Last.fm & Ubuntu

What it is?
Last.fm is the world's largest social music platform with over 20 million active users based in more than 232 countries. Using a unique music recommendation system known as "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations or on the user's computer or portable music device. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("Scrobbled") via a plug-in installed into the users' music player. The profile data is displayed on a personal web page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, but are not able to listen to individual tracks on demand, or to download tracks unless the rightsholder has previously authorized it. Registration is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations.
From Wikipedia.org

To sign up to get a Last.fm Profile

How to integrate Last.fm into your jukebox in Linux
In Amarok you just need to go to the Settings>Configure Amarok and then scroll down to the last.fm icon.


In Rhythmbox, go to Edit>Plugins then select the Last.fm Plugin.


Last.fm Player

The player allows the user to enter the name of any artist or tag which then gives a choice of a number of similar artist stations, or similar global tag stations. Alternatively, Recommendation radio or any of the user's personal radio stations may be played without the necessity to visit the website.

The player displays the name of the station and track currently playing, the song artist, title and track length as well as album details, the artist's photo and biographical details, album cover art when available, lists of similar artists and the most popular tags and top fans. There are several buttons, allowing the user to love, skip, or ban a song. The love button adds the song to the user's loved tracks playlist; the ban button ensures that the song will not be played again. Both features affect the user's profile. The skip button does not. Other buttons allow the user to tag or recommend the currently playing track. Other features offered by the application are: minor editing of the user's profile including removing recently played artists and songs from the loved, banned, or previously played track lists; lists of friends and neighbours, lists of tags and a list of previously played radio stations. Users can also open their full Last.fm profile page directly from the player.
From Wikipedia.org

To get the Last.fm Player:
sudo apt-get install lastfm

This is basically the only radio I listen to anymore. I enter an artist I like and it makes great recommendations. I have found a lot of new music through Last.fm

You can find me on Last.fm here.

Using Your Apple iPod in Ubuntu

This guide works with all iPods models except iPod classics, iPod Video Nano and iPod Touch. Apple has updated it's cryptographic "checksum" in their song databases for these models. This means third-party applications are no longer able to sync your music, video & pictures to these devices. The good news is that the older iPods are fully compatible with 3rd party applications.

I love my iPod and I love Ubuntu so these guides are definitely a labor of love for me. I find that the iPod works great in Ubuntu. I use 3 programs in Ubuntu for syncing my iPod; gtkpod, GPixPod and Amarok.

gtkpod
gtkpod is a platform independent Graphical User Interface for Apple's iPod using GTK2. It supports the first to fifth Generation including the iPod mini, iPod Photo, iPod Shuffle, iPod nano, and iPod Video. It allows you to sync you iPod in Linux. Some of it's features include importing the existing contents of your iPod including play counts, ratings and on-the-go playlists, adding MP3, WAV, M4A, M4B, podcasts, and video files to your iPod and allowing you to view, add and modify cover art and playlists.


To get gtkpod
in a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install gtkpod-aac

GPixPod
GPixPod is a new PyGTK application to organize photos and photo albums on your photo capable iPod models. Its approach to modify manually the elements in the Photo Database of your iPod could be also more useful than the syncing-only method of iTunes. For Linux users gpixpod is an excellent complement to gtkpod and amarok. While these two programs do an excellent job of syncing music, album art and video to your iPod neither do pictures and I haven't been able to find another program in Linux/Ubuntu that does all four; music, video, album art and pictures.

To get gpixpod
In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install gpixpod

Amarok
Amarok a fantasic music player for Linux and Unix with an intuitive interface. Amarok not only makes playing the music you love easy, but also allows you to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically "score" music as you play it. It is seen as Linux's major iTunes alternative and in many people's opinions an iTunes killer. It allows you to look up album via Amazon, sync music, podcasts and audiobooks. Amarok does not do video or pictures, but it's such an amazing jukebox that I don't mind using other apps to take care of it's shortcomings.

To get Amarok, ipod support and mp3 support
In a terminal type:
sudo apt-get install amarok ipodslave libxine1-ffmpeg

edited by pHreaksYcle

KDE The Other Blue Meat

I never talk about the other major Ubuntu distro, Kubuntu. I wish I had the time to cover Kubuntu, but I don't. The good thing is that just just because I run Ubuntu doesn't mean I can't use some of Kubuntu's best applications.

Kubuntu is an official derivative of the Ubuntu operating system using the KDE environment instead of GNOME. KDE enviroment is quite similair and has advantages and disadvantages over GNOME. I will not get into specifics here but I can attest that the following KDE applications I will be recommending are fantastic and many of you might like them more than the GNOME equivalents.

Amarok
Best music jukebox for any operating system. Amarok serves many functions rather than just playing music files. For example, Amarok can be used to organize a library of music into folders according to genre, artist, and album, can edit tags attached to most music formats, associate album art, attach lyrics, and automatically "score" music as you play it. But even under an environment like GNOME Amarok retains all of its functionality. It's biggest features is it last.fm integration, media player support, cover manager and ability to synch the ipod and use many of each features.

To download Amarok, ipod support and mp3 support
sudo apt-get install amarok ipodslave libxine1-ffmpeg

K3b
Provides a graphical user interface to perform most CD/DVD burning tasks like creating an Audio CD from a set of audio files or copying a CD/DVD, as well as more advanced tasks such as burning eMoviX CD/DVDs. It can also perform direct disc-to-disc copies. The program has many default settings which can be customized by more experienced users. The actual disc recording in K3b is done by the command line utilities cdrecord or wodim, cdrdao, and growisofs. As of version 1.0, K3b features a built-in DVD ripper.

sudo apt-get install k3b
sudo apt-get install libk3b2-mp3 for mp3 decoder plugin (allows you to burn mp3s to CD)

K9copy
It is generally seen as the Linux equivalent of the Windows-based DVD Shrink, as it shrinks a DVD-9 DVD down to a DVD-5 DVD, allowing for movies on dual layer DVDs to be shrunk down in order to fit on a single layer DVD. The program allows the user to have the shrunken down DVD written to the hard drive as an ISO image which can then be burned to a DVD recordable by using a CD/DVD burning program such as K3b. Like DVD Shrink, k9copy is also useful for circumventing copy protection that normally leads to an "input/output error".


sudo apt-get install k9copy

KControl
KControl is the graphic tweaking system for the KDE enviroment. It has a modular architecture, the window is split into two parts: the left side displays the list of available modules (also known as applets), and the right side displays the current module. Applications can install their own KControl modules (an example being Konqueror), although most applications prefer to use their own, independent settings managers. This means you can use kcontrol to tweak the look and feel of these kde based programs to fit better into your ubuntu/gnome enviroment.

sudo apt-get install kcontrol

edited by pHreaksYcle