This came out a few years back, but still gives me a chill.
So recently I’ve switched from using Songbird to Rhythmbox for my music player. Not sure if the switch is permanent to Rhythmbox, but with Songbird development being dropped for Linux I sure won’t be using Songbird any more. Maybe Nightingale when that has a stable release.
Anyway, with my switch to Rhythmbox, I lost all of my music ratings. Having spent a reasonable amount time getting those in, I didn’t want to give them up and start from scratch. So. I built this little Flash App to merge an xml file exported by the Rating File Plugin for Songbird with the rhythmdb.xml file for Rhythmbox (found at ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml on Ubuntu 10.10). The Songbird plugin will export as a .srf file or something like that, but it’s actually just an xml file, so just change the extension or save it as an xml file when prompted by the plugin.
Be sure to back up your rhythmdb.xml before you go messin’ with it. Not sure what happens if you remove it all together.
If you’re wondering what exactly the app does, it goes through your exported Songbird rating xml supplied by the plugin and grabs each song with a rating, matches it by song title, artist and album to your rhythmdb.xml and adds in the rating. When it does this, if there is already a rating in your rhythmdb.xml for the song, it will be overwritten. Note that if an album has two songs with the same name and artist (which happens more often than you’d think), I’ve simply omitted them from the rating transfer. So neither song receives the rating. Once the files have been parsed, the app prompts you to download the update rhythmdb.xml file.
I know that this isn’t the most robust way for this to work. I mad it like this for simplicity. Not looking to make anything amazing, just wanted to get what I needed done and thought I’d share.
So here it is. Just click on the labels or textfields to select your files and click the Run Script button and let it run. Easy money. Oh, and sorry for the crudeness of the App. Just wanted something that got the job done.
Please comment if you have any trouble.
[EDIT]
…hmm. I just testing the app and wasn’t prompted to save the file when it finished. Might need to look into that. If you can figure out how to download the swf, it should run locally. Here’s the swf file in case you’re not savy enough to pull it from the HTML.
Recently I made the switch from iTunes to SongBird. The main reason for the change is that I also recently made the switch from my iPhone to the Nexus One. To make a long story longer, I’ve felt that Apple has been on a slow and steady decline since releasing the iPhone and probably more attributed to teaming up with the likes of AT&T and other carriers internationally. In short Apple has been tightening it’s grip on user experience and customizing, which I hate. Don’t get me wrong I love(d) my iPhone, but it was just time to switch. And although I haven’t blogged about it much yet (which I should) I absolutely love my Nexus One. Love it. However, iTunes and the Nexus One don’t play together. Not that they don’t play well, they’re just completely incompatible; another sign of how Apple’s grip is loosing customers. While the Nexus One is completely open, simply appearing as an external drive that can be written to, iTunes will only write out to iPods and iPhones. Maybe I’d still be using them if they could write songs to any device. Oh well.
So. Now that I’m off of iTunes, I’m in need of a new source of digital music. After seeing an old friend’s facebook post about their new album being released on Amazon, I figured I’d get myself a copy and have since purchased a number of songs and albums off of Amazon’s MP3 store. That is until today. Last night I started up Songbird on the task of organizing my music. With the quantity of music to be copied to a new location the task took quite a bit of time. Meanwhile I decided to download a few songs from Amazon. The way the Amazon MP3 works, is that you download an Amazon MP3 file that must be opened through their Amazon MP3 Downloader. Well yesterday I had Songbird going through all my MP3s and soas not to create havoc in that process I decided to refrain from downloading my Amazon MP3s until the morning. I had downloaded the files to be opened by the Amazon MP3 Downloader, but not the actual MP3 files. Upon open said files this morning I see this coming out of Amazon’s app:
Download no longer available.
What the hell is that!? I go into my Amazon account. I can see the songs that I’ve purchased. When selecting my three songs from this morning, Amazon says “already downloaded”. Hmm. Annoying? Yes. Bullshit? Yes. Explainable? I wish.
Basically what this comes down to is that I’m not using Amazon to download MP3s anymore. Or if I do, I will be skeptical. Digital downloads are a tricky thing. I’m a web developer. I understand this. That said, if a company like Amazon wants to start selling MP3s, it needs to have it’s shit figured out. After a quick google, I found that I am hardly the only person this has happened to. It’s one thing to download a file, accidentally delete it and then not be able to re-download. But to say you can’t download this file because you’ve already downloaded it, when you simply haven’t? That’s bullshit. That’s someone else’s f*** up that I just paid $3 for. If it was more money I’d probably contact Amazon and have a string of posts after this talking about how bullshit (or amazing) Amazon’s customer service is. But it’s $3 so I don’t care that much. Instead I’m just not going to use them any more. Little ‘ol me? Not a big deal. I might spend a few hundred dollars a year on MP3 downloads. However, for a company as big as Amazon, I’m sure there are hell of a lot more people just like me that are having a similar experience. Say 1,000 people? Reasonable? Sure. Multiply by $300/year? That’s $300K a year because some programmer(s) can’t get their shit together? Lame. Especially when Amazon is going up against a giant like Apple’s iTunes Store? No wonder they have such a huge market share.
Me? I’m still trying to stay off of iTunes. Apple’s getting too big for it’s own good. I still love them, but they’re doing things that make me nervous for them. Songbird has the 7digital store, which is okay. Seems like they’ve got a fair amount of stuff on there. Haven’t used it a ton, but it seems to be pretty well integrated with Songbird, which I like.
I just bought my first vinyl produced by Rhymesayers Entertainment of Minneapolis: US by Brother Ali.
Brother Ali, US
Upon opening the album I found a business card with a code to download the MP3 version of the album off of the Rhymesayers website. Awesome. I’m not sure if this if a regular practice of newer albums or not, but this is the way it should be. Pay for a hard copy and still get a digital version. The best of both worlds. Again, simply awesome. Thank you Rhymesayers and Brother Ali. Y’all Rock.