opencomponentry

I spend an awful lot of time hunting around in my library (or elsewhere, but not there …stop trying to monitor me! ) and always get halfway excited when people tell me about things like Pandora or last.fm.

Pandora is a good idea but has failed (in my humble eyes) because it simply isn’t open about it’s technology. Don’t like listening to music from a flash app running in your browser? Have plenty of skills to make it work in a much cooler environment? Too f-ing bad. We’re trying to make money here. Let’s squander what little amount we are making now with ads by closing off the majority of the community that might actually use our services on a daily basis. Great idea guys. :/ (f-ing retards..)

Last.fm on the other hand has oodles and oodles of cool stuff. There’s a plugin to submit music I listen to for just about every audio player out there. (including many great linux based plugins, which I am in particular need of ..esp ubuntu - did I ever tell you I love you ubuntu? Well I do… you’re just great )

The really cool part about Pandora and last.fm is that you can listen to music on customized radio streams based on all kinds of different factors..Like what kind of things you already listen to / or your friends listen to / or whatever you tell it…They also have the ability to “learn” on an individual basis as you tell it one particular song is liked/disliked. Pretty cool so far.

The bad part has usually been taking 5 huge progressive steps back from all their innovative work by sticking you with some gay little audio player software that only works with their radio stream and nothing else. Nice . ..Thanks again Pandora. That is….Until I discoverd this today!

http://vidar.gimp.org/?page_id=50 - Python based mini server proxy

(or this for you mac people http://www.macosxhints.com/.. )

The end result is that you simply run a very tiny little python (ehh ehh cool already no? ) proxy app (mostly transparent for me in linux ..ie can you do this in windows? “./main.py &” ? didn’t think so ..sorry..not without some batch file processing fun at least ) As if having a working proxy server that you can connect to with your own music player of choice like it was any other radio stream wasn’t enough - it comes with a wee little web server to provide all the controls usually provided by previously mentioned so called “gay little proprietary apps” .

Here’s a little peek at the interface. You can only imagine how great this is for me. …I barely have to work for good music at all now. It just “comes to me” while I sit on my “love/ban” throne of my own little musical empire. Awesome!