some CVS space in Fedora-land 
>  if other people are interested in this. 
What I'd like to see is a connection between rhythmbox and wikipedia.
So, for instance, click on the artist name and it brings up the artist's
wikipedia page in browser.  This can be done by pulling the wikipedia
URL out of musicbrainz (they have over 16k wikipedia references).  I'm
working on something similar to slurp appropriate wikipedia entries as
notes in my iPod.

>  * GET CSOUND APPROVED FOR FEDORA EXTRAS (gdk).  As part of the effort
> to 
>  get Tamtam working on as many systems as possible, I'm begging our Fedora 
>  Extras community to review the csound package that Dan Williams has 
>  submitted.  I am willing to bribe people, by the way.  :) 
This is done.  btw, ZynAddSubFX also just went in.

>  * FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and
> Fripp 
>  have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
>  find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
>  guys.  :) 
I think so as well.  Heck, the drummer from Blur used to take Linux
kernel sources _hardcopy_ on tour as reading material.  And I'm pretty
sure Trent Reznor has used FOSS software in some of his NiN recordings.
In any case, have you thought about the license requirements for this
sound?

AG