Online Music Phase II
When I was younger, much younger, I always had this idealistic technological day-dreams about how a better tech-world could look like.
One of them was about the perfect file format for music. Of course it would contain all the metadata like lyrics, BPM, or crowd-sourced genre information. While on pause it would display the cover art, while playing it would show the video (only on devices with screens that support it and only if there would be a video available).
The reason I’m thinking about this now is the recent shutdown [1] of Grooveshark in Germany, which leaves a hole unfulfilled: Rdio, Napster or simfy stream music to you as much as you want, but let’s face it, because of the costs of round about 10 €/month they shut out a lot of customers, which aren’t that music-savvy. Spotify offers a free version, but it’s also not available in Germany and it needs the desktop client.
Even if you could afford the money, a ne plus ultra-solution looks slightly different. We already see labels withdrawing their music from streaming services due to low income. And if you would want to share a tune with a friend, you have to watch out if he/she has also a subscription on this specific service.
The hypothesis: YouTube is the best player in the field to fill this gap. They already have the reputation to be the best site to play music. Let me repeat: Even not intended by the YouTube founders, it became the 1st place young people go to when they want to play their favorite song on a party or even at home.
The striking difference between Grooveshark and the YouTube of 2012 is the simple fact that a huge portion of uploaded content is legal, meaning uploaded by the artist or label themselves. Only in addition, you get a lot of fan-uploaded tracks (with often rare material). It would be interesting to see how the music catalogue of YT compares with the one from e.g. Spotify.
And it seems I’m not the only one with this thinking. Take a look at Cantio. Basically the service leverages the YT music library and wraps it into an audio player interface.
There are other services that try to do the same, but Cantio is the most promising because:
- it has good UI design
- it has its own Radio mode (based on genre)
- it lets one import playlists (in M3U format)
- it has easy sharing with custom short URLs built right in
- it has keyboard shortcuts (a hooray for the nerds)
What I miss is the integration of other services: First and foremost Vimeo or Dailymotion - because they don’t have the same strict DRM system like YT in place (yet) - and audio-only services like SoundCloud or the HypeMachine.
Nevertheless, I found my Grooveshark replacement.
[1] I think the reason for the inevitable closing of Grooveshark is and will be the deja-vu to common services: Grooveshark looks exactly like an iTunes (or other music player of your choide) version on a webpage - but for free. This is the kind of radical change major labels will never ever agree with. Maybe that’s also the reason why YT doesn’t do something like audio.youtube.com on its own.
My Media Setup: Part 1
The articles about the speculative entry of Apple in the TV business are reason enough for me to write down how I married my computer with the big screen.
[Update] As I wrote this article, I figured that every aspect about my setup would be way to much and complicated for a single post. In this first article we will take a look at media streaming from the internet.
For one and a half-year I’m using a HTPC for almost all media consumption in my household. The classic TV with cable has deprecated for getting information live and synchronically (think of sports or live coverage from Fukushima immediately after the earthquake). Thanks to the Long Tail, the web has so much more relevant content to offer for free. On the other hand, it’s just ridiculous to watch good content on the smallest interface with the poorest speakers.
Comic by Abstruse Goose “Room with a view”
Now you may ask which media center I use. Is it the all-rounder XBMC, it’s social companion Boxee or something minimal like an Apple TV2?
In fact, I tried all of the above but stick to Miro (available for all platforms). Think of it like the Google Reader for video. You throw in feeds from RSS Podcasts, YouTube users/playlists or Torrents and the program will automatically download newly available files to your hard drive. The embedded player remembers at which point you paused a video for easy resuming and plays several files in a row.
This is a bigger deal than it looks like, because only with that feature (that’s missing from most other solutions) you get the leanback experience one is used to on traditional TV sets. I clustered my feeds in several folders: Sports, Film, Info, Fun, Tech and Music. (To give you an idea what I understand under the different categories, I linked every section to a representative feed.) Now when I hit Music and the play button, Miro gives me all unwatched music videos from the different sources I subscribed to. Sort of like a automatically renewing playlist.
You don’t know what feeds are interesting? Miro has a built-in directory you could search. Maybe (since your reading this) you have similar interests and can use my OPML file with about 90 subscriptions as a starting point.
Here are some additional hints you might find useful:
- Not every feed that’s available on iTunes can be subscribed to via standard RSS. Flipper to the rescue. It’s a free iTunes Podcast to RSS converter that generates links digestible for every normal Media RSS reader.
- To keep the storage needs low, Miro offers to delete watched files after a certain period, e.g. 7 days.
- Clips from video streaming sites like YouTube get downloaded in the highest available quality, means up to 1080p.
- Depending on your internet connection you may need to tell Miro maximum download and upload rates to keep some bandwidth free for other internet tasks.
- Miro can watch harddrive folders for new videos. Video files that I want to add to my Miro queue are easily put in a dedicated Dropbox folder on my notebook. These get synced to the HTPC and automatically moved to a folder Miro watches for new content.
- At this point I should mention Mediathek, a famous tool for Mac owners, that downloads shows from the german channels ARD, ZDF or Arte. (Please don’t compare this to Hulu, otherwise I’ll get really angry. For US-based readers: You don’t appreciate how lucky you are.)
- Use a third-party tool to transfer video links from your “browsing PC” to the HTPC. When I come across a lengthy video that I like to watch on my LCD, I hit the mag.ma bookmarklet. As soon as the video is added to my mag.ma profile, Miro scans the site’s RSS and downloads the queued link. While this is not the nature of the service, it works surprisingly fast.
- Maybe I’ll take a look at Squrl, which is intended to manage exactly this purpose, though.
- To utilize the “next big protocol after RSS” with my Mac mini as a receiver I use AirPlayer. There are different scripts to move video directly to e.g. XBMC.
So, Miro can deal with new watchable content pretty good, what do you do with existing films on hard drives or DVD’s?
You could import them in Miro, too, but personally I want to separate throw-away content that is only watched once and, let’s say the Blu-Ray edition of my favorite blockbuster. But that’s stuff for another article.
