ChapterZero

I got my Sansa e260 mp3 player this weekend, and I’m stoked. Unfortunately, I only have Rufus Wainwright’s Poses, Chris Cornell Unplugged in Sweden, and four seasons of soundtracks from Xena on it (yeah, I’m a freak about that show). Of all these, the only ones I bought were the Xena soundtracks (because they were cheaper than air). I have a Sarah McLachlan cd, and two more Rufus Wainwrights, but I need to figure out how to convert them to an mp3 format the player will read.

I’d like to — *gasp* — buy more music. That’s unheard of– me spending money on something you can download for free with just a little effort. But the fact is, I’d like to stop ripping artists off. Seems like that’s going to be hard: Rhapsody and Napster, the only two subscription music services, are intimately tied to windows, for some reason having to do with the DRM (digital rights management) implementation they use. If I had a more adventurous spirit, I would exploit this obviously ripe opportunity for entrepenuership.

I have a short list of artists I’d like to buy albums from. It includes people like Damien Rice, Sondre Lerche, Sarah McLachlan, Jeff Buckley, The Decemberists, The Shins, Coldplay, and whoever last.fm recommends a la them. Any suggestions? Either for similar artists or linux friendly music outlets? Any offers for free music? I might end up buying cds from offline stores. Suppose that’s good– supporting neighborhood music outlets and such. But it requires effort.

As an aside, last.fm is really good– it’s a free service that tracks the music you listen to, either on your computer or on an iPod, and suggests similar artists and lets you see people with similar interests. I’ve used it to look up artists similar to Rufus Wainwright a couple of days ago, and I still have the player open on my school account so I can keep listening to the tracks it suggests. They’ve been on spot so far. There are a couple of Linux apps that let you integrate fast.fm with media players like Xine.

Also, I have to congratulate the Linux mp3 player community. They’ve done a good job with tools like gnomad and amarok, which try to make it easy to use devices under Linux that are for the most part targeted towards Windows users. It’s just my bad luck that neither of them seem to want to work for me.

Possibly relevant posts:

• Rufus Wainwright (3/21/2007)
• Questions (3/3/2003)
• My first youtube playlist (11/21/2008)