A netbook may be too weak and puny for serious computing, but it makes a pretty good jukebox.
Thanks to the massive amount of music available online, a two-pound computer can access and play nearly every song ever recorded by mankind. The trick is getting the software needed to make it convenient to tune into the cloud instead of cramming your tiny hard drive with MP3s. Here’s how to do it.
I decided to turn my piece of junk MSI Wind into a jukebox because it was useless for most other computing tasks. My Wind actually comes with a rather capacious 160GB hard drive, but this project, as you will see, is particularly suited to netbooks of rather more limited storage. And of course, all of this will work for a “normal” computer too.
Here we use a Wind Hackintosh running Mac OS X, but you can just as easily use the stock Windows XP version. In fact, in one sense this will actually work better. The important thing is a net connection.
So, you have iTunes, but only a 4GB SSD drive. That won’t hold much music. It barely even holds my podcast directory. So for this project I will use iTunes solely for podcasts and grab all the rest of our music from the internet, specifically streaming it from the ether rather than engaging in disc-filling downloads.
There are several internet “radio” stations, sites which will let you pick one artist or genre and then compile a playlist for you. Pandora is one, and apparently very good, using as it does a database compiled by real people to select tunes for you. Sadly, it is not available outside the US, and is therefore dead to me over in Spain.
Instead, we chose Last.FM, a British site that is happy to share with our colonial brethren. Last.FM uses computer wizardry to compare your tastes with those of others who listen to the same music. It then builds eerily accurate playlists. You can then stream these playlists via a web browser or better still, pipe them directly into iTunes using the iScrobbler plugin.
IScrobbler not only monitors your iTunes usage and sends the info the the Last.FM servers (thus building your listening profile), it also takes the streams from Last.FM and plays them in iTunes itself. This means you get to use the remote control and keyboard shortcuts you are used to, along with track info displays. It also means that Last.FM is the only streaming service you can use with AirTunes — Apple’s over-the-air music streaming protocol which beams tracks from iTunes over Wi-Fi to an Airport Express (itself hooked up to a stereo).
At least, its the only one that will do this natively. More on that in a moment.
The real reason for this how-to article is Spotify, a new music service which is so good it made me dedicate a whole computer to it. Spotify is being called a “celestial jukebox”. It is essentially an iTunes-like piece of software with a quite ridiculous amount of music in it, all accessed via your internet connection:
In the future we aim to have all the worlds music available, however, we are currently in beta and are updating our catalogue so it’s possible that you won’t be able to find some of your favorite artists or tracks.
This is the Holy Grail of online music — every track ever made accessible all the time. Better still, Spotify is free in its ad-supported version, and an ad-free premium version costs €10 per month. I’d probably sign up for this but the ads are so unobtrusive there seems no point.
Spotify has all of the big labels signed up, plus some indies: Universal, Sony, BMG, EMI Music, Warner Music, Merlin, The Orchard and Bonnier Amigo. The catch? The free service is invite only and available in UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Sorry US! For once you get left out, although you can get the paid version at any time.
The Spotify software is simple and fast. Faster even than iTunes. The music is piped over the wire in the the open source Ogg Vorbis q5 codec, running at 160 kbps, and it is all managed by P2P, much the same as BitTorrent, to keep the mothership’s bandwidth costs down.
Next, you need to hook your netbook up to a stereo. With Windows XP, just plug a stereo cable into the mic socket. With a Wind running OS X, you’ll need to do some hacking. Better, as this is so far completely free, is to buy Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil, a piece of software (Windows and OS X) which will stream sound from any application and send it to an Airport Express. This is my setup, and it means that the netbook can be anywhere in the apartment and stream music to the big speakers over my Wi-Fi network.
The best thing about this is that you don’t need a remote control — a netbook is so tiny it is a remote control. Even if you don’t have an Airport Express hooked up to your stereo, Airfoil can stream to another computer on the network and take command of its speakers. It’s neat and costs just $25.
There are surely many other ways to get music from the web to your speakers, but the netbook is particularly convenient, especially as you can have an almost infinite library at your fingertips. Any further recommendations should, of course, go in the comments.
Product page [Spotify]
Product page [Last.FM]
