Posts Tagged ‘Banshee’

Ubuntu One Music Store Information

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Posted 26 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

You might have read the news in the web that Ubuntu is planning to launch a music store named Ubuntu One music store. Ubuntu has released an FAQ on that. You can find the FAQ here.

Ubuntu One Music Store will be driven by 7Digital. The songs will be DRM (Digital Rights Management) free, so you can copy the songs to your music player, burn them to a CD or copy them to any computer you want. The songs will be available in high quality 256Kbps MP3 and some songs might be in higher bit rate.

Ubuntu One Music Store will be integrated into Rythmbox. This helps you download the songs and copy them to iPod or other music players. Ubuntu is also planning to release the integration as a plugin, so users using Banshee or Amarok or other music player would be able to use Ubuntu One Music Store.

The following are the features you can expect from Ubuntu One Music Store.

  • Search by artist, album, or track
  • Browse recommendations and genres
  • Discover new releases or just released songs each week
  • A convenient shopping basket
  • Support for a variety of payment options

To purchase the songs, you need Ubuntu One account. If you already have an account, you are ready to go. If not, you can easily create one. You also get 2GB of online storage free with your Ubuntu One account. Purchased songs are automatically transferred to your cloud storage, synchronized to all of your computers, and added to Rhythmbox. Customers will find a new library that contains purchases from the Ubuntu One Music Store.

Customers can download the purchased songs 3 times maximum from the music store. This will help in case they lost the songs they purchased due to error or hardware issue or some other unknown issue.

In order to use Ubuntu One Music Store, you have to have Ubuntu 10.04 installed (which will be released this April).

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Use your Android phone as remote control for Ubuntu Linux PCs

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Posted 18 Feb 2010 — by Arun
Category Droid, Ubuntu

Tesla is a open source media player remote control App for Android phones that can interact and control  music and video players on Linux distributions like Ubuntu. Tesla needs wifi connection to work. It currently supports Rythmbox, Totem, VLC and Banshee. With Tesla you can

  • Control the volume for just the media player, or the whole system
  • Ability to shut-down your PC by remote control
  • Pause your music/video automatically for incoming calls

Tesla requires OpenSSH server installed on your PC. The remote control apps uses the SSH to interact with the PC over the wifi connection.

Tesla is currently not available in Android Market, but the developer is planning to add it to Android Market once version 1.0 is released. The program is also not compatible with Windows or Apple.

Follow the instructions here to install Tesla. You have to enable “installing apps from unknown sources” on your phone. You can disable this once you install Tesla. You also need to have OpenSSH server installed in your PC and started.

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iPod support in Ubuntu 9.10

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Posted 22 Dec 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

I have a weird thing happening in my Ubuntu desktop since the time Ubuntu moved to Brasero as their default CD/DVD writer. I had written about this 8 months back here. I have a Gateway GT5628 Quad core desktop which I bought 8 months back. The desktop has SATA hard drive, but PATA DVD writer (Optiarc AD-7173A). I initially thought it was something to do with the particular DVD drive model, so I added an additional DVD writer (Lite on) I had which was from a different company. Both models are PATA. Whenever I insert a store bought DVD or CD, the system would hang after few seconds or a minute. Home made CDs and DVDs are fine. I have w32codecs, libdvdread4, libdvdcss2 etc installed. If I uninstall Brasero including the libbrasero-media0 file, then everything works fine.

The problem now is, when I uninstall libbrasero-media0 file, it uninstalls Rhythmbox also. Rhythmbox is the only GNOME media player that supports iPod without any issues in Ubuntu 9.10. I tried GTKPod, Banshee and Songbird and iPod doesn’t work with any of them in Ubuntu 9.10. You can get it to work with Banshee with a workaround, but that’s a pain doing it every time you want to update your iPod. I installed Amarok, but I haven’t tried it yet. Does anyone know how to install Rhythmbox without installing the brasero file or any other application that is good and works with iPods in Ubuntu 9.10? Does anyone know why the system hangs if I insert a legal DVD?

Update: The system hangs even after I uninstalled Brasero. I believe the problem has something to do with DVD writer being PATA and hard drive being SATA. I have ordered a new SATA drive which is on it’s way. I’ll let you know once I get the drive.

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Ubuntu One Music Store

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Posted 17 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

Ubuntu team is working on a music store project for Ubuntu 10.4 with the aim of providing facility to purchase music from within a desktop music player. The idea is to integrate a web browser engine into Rhythmbox or Banshee, then add a link to the Ubuntu One music store into the music player. When selected this link will open in a web browser inside the player. Users will be able to browse and buy the music within the player itself. Any music purchased will be downloaded to the Music directory under  your home directory.

The store login will be integrated with Ubuntu One. If the user is singed into Ubuntu One, they can then purchase the music. If the user is not signed in, then the user will be prompted with a Ubuntu One registration/login window.

Sounds interesting. It might be a good way to buy non restricted music. I’m not a big fan of Rhythmbox though it does it’s job pretty well. i feel it would be easier for them if they could collaborate with Songbird team and make use of their eixsting technology.

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Ubuntu 9.10 what I like…

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Posted 03 Nov 2009 — by Arun
Category Ubuntu

Here is the quick summary of what I like (some dislikes) in Ubuntu 9.10.

  • Webcam video quality is very good. Video quality was bad in the last 2 versions of Ubuntu, but it’s back to normal.
  • Pulse audio works with multiple sound devices without installing new packages.
  • Skype 2.1 beta sound and video worked very good (It didn’t work in the previous version of Ubuntu).
  • Empathy IM provides voice and video chat with GTalk, MSN users which is good. Empathy refused to start after a day or two. Not sure why, but I had to reinstall Ubuntu for a different problem and Empathy is working fine. Will watch it for few days.
  • Boot process is faster than Ubuntu 9.04.
  • Login process is longer than Ubuntu 9.04. I think they moved some stuff from boot to login time.
  • Shutdown is lightning fast.
  • Boot logo doesn’t show any progress bar, so you won’t know how far the boot process has progressed. It boots pretty fast, so it may not be a big deal.
  • New icon theme is very good. It shows thumbnails inside each directory’s icon if there are files present.
  • Banshee didn’t recognize my iPod.

I will write more about my experience as I use it. Based on my experience in the past couple of days, I would say Ubuntu has improved a lot in terms of hardware support and usability. Continue the good work.

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