Fitting the battle of life

Well, I asked a flatmate if I could listen to some of his music earlier, and he said ‘Sure, it should be on the network through iTunes.’

I fired up Rhythmbox and, sure enough, there his name was, under ‘Shared’. I clicked on it, expecting it to show me his music and allow easy navigation to The Feeling. But oh now, it stayed stuck on ‘Retrieving music’ in the status bar.

Of course, I checked to see if it would work the other way. I quickly turned on my own sharing, and it popped up in his copy of iTunes, streaming flawlessly. (We then had ‘a good laugh’ at some of the music in my ten-gig collection, but that’s a story I’d rather not share.) So Rhythmbox -> iTunes works, but iTunes -> Rhythmbox doesn’t.

Apparently this is due to some way in which DAAP, the Apple-owned protocol that enables ‘easy’ sharing of music across a local network, changed in iTunes 7 (after working fine before that). The implementation in Rhythmbox (and other open-source, non-Apple apps) doesn’t work as a client (i.e. receiving music across a network), which is annoying.

A silly little proprietary protocol from Apple, trying to lock people into using its products. Apple basically wants me to switch to iTunes to hear music from the room across the hallway, when I run Ubuntu Linux and have no intention of going back to Windows (or onto a Mac). The simple thing to do would be to use an open protocol, so anyone could implement it perfectly. Then we’d see a real market in software, competing properly on features and aesthetics. Is it that Apple are afraid that, given half the chance, people would switch from iTunes to something else? They can’t be that unconfident in their own product, can they…?

This week I recommend:

• In film, This is England. (Watched it tonight, and it’s brilliant, just brilliant. The dialogue’s great, the soundtrack is perfect, and most of the acting is great too.)
• In music, Portland Rise. (Yes, I have a bit of a vested interest in these guys, but would recommend them even if I didn’t know them.)
• In books, Under the Net. (Iris Murdoch’s first novel, and unfortunately the only one of hers I’ve read, but will try and rectify that this summer after my exams.)

That’s my watch, listen and read for this week. I might even make it a semi-regular feature, depending how revision goes.

• (And as a bonus, in podcasts, the Ubuntu-uk podcast episode 2, or uupc as it is become known. It even got a mention on lugradio this week!)

As you may know, I reinstalled Ubuntu the other day, and quickly set about updating and reinstalling things. My first installation was a big job of mplayer, mozilla-mplayer, irssi, vlc, exaile, those kind of programs to get functionality back to what it was. So I fired up exaile to play some music, and it froze. Greyed out, had to force quit. Bugger.

I tried it in rhythmbox and only then realised it was an mp3. And I hadn’t installed restricted extras…

Note to self: make a comprehensive checklist of post-reinstall chores for next time.