Planet TLLTS

I thought really quick this morning that I would like to play a little Christmas music, something nice. Where to get some in a hurry? Well, of course, I went to Magnatune.

Really, I don’t mention these guys enough, not here or on the show. As their motto implies, they are _not evil_. They are DRM free, they carry a FANTASTIC selection of music of all tastes and interests. You pay REASONABLE prices that you decide, and Magnatune actually gets money back to the artists too, much unlike the big music industry giants.

Do yourself and some really talented musicians a favor and check out Magnatune today. You can also arrange Magnatune gift cards, and , of course, listen for FREE to their ENTIRE collection!

How would you like to pay 4 cents a piece for your music? Well, the price was definitely right for me. I stopped at BestBuy and bought a SlotRadio card to use with my Sansa Fuse.

Slide this little card in your Sansa Fuse and you get access to 1000 songs over a variety of genres. It works a lot like radio in that you cannot really choose what songs are going to play next, however, you can switch the genre channels and skip songs.

So far I am really digging this. The audio is encoded at a high quality and the actual songs are all popular (no bad B sides). For 4 cents a song, you just can’t beat this. It would be nice if the format was a bit more portable and I could get the songs somewhere other than my Sansa Fuse, but really, that is what I listen to most of my music on now anyway

While I was picking up my SlotRadio card I did also notice a few Slot Music cards as well. These are the pretty much the same thing as the slot radio cards but filled with one album. The price is about the same as the regular album and, word has it, this music is slightly more portable as an unencumbered mp3 that you can move from device to device. I will have to put one of these on my hot list of things to get and see for myself. I would have grabbed one already but the only albums available at the time in person were not to my musical taste. Ordering online seems to have quite a few more choices though.

Some of you might remember that I used to run GnuMP3d as my home music server of choice. While this is still a great choice, after my recent new server install, I had an interesting choice to make.

The newest versions of GnuMP3d work fantastically like always, but they do not provide for any measure of security at all. You can use the music library as long as you can get to it. Now I know I can employ measures like iptables and hosts.deny, etc., but I decided I would still feel much more secure if I just ran my music server on a different VM that was only accessible from my intranet. I also did a little performance testing and found that GnuMP3d hogged up a lot of my system resources when it was starting up as well. All these factors and more sent me on a quest to once again look into some different streaming music servers.

There are really not very many of these available now that are current and full featured. There are, in fact, 4 that are hands down above the rest. The first was GnuMP3d, which, still, is a great piece of software. I just wanted something different for a while. I looked into Jinzora, which seemed to me to be completely overcomplicated and quite broken when not importing music collections via mp3 tags (stay away from this one). The one I almost settled on was Andromeda, a non-free software program, which works absolutely perfectly for what I wanted. For a measly $20 you can purchase the full version and I was *this* close to doing so until I decided I would give kPlaylist a spin.

kPlaylist is a LAMP app that is actually very easy and quick to get going, looks and works great and it’s strict OSS as well. It even provides the little bit of security I need to feel better about running it in my main server VM

If you are looking around for a nice way to access your personal music collection, you could surely do worse than kPlaylist. Do yourself a favor and hit the website and check it out today!