Topic: Online Music Facility

[Dumah]

At work I used a service called Spotify. It allowed me to build a playlist of songs and have them streamed to me while I worked with a few commercial adverts thrown in to "pay" for the service. Now Spotify are trying to get everyone to pay for the full subscription (£10 per month) or get limits on usage. You do get to download tracks but I'm not paying for the service if the stuff I download has DRM - I'd rather keep buying MP3s from Amazon...agree or disagree, but I wont pay for DRM tracks 

Anyway...I gave about 30 gig of MP3 at home (well...some of its flac, some ogg, some WMA from my windows days...and I'm busy trying to convert them all...but that's another story) that I want to access in work.

I have a Livedrive account I pay for and that has an online MP3 player that's a bit feature-light but usable...and it has FTP access for me to sync my files.

My question is: does anyone have any suggestions for a better service? Ideally I'd like something that streams to a desktop media player like winamp or rhythmbox. It seems to me that the ones that stream are tied to certain apps or platforms and I'd rather keep my options open.

[jkim]

If you already use Amazon, couldn't you use their player? Or are you talking about a way to get your music accessible without uploading it elsewhere?

[Dumah]

The UK version doesn't offer the cloud yet..its coming eventually

I'll still upload it...I'd like ftp access as I can then mirror the online files with my local files. This is what I have with LiveDrive. My only gripe is the weedy mp3 player - it's ok but only plays mp3 (no ogg, flac, etc...) and doesnt allow stuff like persistent playlists....

Streaming to a desktop app would be nice

[Steve]

Winamp supports this. I forget what it is called because i have not used windows in years.

[Dumah]

Winamp supports this. I forget what it is called because i have not used windows in years.

I'll look at that when I get back in work.

Just tried exaile (standard media player in Xubuntu). I linked the file-system to the ftp account with an app called gigolo (also standard in Xubuntu) and now exaile can link directly to the ftp site and stream it - sweet!

If I can do the same in work with winamp then I should be OK. To be honest I didnt think ftp would be good enough to stream...seems to work ok though

[Steve]

Try Audacious, because its supposed to be the linux replacement for winamp. Its what I use on ubuntu I just never tried any remote stuff.

I think Winamp's was called ORB.

[Steve]

Ok did some poking, this would be my suggestion. Run Audacious (it's in the universal repo) with the "Audtool Utility" for the remote control.

[ober]

I thought Winamp had some kind of streaming radio situation you could setup.  That probably means you don't have control over it, but oh well.

Why not just use one of the other services out there?  Pandora, last.fm, Grooveshark, etc?  That's what I use at work and it helps me find new music too.

[Steve]

I thought Winamp had some kind of streaming radio situation you could setup.  That probably means you don't have control over it, but oh well.

Why not just use one of the other services out there?  Pandora, last.fm, Grooveshark, etc?  That's what I use at work and it helps me find new music too.

It does but that came out (or i wasn't aware of it) after I had already moved to linux. I think he is trying to use his collection, so that he doesn't have to deal with a bunch of stuff he doesnt want to hear or cannot control, hence no pandora.

I'm actually glad this inspired me to look around. I'm heading back to Missouri this weekend so I think I will use my storage server to remote my Audacious. That way i can just take Ashley's netbook and save on some storage space.

[Dumah]

I thought Winamp had some kind of streaming radio situation you could setup.  That probably means you don't have control over it, but oh well.

Why not just use one of the other services out there?  Pandora, last.fm, Grooveshark, etc?  That's what I use at work and it helps me find new music too.

Pandora is US only...not sure about the others. What I wanted though is to access my own collection

[Perspective]

Grooveshark is available outside the US, but you can't store your own collection with them


What about Ubuntu One? It's free but it only gives you 2GB of storage.

[Dumah]

What about Ubuntu One? It's free but it only gives you 2GB of storage.

No FTP connection. You can use the sync tools, but I use Xubuntu and it requires a little extra configuration to get it working on Xfce. Also, I need a lot more space than that, and as I am already paying for livedrive which has plenty of space and FTP, then that's going to do the trick.

My native media player can read from FTP fine and as I'm reliably told that winamp can do the same I should be ok when in work.

I also found a neat command line linux app called lftp that can mirror FTP sites rather well (kind of like the mirror option on wget but it mirrors both ways so that's made things easier).