Right, as we all know back in the days of old Napster ruled supreme. There was no contest about that and everyone I knew who was on-line was using it, however it obviously was highly illegal. Since then many companies have tried to ressurect Napster in many different forms from Kazaa to LimeWire. However they all still fall in the pitfall of being illegal. So what would happen if a legal alternative occured? Well, it’s no longer what would happen, as its now happening with Spotify.

So how does Spotify work?

Well, it’s simply a Windows/Mac on-demand streaming audio. There’s no waiting, and it’s so quick there’s no buffering either. You can scan through the tracks at will without having to wait for it to catch up with your track.

How do they make money?

Every 10 odd tracks you play you have to listen to an advert thats about 20seconds long. It then goes back to playing what it told you too.  If you don’t want to ever listen to the adverts you can get a subscription, one is just for a day, the other for a month and during that time you won’t hear any adverts at all. If you stick to free, it’s a bit like listening to a real radio station, just they always play good tracks

How good is it?

Well ive only been using it for about an hour, but from initial impressions, it looks and feels great. All the artists I searched for were available for play, along with massive back catalogues for all artists. You have the ability to queue up music to play, and you can also create playlists.

One thing that pleasantly surprized me about it was the fact it has last.fm scrobbling built in, just simply put in your username and password and off it goes…

Listening now using Spotify

You also have the option to listen to generic radio stations of which you can tell it what you like. So for example you can tell it you want to listen to music from the 90’s pop, or 80’s disco and pop.

How do I get it?

Ah the most important one of all. Currently Spotify is in an invite only stage, however it seems that if you visit this cunning link, you can by-pass all that! However no guarentees on this working for too long!

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

- Ninja Edit -

Just found a rather useful Greasemonkey script that adds little notes next to artist names and track names on last.fm, and when you click them it will search in Spotify for playable tracks. More information over here.

Just a quick post to say that this is probably my track of the month. Originally found it through the film 21 and it also just got awarded “#3 Hottest New Music of 2008″ by Last.fm

I’ve been hunting around for a good music playing application for Ubuntu (8.04.1 – Hardy), and after some initial searching and testing I ended up on Amarok because I was impressed it used a proper database back end. Although, I’m not too impressed with the player itself, beyond 10,000 tracks and it starts to feel like your computer has turned into a jar of treacle.

Anyway, since that I decided to try Songbird again. I had initially dismissed this after it wouldn’t read files from Samba shares, and at that time my external with my music was on another PC. Now that external is plugged into the Ubuntu machine, so off I went to download and try it again.

The first hurdle, its not in the package system, and the official site doesn’t provide a .deb file, and I’m lazy. A quick google later and I have songbird_0.7.0-0~getdeb1_i386.deb!

I get it installed, I go to run it and it’s pre-run wizard loads up asking me if I want to search for media and what plug-ins I want. Unfortunately at the end of this it goes off to download the files, then disappears, then starts again. Very frustrating. I try it again just to make sure it wasn’t some sort of cosmic ray interference or some such, unfortunately it repeats itself again.

After about 30minutes of google abuse, installing older versions, uninstalling those older versions and installing the latest again, the solution is quite simple. Simply delete the “.songbird” directory from your own home directory. Now you would have thought that the package manager would have done that for me when I told it to “Completely remove this application including configuration files” obviously not…

Well, I seemed to miss this in the news while I was away at the weekend at Alton Towers. Needless to say, the second I saw this available for download I jumped on it. Contained within the zip file are 20 mp3 files, (so no longer the ogg format that Unreal Tournament 2004 used), but not all are music files, some are announcer sound previews. It appears that they have taken the announcer voice and added a slight reverb effect which adds to the surround sound effect.

Track Listing:

1. UT2007 MenuTheme (3:40)
2. ONS01Mix (4:20)
3. Announcer Male KillingSpree (0:02)
4. Mech8Mix (3:32)
5. Announcer Female PrepareForBattle (0:01)
6. GoDown Mix (3:06)
7. RomNecris02 BeatMix (1:24)
8. Taunts Malcolm AhHellNo (0:01)
9. UT2007 MenuTheme2 (2:52)
10. RomUT02Mix (4:00)
11. Announcer Male DoubleKill (0:02)
12. RomNecris01 AmbientTheme (2:12)
13. GoDown SuspenseTheme (1:11)
14. RomNecris02 VictoryTheme (1:48)
15. LockdownMix (4:48)
16. RomNecris01 VictoryTheme (1:12)
17. Announcer Female NewOpponent (0:02)
18. Outpost SuspenseTheme (1:27)
19. RomUT06 ActionTheme (0:50)
20. SpaceDnB VictoryTheme (1:00)

After listening to the first few tracks I can tell you now that Epic Games have defiantly gone back to their original Unreal Tournament roots, as the menu theme is a remixed original menu theme. Within the second menu theme there is a fantastic bass line which I think my neighbours will learn to like.

Throughout this soundtrack though there are other remixes of the old music, such as “Go Down” and “Mech8″ which sound amazing and all I now want to do is play the original and salivate in waiting of Unreal Tournament 3.

Download Link – Unreal Tournament 3 Official Soundtrack (34mb)