LoudSon.gs : i <3 lyrics & code

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, music

LoudSon.gs is a website that I recently threw together in my attempt to tighten my strangle hold on teh interwebz (by the way, I’m losing)

LoudSon.gs is a lyrics website that focuses on hard to find album artwork and lyrics, mostly for punk, hardcore and emo bands, but the door is open for all types of music.

On the technical site, the site is built using PHP, MySQL, and is the first site that I have built using the codeIgniter framework. There is also some code integration with amazon for the album art, along with some other code wizardry.

But isn’t the internet full of lyric sites already?

Yeah, it is, but none of them specialize in the kind of music that speaks to me, so I built one.

The project started out as something personal for myself in 2004, then became part of notpopular.com in 2005. The original version lived for years at notPopular.com/lyrics, and was build out of some really bad php code and used a really sketch database. Instead of taking it down, I allow it to live on, but all new additions get added to LoudSon.gs.

I also decided to do some different things with this site. In an attempt to make the domain name a bit more memorable, I bought a non .com domain, sort of like del.icio.us. For easy, and for n00bz, you can also get to the site from LoudSongs.com. I also used some SES (search engine safe) URLS. The CodeIgniter framwork made that really easy to do.

Overall, this was probably one if the funnest projects I have worked on in a while. It’s a real labor of love on my part. The site takes time every day to maintain, the only way I will ever mak money from the site is throught the google ads.

Music is a huge part of my life. You can see the “about section” of LoudSon.gs to read more about that. LoudSon.gs sums up a lot about me, code, the internet and music.


100 Gigs of MP3s

By Josh Highland in iPhone, iPod, Josh's Rambling, music, software

It finally happened after I added the new Anniversary album, I have over 100 Gigs of music in my iTunes!

I’m very strict when it comes to my music. Minimum 192 kbps. I’ve made posts before about how to create good mp3 files through iTunes.

I’m just excited to break the 100 gig mark. My iPhone only holds 16 gig, but it’s nice to know I can listen to music for over 45 days and never hear the same song twice!

Excess, what’s that!

a picture is worth more then 300 words

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, music, semi-legal

My very good friend Steve Berg, challenged me to find a pre-release of Judas Priest’s new album,  Nostradamus, in under an hour.  The wager was simple, a 300 word or more post on the losers blog in honor of the winner. After searching high and low on the underside of the web, my usual music download locations were fruitless. I accept my lose Steve. Epic records has thwarted my efforts… this time.

Steve, we both agree that pictures are worth more then words, so I present the following picture in your honor.

LOLz!

Who is listening to your iTunes?

By Josh Highland in music, software, tutorials

sharing_itunes.gif

If you use iTunes while your computer is hooked to a network (work, dorms, and coffee shops are good examples), you can share your iTunes with other people. This feature has been around for a long time in iTunes. Something that isn’t included is the ability to see how many, and who is listening to your music.

I did a little bit of searching an found that iTunes uses port 3689 to share music on. Reaching back into my DOS days, I came up with this:

press the windows key + r
enter “cmd” and press enter
at the prompt type:
netstat | find “:3689”

you will get a listing of all the computers connected to your iTunes. A useless but interesting trick.

If you are running a mac, I’m sure you can do the same thing but with grep.