dfbills.com blog

A few months back, I was feeling a bit jealous of all the cool kids in iChat using their music as status messages.  I’ve played with this on and off since I first saw the scripts to make this happen on Doug’s Scripts for iTunes.  When it was officially added to iChat in the Tiger OS release, I toyed with it some more, but never could really use it on a regular basis since I play music at work on my iPod.

Then one day it hit me- with my jailbroken iPod, I could wirelessly scrobble tracks to last.fm and then pull that data back down and use it for a status message.  So, I whipped up a little shell script.

#!/bin/sh
while :
do
osascript -e ‘tell application “iChat” to set status message to (do shell script “curl http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/dfbills/recenttracks.txt | head -n 1 | cut -c12-”)’
sleep 110
done

Download here.

I’m sure this could be cleaner and I’ve been mulling over the idea of setting the data as a variable so that I can display a growl message too, but hey- my contacts in iChat can see my uber-cool status line showing my musical taste and that’s all I set out to do.

I found the nifty Build Last.fm site to a be a great source of Last.fm toys.  I’m currently using a few of the Last.fm charts on the sidebars of my site, but now I have the awesome LastGraph printed out and hung on my wall.

iLounge has posted the a look at iTunes HD Radio tagging.  Very cool… too bad it’s so expensive.

http://ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-itunes-tagging/

I’ve really been diggin’ Jackie Green since I heard him a few weeks back at Island Burger over lunch with my dad.  He sounds like a combination of Dylan and Ryan Adams.

Please do check out his album “Sweet Somewhere Bound

DoubleTwist is the latest venture from the infamous DVD Jon.  On his blog, he posts:

“The goal of doubleTwist is to simplify the flow of media across devices and social networks. To give an example: say you shot a video with your Nokia N95 cellphone. How do you send that video to your friend and make sure he’ll be able to play it on his iPod or Sony PSP? Yesterday, the easiest solution was to give up. As of today, the answer is doubleTwist. With doubleTwist, you’ll be able to share and sync digital media without worrying about codecs and bitrates.”

I’m curious to see how well he supports encrypted media like iTunes Music Store files and for how long he’ll play the inevitable cat and mouse game with Apple and others.

Today, BusinessWeek is reporting that Sony BMG has agreed to offer music for sale without DRM.  Of course it was only last week when Warner added DRM-free tunes to Amazon’s MP3 store.

The music should be available for Amazon’s 1 billion song MP3 Superbowl promo with Pepsi.

No more rootkits, I suppose.

Sean Heber has justed announced 31 days of fresh iPhone apps.  His new package source in Installer.app promises a new downloadable app every day for the month of November.

They’re all going to be free and I now have something definite to look forward to each morning when I check for new apps.  Thanks, Sean.

Apple is changing the price of all DRM-free “iTunes Plus” songs on the iTunes Store from $1.29 to $0.99.  Certainly this is a response to recent announcements from Amazon (DRM free and often less than $0.99) and now Napster’s web portal.

Jobs is quoted in the WSJ as saying: “It’s been very popular with our customers, and we’re making it even more affordable.”

Update: Apple now claims largest DRM-free catalog with 2 million songs.

Led Zeppelin is apparently going to be available on iTunes next month.  Sounds like nearly the entire catalog will be available.  This is great news as it means that more people than ever will be able to enjoy easy access to one of my favorite bands. 

“Over the Hills and Far Away” was the first song I every figured out how to play on the guitar all by myself.  Shout out to Mike Sabatino for introducing me to Zep and teaching me to play many of the songs on guitar.

Stats: Led Zeppelin is the only band in history that managed to get all of its albums into the U.S. Billboard Top 10 and has sold more than 300 million albums globally with almost 110 million of those sales occurring in the U.S. alone.

I came across this interesting interview with Will Friedwald, “Owner Of The Worlds Largest iTunes Collection” this morning.

I’d also love to see a “Pro” version of iTunes geared toward massive collections. But, I do think that iTunes will finally get there on its own.

Just look at the growth of the capacity of iPods: a 160GB model holds 97% more data than the original. iTunes will have be enhanced to hold a similar growth in music libraries.  iPhoto has been similarly enhanced in recent versions with exponential storage capacity updates.

For the record:

Will’s Library:
849 GB | 172,150 tracks | 809.2 days
2,935 artists | 11,561 albums
iTunes library database file - 282 MB
iTunes library XML file - 259 MB

Mine:
260.37 GB | 59,915 tracks | 147.6 days
9,778 artists | 7,083 albums
iTunes library database file - 104.9 MB
iTunes library XML file - 91.5 MB