assorted pieces of random gobbledygook

Fuck. I so want this! And I don’t even have an iPhone yet. last.fm on your MP3 player! And I want that A2DP profile to work, dammit! Apple, hear me?

My new A2DP headset/headphones arrived today and I have to say: I’m stoked! Although the headphones part is not quite as good as the AKG headphones I own, they sound alright.

Pairing with my Nokia E61 with the HBH-DS980 worked almost flawlessly (the first pairing attempt failed, but after I reset the phone everything was alright). Since OSX 10.5 (aka Leopard) now supports A2DP devices as sound devices globally, I can use them both for listening to Last.FM and (as a headset) in Skype.

I usually have no problems with jet lag at all. Yesterday however it dawned on me that the lack of sleep on the flight would probably require a serious afternoon nap with me awakening at 5am the next morning.

So rather than giving in to the temptation I scoured the web for some local band to go to and settled for Condor/Elephone/Boyskout. Being able to listen in to some mp3s of Boyskout on their web site really helped making that decision. Although Groove Rider was playing the same night I figured that if I really want to see him spinning records I can probably do that anytime I am in the U.K. again.

Three hours of sleep later and one hour late for the show I hauled a cab to the Bottom of the Hill. I missed some band called Condor, but the next two bands, Elephone and Boyskout were pretty good. I actually liked Boyskout a LOT, but I frigging forgot buying one of their CDs. The guy manning the merchandise counter didn’t really know how much to charge for it and started picking a random number out of his nose so I told him I’d wait till his buddy selling the Boyskout merch would come back and then buy from him; which I unfortunately forgot. Sigh. Whatever. So I ran into this guy Carey who invited me to a party on Saturday where he’d be spinning records. Let’s see what that’s about.

Later on I headed to some dive called the Delirium in the Mission district. Not bad, but man… Why the hell do they have to shut all places down on 2am on a Thursday night???

Just having finished my coffee I’ll now head out to StudioZ. According to their website it’s next door to the Paradise Lounge; so I should know where that is. Pics of yesterday should be up on flickr soonish… if they’re any good, I haven’t really checked them yet.

I sooooooo want to see this band live! Rock on! Hopefully they’ll be touring Germany, otherwise I’ll have to catch a flight to Sweden sometime soon.

technorati tags: music

Back when I first looked at JustePort and raop_play, the Apple Lossless encoding was missing. Having stumbled across the reverse-engineered ALAC decoder again this weekend I decided to have another look how difficult it is to make my Airport Express play nicely with Linux.

Oh joy! JustePort 0.2 and raop_play from version 0.4 on already have an ALAC encoder built in. Yay! So I cobbled together an ebuild for my desktop box (an AOpen EA65 II) and pondered my next move. Obviously I was going to need a decent audio player on my system, having been spoiled by iTunes. Being mostly desktop environment agnostic, I had two choices here: rythmbox and amaroK. Flipping a coin, amaroK it was. Fortunately amaroK can be built with gstreamer support, which enabled the following crude hack:

gstreamer provides an output sink called tcpclientsink which can be made to connect to an arbitrary host and port. By default it connects to localhost:4953 and sends all of it output data there (44100Hz, 16-bit stereo in my case). For each song played in amaroK, however, a new connection is opened. raop_play by default calls external programs to decode mp3, aac and ogg files. These output the decoded data to stdout.

So I placed the following minimalistic glue scripts in my $HOME/bin/ape-hack directory:

mpg321:
#!/bin/sh
socat -s TCP4-LISTEN:4953,fork -

ape-gstreamer:
#!/bin/sh
PATH=$HOME/bin/ape-hack:$PATH \
exec raop_play <airport express ip> dummy.mp3


Socat is a nifty little universal connector; if you think of netcat as your typical Swiss Army Knife, socat is the Victorinox CyberTool with a built-in kitchen sink. After having configured gstreamer using gconf-editor (system->gstreamer->0.8->default->audiosink) I was set to go.

All of the above of course ain’t pretty, but amaroK now plays tunes on my APE. Regrettably the transition between songs isn’t smooth yet… I guess somebody has to write a gst-apesink soon Of course, nothing of the above is really Linux specific.