Skip to main content

The Bad Sheep: iTunes & Miro

I'm an advocate of open-source, but I'm not a purist. I don't mind paid-closed software in most cases (for example Opera browser, I like) but there is one thing I don't like and that's vendor close-in. That is when the vendor tries to keep your data or things locked to their system so you can't use anybody else's. For example iTunes music before it was unprotected was locked to the iTunes platform. I couldn't listen to the music I had purchased there on my Transcend MP3 Player, which I used for running until I bought an iPod, nor could I listen to those m4p files on another music player. And that meant I couldn't play those files on Linux.

I'm a fan of Linux not just because its free but because it is a better operating system than Windows XP and I <3 the Bash shell from my University days using Unix. But Linux lacks a good decent media player, one that could compete with iTunes. I had my hopes set on Songbird being that media player but they dropped official support for Linux.

Thankfully it looks like Miro 4 will be that player.

To put my money where my mouth is I modestly support open-source projects. I bought a songbird T-shirt, and while I never liked the earlier versions of Miro they had this cute, support a programmer-bad sheep promotion a while back, so I sent them a few bucks.

Now I'm reaping the rewards of that modest support. Miro 4, the newest version is great. Moving beyond its original mission of being an internet TV player, Miro 4 is a great music player, and a great video player. It included in-built media conversion so you can convert videos and audio to different formats which allows you to change video to work on your smart phone. And while it wont play my old m4p iTunes protected files it plays the newer m4a that iTunes sells now. It even has an Amazon MP3 store integration. And best of all, it runs on Linux.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spani...
3 comments
Read more

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo...
2 comments
Read more

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior t...
1 comment
Read more