LegRoom.net Kick back and relax

Magnatune is an independent record label and online music distribution channel. Why am I writing about it here? Because as the title suggests, it's frickin' awesome.

I've been listening to my music collection in digital form for many years now. I first ripped my entire CD collection in 2000, and have since ripped it twice more in progressively better quality. My final rip two years ago was done as lossless FLACs (see my AutoFLAC utility for more information), so I'll never have to rip them again. I've also long had a computer connected to my home theater system, primarily so I could listen to my music collection through may main stereo system. A completely digital music collection, combined with an intelligent media player like Amarok, offers countless advantages and flexibility over manually playing individual CDs.

Despite my love of digital music, until recently I've never purchased a single song or album digitally. Instead, I've continued to purchase, and subsequently rip, compact discs. Why? Because most online music services suck balls. Why?

1. Digital Restrictions Management (aka, DRM) - this anti-consumer technology implements technical controls to limit what you can and can't do with music that you legally purchased. Want to listen to it on something other than an "approved" player? Tough. Want to copy it to and play it from another computer? Nope. Want to edit/remix it? Not gonna happen. Want to send it to a friend so he can check it out? Ha, now you're just being silly.
   Think you own it and should be able to play it forever? Better hope your music service/provider doesn't shut down.

2. Quality - Most digital music has been sold as 128 Kbps tracks. This is atrocious quality. Why would I want to buy something of significantly worse quality (digital music) than the same exact product I've been buying for years in stores (compact discs). Recently many services have begun selling 256 Kbps tracks, which is a huge step in the right direction, but even this is far inferior to lossless CD quality music.
3. Proprietary/restrictive application requirements - Most services require some kind of proprietary application to download and/or play the music. Why should I be forced to install a really crappy media player, that doesn't even run on my operating system, just to buy and download music? Why do I need to install some proprietary browser plugin just to download files that my browser is perfectly capable of downloading by itself?
4. DRM - Yes, this point is worth repeating. DRM is defective by design, and it's important to treat it as such.
5. Physical media - I like physical media. I like album art. I like liner notes and lyrics. I like the whole CD experience. Simply buying a digital copy of a song and downloading it to your computer without all of the value-added features is really rather lame by comparison.
6. Have I mentioned DRM is evil?

I could go on, but that purpose of this post is not to rant about online other music services. The reason I'm posting this is because I want to call attention to a really great online music service: Magnatune. Their motto is "We are not evil," and unlike Google, which shares a similar motto but is so busy compiling every last detail of your life into one massive database to remember that, Magnatune actually means it. From there front page:

We work directly with independent musicians world-wide to give you downloads of MP3s and perfect-quality WAV files. We never work with major labels, and our musicians always get 50%. You can listen to every album in its entirety before buying or becoming a member.

They expand much more on this. The reasons behind Magnatune's creation are also quite interesting, and that 50/50 split directly with artists is a big deal. Be sure to check out their full info page for all the details.

Ok, so Magnatune says they're not evil, has a lot of propaganda on their site discussing that fact, and seems to be quite fair to the artists involved, but how does that affect me as a customer? Well, it basically translates into a wonderful customers-first policy that is extremely rare today. To be completely honest, and this is something you'll very, very rarely hear me say, I was 100% satisfied by the entire browsing and ordering process. Let me walk you through it:

1. Decide on something to buy. Magnatune makes this quite easy:
   • Music can be searched/browsed by genre, artist, or album, and includes best-selling and newest lists
   • ALL music on the site can be sampled in its entirety in reasonable quality streaming audio. These "preview" tracks are actually just MP3s that are streamed directly from Magnatune's servers.
   • You can listen to the samples through an embedded media player in your web browser or by opening playlist links in your own preferred media player. Magnatune even offers a special programming interface that allows the service to be directly integrated with music players so I can, for example, browse, play, and purchase any album directly within Amarok.
2. Once you've found something you like, click Buy Download
   • Note that you also have the choice to buy a physical CD instead and have it shipped to you
3. Choose how much you want to pay, from $5 - $18. $8 is the default, though I've been choosing $10 (remember, 50% goes directly to the artists, not the label or any other middle men)
4. Enter payment info
   • It's not necessary to register or create a permanent account
   • It's not necessary to give them your e-mail addresses, although a receipt will be e-mailed to you if one is provided
   • Payment information (eg., credit card number) is never saved on the server, unlike most other online retailers who don't even give you this option
5. Click Pay
6. Note the provided username and password, then click on the download link
7. Begin downloading in choice of audio format
   • FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3 (both constant and variable bitrate), AAC, and even WAV are allowed
   • Album cover art is also available for download
8. If desired, forward download link and password to up 3 friends
   • Yes, this is permitted and even encouraged: http://magnatune.com/info/give
9. Sit back and enjoy your new music in any way that you want

Now, with all that said, I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention the one negative aspect of the site. I mentioned at the very beginning that Magnatune is an independent record label. While this is a good thing, it does have one significant drawback: Magnatune as a much more limited selection than any of the major record labels. Basically, if you're used to buying music from a particular artist at Target or Best Buy, you will not find that artist's music on Magnatune. If you're only looking for big-name bands, you probably won't find much here. That's an unfortunate reality of the current industry environment. If, however, you're looking for some good music from lesser-known artists (I strongly recommend Rob Costlow if you like solo piano, and the rock group Atomic Opera is also worth checking out), you're not likely to find a better experience anywhere else.

I'm definitely not one to gush about, well, pretty much anything, but in this case I was so impressed, and so pleased, with my experience that I wanted to share it here. By all accounts, Magnatune is a good company doing good business and providing a great service to music fans and musicians alike. Check them out.

Note: All LegRoom.net e-mail will be unavailable beginning 12:00am CST 08/17/08 through 12:00am CST 08/18/08. Details are below.

I'm about to begin migrating the LegRoom.net e-mail server to a new system. As with the recent web server migration, this will be a completely new environment - new hardware, new host, new mail server applications, radically different configuration, etc. It's going to take some time to completely migrate all e-mail, update the server-side configuration for each user, test the new server-side configuration, test the client-side migration, and document the client-side migration. I'll let everyone know once the migration is complete.

I just completed migrating the LegRoom.net web server to a new hardware platform. It's now running on a dedicated host at a commercial hosting provider. The site should be much faster and more responsive now, as it's no longer running on a poky 33.6 KBps upstream DSL connection. It should also up more reliably as well now that it's no longer running under a virtual Xen instance on my desktop. :-)

In addition to the new hardware, I also made quite a few under-the-hood changes. I upgraded Drupal, changed up the apache configuration used for the website, restructured some of the website directories on the fileserver, and even changed the name of the database. LegRoom.net's been running for close to 6 consecutive years now, through various OS upgrades and hardware migrations, and it's built up a lot of cruft over the years. Since this was already a major change from what I had going before, I also took the time to reorganize things to make maintenance easier going forward.

Of course, I also tried my hardest to make sure everything looked exactly the same to end-users visiting my site, so unless you're reading this point you hopefully won't notice that anything has changed at all (aside from, of course, the speed). If you do find something that doesn't work - missing page, broken download link, lost credentials, etc. - please let me know ASAP.

Enjoy the upgraded site.

I came across a new (to me) Linux-related website a couple months ago that rather impressed me (which is something that doesn't happen all that often). The name of the site is Linux Kernel Newbies, and it's located at http://kernelnewbies.org/.

I stumbled across the site while looking for a good kernel changelog. Most changelogs that I've been able to find discuss the changes in one of three formats

• List changes/commits made in each release candidate
• List all individual commits made during the release cycle
• Briefly summarize major changes or new features

None of these really provided the information that I was looking for. Documenting changes for each release candidate is fine if you're actually using/testing -rc kernels, but it's a pain when looking for changes from version to version because it requires looking through multiple posts or documents. The commit list approach is also fine for the gritty details, but unfortunately the summaries of each change are rather cryptic and often don't mean a lot to people not actively involved in the development. The new feature and major change approach is nice in that it's easily digestible and hits the highlights, but unfortunately it usually doesn't cover enough detail for me.

While searching for a decent changelog that was something in between the detailed commit list and a high-level summary, I found the LinuxChanges page on the Linux Kernel Newbies wiki. This is almost exactly what I've been looking for. They do a great job of describing all of the new/important features of the given kernel release, including providing links to the actual commit records if you really want the full details. They also provide a list of all individual commits,
logically grouped and sorted, which makes it much easier to understand what was changes. Finally, they even cover the highlights of new/upcoming patches are are actively being development for succeeding kernel releases.

The LinuxChanges link always displays the changelog for the most recent stable kernel release (currently 2.6.26 as I write this). Changelogs for older release can be found on the Linux26Changes page.

While the changelog is what keeps me coming back every couple of months, Linux Kernel Newbies also offers a few other useful resources that may be of interest to Linux users, such as the KernelGlossary, FAQ, and Forum. The homepage also provides links to other content on the site.

I don't have any affiliation with the site, and to be honest I haven't spent much time on the site outside of the changelog pages, but even so I found it so useful that I wanted to mention it here. Hopefully some others can benefit from this site as well.

This website gets a lot of account registrations. Most of these are obvious spam accounts using fake e-mail addresses. Since e-mail confirmation is required on all new accounts, these accounts are never confirmed and therefore are never fully activated. I routinely run through the account list and delete these accounts to help keep things manageable. I also run through all of the new confirmed accounts every couple of weeks looking for obvious spam accounts that actually use a real e-mail address and remove these as well.

Since this website went live, that's pretty been the only account maintenance that I've done. At this point, 1 year and 4 months later, there are nearly 400 active accounts. This is after the obvious spam accounts were removed as described above. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these accounts have not been used at all since their initial creation. A lot of these accounts are spam accounts that use legitimate sounding names and e-mail addresses. A lot of them are also one-time use accounts: the user signs up, does whatever he wanted to do once, and then never returns (or at least never uses the account again).

Due to the large volume of inactive accounts, I decided to start cleaning up these old, unused accounts as well. For the first batch, I'm deleting all accounts that meet these two criteria:

• the account was created more than six months ago
• the account was last accessed more than six months ago

So, basically, any user that signed up for a LegRoom.net account more than six months ago and has not used the account since then has had his account deleted. After the first batch of deletions, the total account count dropped from nearly 400 to about 130. Much better. :-)

If you've been affected by this, the easiest solution would be to simply recreate your account, and login periodically to keep it active. I'll probably continue to do this on a semi-regular basis going forward. If you have any questions or complaints, feel free to either leave a comment or send me an e-mail.