Jamendo - download Ogg files directly

*****Due to Jamendo restructuring it's file archives, this method no longer works in order to obtain albums in ogg vorbis format, I will post an update when I find an alternative method****** 

If your anything like me then you'll be very annoyed with the constant offer of an Ogg Vorbis torrent on Jamendo and then the severe lack of any seeders for the album. Indeed I've one album in particular that I've been trying to download now for 6 months without a single seeder. Given that the files are there, the lack of seeders is very frustrating. However a solution is at hand: download them directly.

This does not appear to be an option from the Jamendo site, however I noticed that the Android app is able to download any album I want in Ogg format. After some research and questioning, there is a way to directly download the albums in Ogg Vorbis format to your PC.

It is not as simple as a one click, however it is not overly complicated.

1. First go to the page of the album you wish to download, in my example I'm using the band I reviewed in my previous blog post: Roads and Lakes by Crazy Evolution.

















2. Take a look at the address bar, take a note of the numbers at the end. This is the Album ID, in this case 77507





3. Pace this into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/{album ID goes here}/?are=ogg3

so for my example to get the Crazy Evolution album it would be :
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/77507/?are=ogg3

4. From the pop up window select Save File and then click OK


















Once your downloads have finished; sit back, relax and enjoy your music in a free format.

*****Due to Jamendo restructuring it's file archives, this method no longer works in order to obtain albums in ogg vorbis format, I will post an update when I find an alternative method****** 

If your anything like me then you'll be very annoyed with the constant offer of an Ogg Vorbis torrent on Jamendo and then the severe lack of any seeders for the album. Indeed I've one album in particular that I've been trying to download now for 6 months without a single seeder. Given that the files are there, the lack of seeders is very frustrating. However a solution is at hand: download them directly.

This does not appear to be an option from the Jamendo site, however I noticed that the Android app is able to download any album I want in Ogg format. After some research and questioning, there is a way to directly download the albums in Ogg Vorbis format to your PC.

It is not as simple as a one click, however it is not overly complicated.

1. First go to the page of the album you wish to download, in my example I'm using the band I reviewed in my previous blog post: Roads and Lakes by Crazy Evolution.

















2. Take a look at the address bar, take a note of the numbers at the end. This is the Album ID, in this case 77507





3. Pace this into the address bar of your browser:
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/{album ID goes here}/?are=ogg3

so for my example to get the Crazy Evolution album it would be :
http://www.jamendo.com/get/album/id/album/archiverestricted/redirect/77507/?are=ogg3

4. From the pop up window select Save File and then click OK


















Once your downloads have finished; sit back, relax and enjoy your music in a free format.

Jamendo - download Ogg files directly

Crazy Evolution - Roads and Lakes

A new band has appeared on the scene at Jamendo; Crazy Evolution. The band are stuck firmly in the punk rock genre, there is no grey area here. This is a genre that you either love or hate and this is right up my alley.

Drawing on influences from a variety of bands such as The Offspring, Sum 41, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup and a variety of others, Crazy Evolution have produced a great début album; Roads and Lakes.

The guitars and drums are top notch and the singing and backing vocals are very well performed throughout. This band would not appear out of place on a best of punk rock album with some of the bands mentioned earlier.

Whilst this genre does get pigeon holed to the skateboarders of society, the cover does little to help this stereotype, this is album is definitely worthy of a listen.

Free music for professional licensing

Jamendo Page
Official site
MySpace Page

A new band has appeared on the scene at Jamendo; Crazy Evolution. The band are stuck firmly in the punk rock genre, there is no grey area here. This is a genre that you either love or hate and this is right up my alley.

Drawing on influences from a variety of bands such as The Offspring, Sum 41, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup and a variety of others, Crazy Evolution have produced a great début album; Roads and Lakes.

The guitars and drums are top notch and the singing and backing vocals are very well performed throughout. This band would not appear out of place on a best of punk rock album with some of the bands mentioned earlier.

Whilst this genre does get pigeon holed to the skateboarders of society, the cover does little to help this stereotype, this is album is definitely worthy of a listen.

Free music for professional licensing

Jamendo Page
Official site
MySpace Page

Crazy Evolution - Roads and Lakes

geek test results

Overall, you scored as follows: 16% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 83% scored lower (less geeky).

Compared to those in the same age group as you: 23% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 76% scored lower (less geeky).

What does this mean? Your computer geekiness is: High-Level Computer Geek. All of those below you are envious of you! (...Well perhaps not the cool people)

Overall, you scored as follows: 16% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 83% scored lower (less geeky).

Compared to those in the same age group as you: 23% scored higher (more computer geeky), 1% scored the same, and 76% scored lower (less geeky).

What does this mean? Your computer geekiness is: High-Level Computer Geek. All of those below you are envious of you! (...Well perhaps not the cool people)

geek test results

Removing Facebok & Twitter from the Nexus One

*This guide will not work with Android 2.2.1, Universal Androot is not compatible with 2.2.1 due to root restrictions

**If you are not confident with using the terminal please do not do this, I am not responsible for any damage to the phone

A lot of posts have been written on various forums about removing some of the default apps that come supplied with the Nexus One phone. Two that particularly grate on me is the automatic inclusion of Facebook and Twitter apps, I do not have an account with either and neither do I want one.

Given that Android is based on a Linux kernel then it should all be about freedom, so removing these was high on my list of priorities when I received the phone. As Android is based on Linux then you can use the same commands that most Linux users use on a day to day basis in the terminal.

First of all, from your Nexus One, select Settings > Applications and make sure that there is a tick beside Unknown Sources. This allows us to use software other than the apps in the market, very useful for trying beta packages that are not yet in the marketplace (Fennec etc).

We now need root privileges. Most ways of rooting your phone affect the bootloader and the mobile companies claim that this nullifies your warranty. I am using Universal Androot which can be downloaded here or by scanning the barcode below, this grants root privileges to applications, not your bootloader, so a factory reset should wipe this out.














Install the the app, make sure the Android version is set to 2.0~2.2 and click Go Root. The next screen should give you the message: Woot! Your device is rooted!

Now go to the marketplace and download a terminal, I used the Android Terminal Emulator; it does the job and it's free, but feel free to choose any you wish.

Open the terminal and type:

su

An Android head with crossed bones below it will appear asking if you wish to grant this application Superuser permissions, select Yes. At this point I had to restart the terminal app, but this may not be the case for all of you.

Now type, pressing return at the end of each line:

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

cd /system/app
ls

At this point you will get a list of all the pre-installed packages, they will all have .apk extensions. Take a note of the exact names of the package files you wish to remove. Please be careful not to remove apps that are necessary to the basic function of your phone. We will rename these instead of deleting them, this means that we can retrieve them later if we wish. In my example I will be removing the Facebook and Twitter apps:

mv Facebook.apk Facebook.bak
mv Twitter.apk Twitter.bak
mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

sync

Now exit the terminal and reboot your Nexus One and the unwanted apps will be gone.

*This guide will not work with Android 2.2.1, Universal Androot is not compatible with 2.2.1 due to root restrictions

**If you are not confident with using the terminal please do not do this, I am not responsible for any damage to the phone

A lot of posts have been written on various forums about removing some of the default apps that come supplied with the Nexus One phone. Two that particularly grate on me is the automatic inclusion of Facebook and Twitter apps, I do not have an account with either and neither do I want one.

Given that Android is based on a Linux kernel then it should all be about freedom, so removing these was high on my list of priorities when I received the phone. As Android is based on Linux then you can use the same commands that most Linux users use on a day to day basis in the terminal.

First of all, from your Nexus One, select Settings > Applications and make sure that there is a tick beside Unknown Sources. This allows us to use software other than the apps in the market, very useful for trying beta packages that are not yet in the marketplace (Fennec etc).

We now need root privileges. Most ways of rooting your phone affect the bootloader and the mobile companies claim that this nullifies your warranty. I am using Universal Androot which can be downloaded here or by scanning the barcode below, this grants root privileges to applications, not your bootloader, so a factory reset should wipe this out.














Install the the app, make sure the Android version is set to 2.0~2.2 and click Go Root. The next screen should give you the message: Woot! Your device is rooted!

Now go to the marketplace and download a terminal, I used the Android Terminal Emulator; it does the job and it's free, but feel free to choose any you wish.

Open the terminal and type:

su

An Android head with crossed bones below it will appear asking if you wish to grant this application Superuser permissions, select Yes. At this point I had to restart the terminal app, but this may not be the case for all of you.

Now type, pressing return at the end of each line:

mount -o remount,rw -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

cd /system/app
ls

At this point you will get a list of all the pre-installed packages, they will all have .apk extensions. Take a note of the exact names of the package files you wish to remove. Please be careful not to remove apps that are necessary to the basic function of your phone. We will rename these instead of deleting them, this means that we can retrieve them later if we wish. In my example I will be removing the Facebook and Twitter apps:

mv Facebook.apk Facebook.bak
mv Twitter.apk Twitter.bak
mount -o ro,remount -t yaffs2 /dev/block/mtdblock3 /system

sync

Now exit the terminal and reboot your Nexus One and the unwanted apps will be gone.

Removing Facebok & Twitter from the Nexus One

Fedora 14 - a preview

With the release of one of my favourite Linux distros imminent I decided to try out Fedora 14 beta release candidate for a sneak preview. The one thing I will say is that Fedora have concentrated on speed, this distro is fast, a quick install and boot up times. The usual slick blue design is there, but as with 13 I do think they may have stripped the core system back a bit too much, I felt that selection of applications upon installing a bit limited.

Firefox, Pino, Shotwell and Rhythmbox are all very useful but no word processing or graphics packages at all??? Stability, as Fedora releases love to be cutting edge, may be a bit of an issue. I tested this on two laptops (HP & Lenovo), both with similar specs 2GHz processor, 2GB ram, both capable of running the 64bit versions. The only major setup difference was that I used the entire hard drive on the HP, but only a partition on the Lenovo. The HP worked perfectly from the install, this could quite easily have been the final version. However the same install disk produced a very different outcome on the Lenovo. Almost nothing worked as it should; nautilus kept crashing, I couldn't get the wireless working properly and I couldn't burn a CD or DVD. The software started up but then hung for a while before crashing. I thought to myself this could be an error during installation but sadly on a re-install I was greeted with the same problems. This appeared to be more like an alpha edition than a release candidate.

Anyway we shall wait and see what the final release will bring, I hope that if these bugs are not sorted then Fedora will push the date back rather than releasing an unstable system.

With the release of one of my favourite Linux distros imminent I decided to try out Fedora 14 beta release candidate for a sneak preview. The one thing I will say is that Fedora have concentrated on speed, this distro is fast, a quick install and boot up times. The usual slick blue design is there, but as with 13 I do think they may have stripped the core system back a bit too much, I felt that selection of applications upon installing a bit limited.

Firefox, Pino, Shotwell and Rhythmbox are all very useful but no word processing or graphics packages at all??? Stability, as Fedora releases love to be cutting edge, may be a bit of an issue. I tested this on two laptops (HP & Lenovo), both with similar specs 2GHz processor, 2GB ram, both capable of running the 64bit versions. The only major setup difference was that I used the entire hard drive on the HP, but only a partition on the Lenovo. The HP worked perfectly from the install, this could quite easily have been the final version. However the same install disk produced a very different outcome on the Lenovo. Almost nothing worked as it should; nautilus kept crashing, I couldn't get the wireless working properly and I couldn't burn a CD or DVD. The software started up but then hung for a while before crashing. I thought to myself this could be an error during installation but sadly on a re-install I was greeted with the same problems. This appeared to be more like an alpha edition than a release candidate.

Anyway we shall wait and see what the final release will bring, I hope that if these bugs are not sorted then Fedora will push the date back rather than releasing an unstable system.

Fedora 14 - a preview