[Fedora-music-list] Fedora Music Update

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

Not a lot of traffic on the list.  That's ok -- not ideal, but ok.  Baby
steps.  :)  So I'm here to give an update on what I, and some other folks,
have been working on.
 
Some Red Hatters had a meeting here at Red Hat this afternoon to talk
about the "free music" roadmap as we see it.  Lots of baby steps in a
number of directions.  

These were the action items that fell out.  The owners are Redhatters and
are listed in (parens) after each action item.  All of us could use any
help you'd like to offer.  

Here were the attendees at the meeting:
 
  * Luke Macken (lmacken at redhat.com)
  * Steve Salevan (ssalevan at redhat.com)
  * Adrian Likins (alikins at redhat.com)
  * Myself (gdk at redhat.com)

And the action items:
 
* JAMENDO STREAMS IN RHYTHMBOX FOR FC6 (lmacken).  It should be relatively
simple to get Rhythmbox, default music player in FC6, to stream Ogg music
out of the box.  One of the strongest sources for free Ogg content is
jamendo.com.  (Laurent, we may ask for your help here.)
 
* TORRENT SERVER FOR JAMENDO OGG FILES (gdk).  The nice thing about 
Jamendo is that it allows not just streaming, but actual download of files 
through BitTorrent.  We're going to invest in some hardware to help 
support with Ogg support: a system with lots of disk and decent bandwidth.  
(This server will probably also help us with the Live CD project.)
 
* RHYTHMBOX PLUG-IN EXPERIMENTATION (lmacken, ssalevan).  Jamendo has some 
great xmlrpc calls.  We'd like to hook into them so that Rhythmbox can 
show artist info -- maybe even in the notifications field for Rhythmbox.  
Like, say, where an artist will be playing, or where you can buy a 
t-shirt.  Mostly, we'll just be playing around to figure out how this will 
work.  Luke/Steve, it might be worth finding some CVS space in Fedora-land 
if other people are interested in this.
 
* TALK TO CCMIXTER FOLKS ABOUT OGG (gdk).  How much of the content 
uploaded to ccMixter is available in Ogg format?  Not much.  We'd like to 
see if we can fix this.
 
* TALK TO MAGNATUNE FOLKS ABOUT OGG (gdk).  Same goes for Magnatune.  I 
know they're working on making their content available as Ogg files, but a 
little nudge in the right direction might help.  :)
 
* GET TAMTAM RUNNING IN OUR LAB (alikins).  The OLPC folks have actual 
code working in the Tamtam project, woo hoo!  It's based on gtk2+csound.  
The screenshots look cool, but I'd like to see it in action.  We're going 
to try to get it running here.  This is going to be a music production 
application that will be available to millions of kids in the next year, 
if all goes well -- meaning it will have more users than Garage Band.  
It's potentially A Big Deal.
 
* GET CSOUND APPROVED FOR FEDORA EXTRAS (gdk).  As part of the effort to 
get Tamtam working on as many systems as possible, I'm begging our Fedora 
Extras community to review the csound package that Dan Williams has 
submitted.  I am willing to bribe people, by the way.  :)
 
* FIND A FAMOUS MUSICIAN FOR FEDORA STARTUP SOUND (all).  Eno and Fripp 
have dedicated their talents to the Windows startup sounds.  Surely we can 
find some freedom-lovin' music superhero to do some work for the good 
guys.  :)
 
* INSTALL CCHOST IN RH COLO (lmacken).  We want to learn a lot more about 
the award-winning ccHost application, especially as a potential backend 
for people using Fedora (or one day OLPC) to collaborate on musical 
projects.  Luke is going to get that running for us.
 
* MUSICIAN SURVEY (gdk, ssalevan).  We've been trying to figure out some 
questions to ask musicians about how they work.  Steve is program director 
for a college radio station, so he's going to take a strong role here.
 
So that's what we're working on.  Any questions or offers of help, send 
them to the list.  :)

--g

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