cat >/dev/null

I’m just listening to the new album from Radiohead, named In Rainbows, which was released yesterday. I’m still halfway through, but so far it seems like a good record.

So, what’s new?

I just downloaded it off the net.

Again, what’s the deal?

I actually paid for it.

Hm, interesting, for a change, but not exactly earth shattering, I can almost hear you think.

Well, think again.

I didn’t buy it from iTunes or another online music store. I got it directly from the album’s own website, after paying directly to the artists. Immediatly after checking out I received a web link that started the download of a zip archive, containing plain simple 160kbps mp3 files. No DRM. No strings attached. Just good music, click and play.

Now, hear this. What you pay for it is left up to you. No, really, it’s up to you.

So, what do you say? I say it’s high time you put your money where your ears are. I’m going to be quite upset when I see someone pirating this.

P.S.: curious about how much I chose to pay for the album? £3.33. I’d pay less for 160k mp3s, but I really wanted to vote with my purse on this one. I am generally concerned about sound quality; give me royalty-free, lossless high-quality audio files (hint: FLAC) and I will gladly pay more than that.

Moreover, while I understand it would somehow lessen the impact in this instance, generally I’d appreciate a little preview. Also, artwork does not necessarily mean paper.

P.P.S.: no, you can’t have my mp3s. Go download them off the site.

While the headline speaks for itself (here are the relevant release notes), it’s no big deal for me, since I make very little use of Skype.

There are times when I can’t avoid using it, though. Most people don’t value their freedom enough to take the most basic action or turn around the slightest annoyance, and I can’t afford not to care about all of them (though heaven knows I’m tempted).

That’s how I discovered that Skype had this very annoying habit of fiddling with the sound hardware on my notebook, randomly toggling the “capture” status and actually muting my mic during a call. After several experiments, a lot of repetitions and a whole lot of cursewords (only some of which have been heard by my counterparts, good for me), I’d come to the conclusion that it had something to do with the sound level, but couldn’t completely avoid this behaviour, no matter how low I kept my mic level or the tone of my voice.

Well, maybe the problem has been solved. This new release has a promising option switch, Allow Skype to automatically adjust my mixer levels:

to which I reply: hell no!!!

After literally months of whispering, I can’t wait to shout into someone else’s ears! Not quite enough punishment for using a closed-source, closed-protocol VoIP application, but still better than none.

Oh, almost slipped my mind: still no SMS.

Today is a great day.

After literally years as a GNU/Linux desktop user, I was finally able to reach a satisfying sound configuration.

Frankly, it baffles me to think that it was as easy as putting this into my /etc/asound.conf:


pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm “dmix:1″
}


There’s got to be a lesson in all this, too bad I can’t make it out!

I’m now running several instances of xmms, vlc, playing a Flash movie (newborn version 9 of the Linux plugin supports ALSA) and hearing sound notifications from gaim (via esd), all together. Of course it’s a total mess, but I’m as happy as a child.

You know I HATE to be forced using proprietary protocols and formats. Nobody should ever support a protocol for which a legal Free Software reference implementation is not available. All violations should be punished with Death by iPod Stoning.

In spite of their so-called community efforts, Real never convinced me (or rms, but that’s understood). Too bad the need to play the occasional flipping .rm file on Linux comes whenever you least expect it. So yes, there’s a RealPlayer 10 Gold for Linux, but what the…? No ALSA support? Are you joking or what?

So I did some research, and (not nearly as easily as you may think) I found out that there are nightly builds for RealPlayer.

And guess what: ALSA support!

Sweet. Well… almost.

Though I am definitely not a very loyal fan of Skype (or the next closed-protocol app, for that purpose), I must admit that it does its job cleverly, and can occasionally save your day. So it’s loaded on my PC almost full-time.

I use Skype on Linux most of the time. Despite the fact that, as we all know, the Linux experience with sound (and multimedia in general) leaves so much to be desired, I’ve more or less found my blues. Being a KDE user, I came to prefer getting a cheerful fanfare of sound notifications stacked together as soon as I hang up a phone call (the artsd daemon stacks them while the sound device is not available, and plays them when skype gives it back) rather than wrapping Skype with artsdsp and get bad sound quality and horrible lag.

It seems that pretty soon Skype will support ALSA and KDE will support gstreamer or something else, better still. Pretty soon Linux will be a wonderful platform for multimedia, and AIDS, cancer and artsd will be things of the past. Anyway, I know I learned not to hold my breath. And I like it that way. I am thankful to the F/OSS gods and I won’t sell my soul to Steve Jobs for want of a bell chime. (audience laughs)

All this said, I never, ever had the pleasure of hearing that chime when a Skype chat message comes in. My Skype does not even ring to an incoming phone call. This is very annoying and I keep missing important events.

After so many months of wondering I decided to follow my long-time resolution and go have a look at the forum. There was my answer, actually not as evident as one could expect, given the relevance of this issue, but definitely within my reach.

I’m posting the link on my blog along with a brief summary, so that the millions of Skype users under Linux reading it may finally find a solution to this frustrating problem.

The Skype installation includes a sound dir. That’s where the WAVs for the notifications are kept. I install Skype from the tar package into /home/skype. Your mileage may vary.

Copy or link this directory to your home dir:

andrew@bambino:~$ ln -s /home/skype/sound ~/

If you want a system-wide setting, use /sound instead:

root@bambino:~# ln -s /home/skype/sound /

and you’re set.

Now leave a comment using one of these two templates:

A) At last!! No more lost calls. I’ll be your slave for the rest of my life. Please accept
[ ] these €500
[ ] this 12″ iBook
[ ] my sister
on account.

B) Wake up, pal. It’s been on the front page of the forum for ages.

UPDATE 20060905: recent Skype for GNU/Linux betas natively support ALSA and seem to pick up sound files just fine. Still a hog, though. Nothing’s perfect, I guess.