I’d only just got out of bed this AM when Lars sent me an MSN message that said, “GOOOD MOOOOORNING USA!” He doesn’t usually shout at me, but what he wanted to tell me today was really pretty cool. He sent me a link to something called Simplify Media; he’d discovered it as an iPhone app and knew I’d be interested because we’d been talking about tastes in music and listening habits a few days ago. The app is fairly awesome; a way to share music with friends (up to thirty), but legally, and it works with iTunes, Winamp and best of all, Rhythmbox. I created an account, and now, if we’re both logged in and I run Rhythmbox, his music collection from his XP box and his MacBook appear under “Shared” and I can listen to his stuff as if it were my own. I can’t copy it, or burn it to CD, but that doesn’t matter to me; I can listen to it as long as I like, either choosing songs individually, or letting Rhythmbox pick at random. I can see what he’s listening to from my collection, he can access mine from PC, Mac or his iPhone, and there’s a chat window as well. I couldn’t get it to work at first, but then I realised it wanted to make him a DAAP share, so all I had to do was re-enable the DAAP plugin in Rhythmbox that I’d disabled because I didn’t use it, then run the script in the “rhythmbox_Ubuntu_8_04” directory and restart Rhythmbox. Works like a charm, isn’t hard on resources, and doesn’t interfere with my regular web activities. For now, I’ve set it to start when I log in; we’ll see whether I decide to keep it that way or not (depends on whether it becomes annoying, but I suspect it won’t). He can listen to my stuff on either of his computers, or his iPhone, and when I figure out how to install this on openSUSE, I’ll be able to listen to his on my laptop as well as my desktop. That does, of course, mean that I have to use Rhythmbox rather than Songbird, but only if I want access to his stuff as well as my own, but that’s all right because I found the option to automatically scan my directory for updates, which was the only thing that annoyed me about Rhythmbox in the first place. Some of his tags are incorrect, but so are many of mine, his collection is as eclectic as my own (though less organised) and he’s got some good music…some I like and didn’t even know I liked! 🙂

Yay–works on openSUSE, too. It’s supposed to work with Banshee, but I don’t like Banshee, so I didn’t try all that hard. All I had to do was install Rhythmbox and then run the script, same as I did for Ubuntu.