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Thursday March 29, 2007

Yakshaving a Copy of the SXSW 2007 Music

Last week Paul Lamere mentioned that there was a 3.1 torrent available at the SXSW website, containing 739 MP3s of the bands appearing at SXSW 2007.

From their website:

"The SXSW MUSIC AND MEDIA CONFERENCE showcases hundreds of musical acts from around the globe on over fifty stages in downtown Austin. By day, conference registrants do business in the SXSW Trade Show in the Austin Convention Center and partake of a full agenda of informative, provocative panel discussions featuring hundreds of speakers of international stature. SXSW Music 2007 took place March 14 - 18, 2007."

I'm always on the lookout for new music (one of the reasons why I normally listen to Radio Paradise while I work), so I thought wouldn't it be great to download a copy of all these files and create myself a DVD from them.

That's where the fun began. I ended up having to shave several yaks before I got what I wanted.

Yak shaving is a neologism which describes the act of performing seemingly unrelated and often annoying tasks which stand in the way of an ultimate goal. Often these tasks stack up on each other, where one task becomes impossible due to some obstacle, which leads to another unrelated task, yet another obstacle, and so on.

First I tried using Freeloader to download the torrent. This started off okay but after a couple hundred KB's had been downloaded the Freeloader window went blank and non-responsive. Freeloader is written in Python and uses the Python GTK+ wrappers for its graphics. I've been recently seeing similar occasional blankless from the Ubuntu update manager. That is also written in Python and uses GTK+. From my evaluation of a recent Freeloader bug report against Orca, I strongly suspect there is a major threading or deadlocking problem in these applications or in the way that pygtk works. I'd love to be proved wrong.

So I gave up on Freeloader and used Azureus instead. This Java application was one of the ones recommended by several people on the I Want a Linux/Unix Utility To... list. I initially tried this under latest Ubuntu Feisty on my 64bit AMD Ferrari. It didn't want to run:

$ ./azureus 
Starting Azureus...
Java exec found in PATH. Verifying...
Suitable java version found [java = 1.5.0_11]
Configuring environment...
Loading Azureus:
java -Xms16m -Xmx128m -cp "/home/richb/azureus/Azureus2.jar:/home/richb/azureus/swt.jar" -Djava.library.path="/home/richb/azureus" -Dazureus.install.path="/home/richb/azureus" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main ''
changeLocale: *Default Language* != English (United States). Searching without country..
changeLocale: Searching for language English in *any* country..
changeLocale: no message properties for Locale 'English (United States)' (en_US), using 'English (default)'
GTK Accessibility Module initialized
#
# An unexpected error has been detected by HotSpot Virtual Machine:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00002aaab58f4a7d, pid=2952, tid=47008737245952
#
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (1.5.0_11-b03 mixed mode)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libgobject-2.0.so.0+0x23a7d]
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as hs_err_pid2952.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
#
./azureus: line 112:  2952 Aborted                 (core dumped) ${JAVA_PROGRAM_DIR}java -Xms16m -Xmx128m -cp "${CLASSPATH}" -Djava.library.path="${PROGRAM_DIR}" -Dazureus.install.path="${PROGRAM_DIR}" org.gudy.azureus2.ui.swt.Main "$@"
Azureus TERMINATED.

I downloaded Azureus on a 32bit machine and it worked just fine. Apart from the fact that I had to reinitiate the connection several times and download speeds ranged from several hundred KB's per second to virtually zero. I've no idea if this is because this torrent is really popular or what. It's peer-to-peer file sharing, so I'm a little confused.

Anyway, I now have a directory containing 739 MP3 files. But it's on the wrong machine. My DVD burner is on the Ferrari. So I had to install an SSH server on my Ferrari:

$ sudo apt-get install openssh-server

I then had to Google to find out how to find out what the DHCP address was on my server ($ ifconfig eth0 - obvious wasn't it)? Finally I had them all copied over. Another fifteen minutes. Another smooth yak.

Now I want to make a DVD of them. I initially wondered whether I could make an audio DVD, just like you can make an audio CD. I thought it might be a silly question, but I asked two really smart people that I work with, and neither of them knew the answer, so that made me feel a little better. From googling around, I don't think you can do this. Or rather nobody does this because most "CD players" just take CD's. Again, I'd love to be proved wrong.

I decided to use k3b, another application from the "I want..." list that I'd never used before. I was mostly very impressed by k3b. The only thing I found missing was a quick way to select all 739 files and add them to the list of files to be burned. I ended up mouse clicking each one individually.

k3b took about 20 minutes to burn the DVD containing the 739 tracks. That's 44 hours and 35 minutes worth of new music to listen to!

I then imported then into rhythmbox and setup a random shuffle and started listening to them. This worked just fine on my Ferrari, but then I wanted to do the same back on the 32bit PC, because that has the really nice sound system. rhythmbox burped as it tried to import them. It threw up a popup telling me there was a problem. I dismissed that but it had starting importing the same track list again. I had to quit the application and restart it. It played the tracks just fine. This is a much older machine. I wonder whether the problem was due to the vintage of the DVD drive...

Anyway, I finally had what I wanted. There's some great music here! I highly recommend downloading and creating your own copy.

I just hope there is not so much Tibetan ox scaping when you do it.

[Technorati Tag: Music]