Magnatune blog

Amarok : new version

Amarok is a great music player for Linux (under KDE), which in their previous version (1.4.4) added support for listening and buying Magnatune music directly inside Amarok itself.

Now, Amarok 1.4.5 is out, the 2nd version to support Magnatune. Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, who developed the Magnatune addin to Amarok wrote me to tell me that this version fixes all the known issues and adds quite a bit of polish to the Magnatune store.

The Amarok programming team is currently moving Amarok to a major new version of KDE, the graphics environment it's programmed in, and Nikolaj's blog gives a deep explanation of how it's going.

The OpenSuse Linux Maintainers have corresponded with me and their 10.2 version is out with Amarok 1.4.4. I haven't checked it to see if they did include Magnatune support in their Amarok distribution in the end -- they had some concerns that I believed to be addressed.

I'm *really* excited about the major Linux distributions including Amarok 1.4.4 as that greatly increases our user base and visibility to exactly the right crowd for us.

XSPF playlist standard now widely supported

Sebastian Pipping sent me an email recently pointing out a small error in our XSPF implementation, which wasn't a visible problem because I was only feeding the XSPF files to our flash audio player, but he also suggested we make the XSPF playlist files publicly visible.

Sebastian argued:
If the XSPF on Magnatune.com was valid then me and other
people could listen to your music with the player
of their choice even with the browser closed.

But my personal interest in this mainly is of a different
nature. If Magnatune and others keep producing invalid XSPF
then users will ask for software dealing with invalid XSPF
which will kill XSPF as an Open Standard and repeat the same
shame that happened to HTML in the past. The web still
suffers from that. So you have a big responsibility here.
I have seen many kinds of invalid XSPF out there already
so it really is important that you all do your part.
Musicmobs have fixed their XSPF on my request by the way.

If I understood you right at the moment Magnatune is only
using XSPF because Musicplayer wants that as input.
Why don't you put XSPF on your flag instead? "We are not evil"
and "We support open standards" fits together quite well.
Jamendo has done this before and it fits great. We will
have a "valid XSPF" button soon and I hope Magnatune will
be ready then to show it.

I agree with him, and Magnatune now fully supports the XSPF standard, which a very large number of software programs can play. XSPF is nice, because it allows the player to show album art, and a "click for more info" URL, among other things.

On album pages such as this one http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/belief-eponyms/ you'll see "Play all tracks as an m3u audio stream (or xspf)". This XSPF option also appears on the podcast and mood pages.

Playing Magnatune Music in your Second Life Land

We'd like you add our music to your land, so that people visiting your space can listen to our fabulous music. We've made 40 different streams--from Alternative Rock to World--just for Second Life use, so you can pick the genre that best fits your tastes.

Best of all, we consider all Second Life playing of these streams to be a promotional use of our music, and grant you a license to use our music for free. We also grant you a collecting society waiver, so that if ASCAP or BMI ever asks you to pay them for the music you're using on Second Life (something they can do if you play anyone else's music in SL), you can point them to this page.

How-to:

To add a music stream you need to either own the land or be an Officer/Owner of group owned land.

Be standing on the parcel of land

Go to World menu > About Land...

Click the Media tab

Enter one of the Magnatune music urls listed below (such as http://sl.magnatune.com/Ambient)

Press Enter

Click the "x" in upper right corner to close the menu

That's it!

You can also subdivide your land into separate parcels, each with its own Magnatune music stream, just as we've done on the Magnatune SL space. Second Life has an excellent tutorial on this.

Here are the stream URLs for playing our music:

http://sl.magnatune.com/Alternative%20Rock
http://sl.magnatune.com/Ambient
http://sl.magnatune.com/Baroque
http://sl.magnatune.com/Blues
http://sl.magnatune.com/Chamber%20Music
http://sl.magnatune.com/Children"
http://sl.magnatune.com/Choral
http://sl.magnatune.com/Christian
http://sl.magnatune.com/Classical
http://sl.magnatune.com/Classical%20After%201800
http://sl.magnatune.com/Darkwave
http://sl.magnatune.com/Downtempo
http://sl.magnatune.com/Electronica
http://sl.magnatune.com/Euro-Techno
http://sl.magnatune.com/Experimental
http://sl.magnatune.com/Flute
http://sl.magnatune.com/Folk
http://sl.magnatune.com/Folk-Rock
http://sl.magnatune.com/Funk
http://sl.magnatune.com/Hard%20Rock
http://sl.magnatune.com/Indian
http://sl.magnatune.com/Industrial
http://sl.magnatune.com/Jazz
http://sl.magnatune.com/Latin
http://sl.magnatune.com/Medieval
http://sl.magnatune.com/Metal
http://sl.magnatune.com/Middle-Eastern
http://sl.magnatune.com/New%20Age
http://sl.magnatune.com/Opera
http://sl.magnatune.com/Orchestral
http://sl.magnatune.com/Piano
http://sl.magnatune.com/Pop
http://sl.magnatune.com/Progressive
http://sl.magnatune.com/Punk
http://sl.magnatune.com/Rock
http://sl.magnatune.com/Techno
http://sl.magnatune.com/Thrash%20Metal
http://sl.magnatune.com/Vocal
http://sl.magnatune.com/World

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Updated info about Magnatune on Second Life can be found at http://www.magnatune.com/info/second_life

"Pay what you want" spreads to LibraryThing

Tim Spalding, who runs LibraryThing is trying out Magnatune's "what do you want to pay" idea on his book-cataloging web site. I know Tim through my other site, the book-swapping web site BookMooch.

Tim writes:
We were inspired by something John Buckman is doing at the online record label Magnatune. When you buy a CD, Magnatune asks "How much do you want to pay?" and gives you a price menu. You can't pay nothing, but you get some latitude. You can low-ball them a bit, or, if you're feeling grateful, pay more. It sounded like a fun idea to us. We've had people—and not a few—pay twice to thank us. But we've also had emails from people who say they'll buy a membership next time they get their pay check, disability, etc.

More at http://www.librarything.com/blog/2007/02/how-much-do-you-want-to-pay.php

Second Life and Magnatune

We've now launched our presence on Second Life, including:

Listen & hang out: a large space on Joi Ito's island Kula 1, with themed listening areas for each of our genres (with our streams playing), along with comfy furniture for you to hang out with your friends. Search for "magnatune" in SL to find it.

Music for your land: audio streams for over 40 genres that you can use at no cost in your own land. Click on the sign at the Magnatune space in Second Life for information.

Tshirt: a free Magnatune tshirt for your avatar

Message board: leave us a comment when you visit

Film: "Magnatune in six" video showing

and a page about it at Magnatune along with an email discussion group for organizing get-togethers there.

Mac Dashboard widget for Song-of-the-Day

I've written a Dashboard widget for Mac OSX, which shows you the song of the day, and lets you download it. You can download a copy on Apple's software site, by clicking here.

I'm working on a dashboard widget for listening to the Magnatune catalog, and have it mostly working, except for a few annoying bugs that may not be surmountable (such as Dashboard getting so little cpu priority, that clicking on our Flash audio player widget often requires several clicks).