I do applaud their blackout on January 18, 2012.

Every Category in this blog system is applied to this post, therefore, and every TAG … it’s just not reasonable to list every tag, so I’ve used ‘Everything’ and ‘Nothing’ as my TAGS.

It was “LIKE” new, but that wasn’t a problem, until now. Suddenly the channels displayed were weird. It was like years before, names of channels, the graphics for the channel name, totally Fred, Ethel, Lucy, etc. plus Hair Nation was now Boneyard XL, and lots of weird channels out of place. Yes, pre-change 2008. Why? It just reverted to that junk for some reason. Weird, weird, weird.

Last week I had it on and it was fine. Yesterday I brought it out to our vehicle for our trip to Costco and when it turned on it was like, WHAT IS THAT???? What is going ON!!!!!

I tried to load the siriusxm site on my HTC Evo, but the channel list function wouldn’t work for me.

Later I got out my HTC Evo VIEW tablet when we were in a restaurant and loaded the site, and it worked great. Nice. Huh, the channel listings here are exactly what they were last week and for a long time before.

I tried to login to be able to “refresh” my radio, but I couldn’t remember the right credentials and wasn’t able to then.

Once home it was late, and I was tired. So the first thought I had of it this morning I got the XM radio and also my husbands old one, put each one on my speaker dock and his had the right channel names. Mine, same as night before. Ugh.

So I went down to my laptop pc and logged-in to our xm account. I refreshed my xm radio and eventually all the channel graphics began changing to what they should be. Not as pretty, mind you, interesting fact, but they were the old hat usuals I’ve become accustomed to.

Any how, it’s another of those things, nothing feels worse than when it goes wrong. Like something fully trustworthy will never again be fully trustworthy. You’ll always be looking at it ready for it to do it again.

I like XM for 1st Wave primarily and Octane, Boneyard, Hair Nation, Classic Vinyl, Classic Rewind, Lithium, etc.

I also like Symphony Hall, Pops, Met Opera.

I used to like MLB on XM, but no more. MLB.com has better options for listening if you want that, which we have subscriptions to that all the time, so why do I need XM for that? Don’t, especially when I am FORCED to listen to the home game feed of the game I want to listen to. A couple of years it was home or away, choice. Now it’s not.

I have listened to Whatever Martha in the past, a lot in the past, not really for a year or so. That’s the only part of “best of sirius” that I liked, one stinkin’ show. I used to watch it on TV (Fine Living channel.) That’s bye-bye and I haven’t ever sought it out in another outlet. I like it, but I’m fine without it.

So how it goes with XM and me, since I primarily use the colored split screen unit I don’t go into the “thinking” aspect of it much. I know basically that 1st Wave is ch. 33, and everything else is near there, except for classical is in the 70′s and that’s that. I don’t know all the numbers for all the channels I like, I know their names and looks of their graphics. When my unit pulled out the pre-change look on me, I was fumbling around trying to make sense of it, (hoping somehow that The Torch was back) in any case I made a chart of things and it was out of order, but the odd old names were some of the newer named channels on those out of place channels.

It was just as surreal as something can get. That gives me a full reason to finally ditch them eventually. I was so mad when they stop airing The Torch. I loved that channel. (Any “Christian” channels they have are totally lame IMHO.)

On my Win 7 laptop I sometimes have a Rocketfish Bluetooth dongle installed in a USB port. My phone connects fine for file transfer (which is all I have done with it.)

Today I decided to get the audio on my laptop into my iMT525 device. It paired easily, but then, Win 7 said there were no device drivers for it. Couldn’t find any, nothing anywhere anywhere at all. In Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Sound/Manage audio devices/Playback there was no iMT525 listed.

Messing around, there are Broadcom drivers on my laptop that are associated with the Bluetooth dongle, but nothing more than that, they didn’t do anything.

Win 7 Compatibility doesn’t have my Soundblade in it at all as iMT525 (as it shows itself in bluetooth connectivity).

The manual for the Soundblade doesn’t help with connecting to PC’s, up to you to figure it out, there are no drivers on the devices side of it.

I knew I had to figure out how to use the Bluetooth dongle on my Win XP desktop computer to work with the keyboard and mouse it came with some time ago. I had to find a better broadcom bluetooth stack than was on the disk it came with. Eventually I found and got it working, and it had tons of ability for connecting many devices via bluetooth.

So I finally did that today with my Win 7 computer. Seach “Broadcom Bluetooth Stack” and it should be the first link in Google.

Here is the link as it shows today.

Make sure your Bluetooth dongle is plugged into your computer.

Run the file you download to install the updated bluetooth stack. It takes awhile, let it do it’s work, when it gets close to done, for me at least, it was like magic, my iMT525 in Devices and Printers had no troubleshooting icons on it anymore. Things fired up from the system tray about audio, and more, drivers installed. It was awesome.

Now, to get it going I had to open Control Panel/Hardware and Sound/Sound/Manage audio devices/Playback — and make that iMT525 the default speaker. When I’m connected to the iMT525, it works. When I’m not connected via bluetooth to the iM525 then my laptop speakers work.

There maybe little things I didn’t write here that you’ll have to work through if you are trying to get something to work with bluetooth like I was. Overall, just forget about Plug & Play for this, get the Broadcom drivers from online and THEN you’ll be able to get whatever it is you want going, easily.

mSpot couldn’t ever get my stuff uploaded. It took over night to get like 10 songs. It took all day, then all night, to get a few songs. I deleted everything from mSpot, and re-did the info as to what to upload, and it wasn’t any different. Now I have a large library of music, but it’s not that big really. Also it’s not encoded in anything but .wma or .mp3 and neither at a very high rate (it bothers me, but less than making higher rate rips that take up tons of space, so I live with not quite up to snuff, but good enough to get more on my player, which never made a difference anyhow with playing music at any high or low rate with it. Good earphones worked well enough also. Whatever. I digress.

I’m waiting for the $$ to put together a new desktop computer. On this future computer I was going to re-rip all of my music on higher settings. I wanted a cloud music service to be able to listen on a device that way (therefore not needing huge Micro-SD cards just for the MUSIC anymore.)

All I have ever wanted was a connected device and a way to use it with MY music.

Enter Android. I got an Android phone in September 2010 and very shortly dreamed of what it could be for me if only …

Google Cloud Music would happen.

I found a leaked Honeycomb music player, found the .apk file for it, installed it on my phone. That’s the one that also installed “Jumper Test” and that had a music sync thing that worked, it seemed, though I never tried it without my Micro-SD card installed with the music still on it. The app was nice, but not everything that should have been was implemented. Basically it would play my music sideways, and that made me happy, plus it scrobbled.

In any case, recently I looked for an update, and found an updated version. I installed that .apk (had to uninstall the above one before it would install) and the app was similar, but better, yet had no “Jumper Test” and the “add google account” area for syncing music was “empty” … but otherwise the regular player was nice, worked awesome with the music on my phone.

Just yesterday, early morning I was on my computer and found more information, that Google was unveiling the Cloud Music that very day … So I got over to music.google.com and requested an invite. And I’m still waiting. It’s been over a day. I used to Tweet about how much I wanted this. I wish to try it out so badly since I really want this, now use a SoundBlade with my phone to listen to music via bluetooth.

I have the official 3.0 Google Music app on my phone now. It’s the same as that last one I tried, minus all the streaming stuff in the menus. I mean, it’s not in the menus at all. I’m wondering if it’ll magically appear once my invite arrives?

On my Google Account it’s there, but I can’t access the service yet. It’s in my Dashboard as “Music by Google Beta” with “Manage Music Library” and “PrivacyPolicy” links. I’m anxious to have access to this, and part of that is my curiosity to see if something is there already, from the Jumper Test days of the previous few months.

Also, on my HTC Evo I have “Listen To” use with this app. That’s a great step ahead. My basic need though is for that to be cleaned up. If I say “Listen To … Wasteland” if there is other noise around me it asks me if I meant Listen To Wasteland and many other options.

If there isn’t other noise it loads the
“Listen To Wasteland”
“Go Cancel”
window, then the music app with the search field filled in with “Wasteland” and the song category is shown with the song listed below it, and the keyboard is popped up. But, the song then plays, without showing the Now Playing screen (which I find highly annoying) without me touching anything.

Right now I tried another

The Cure has an album, Disintegration. There is also a song on that album with the same name.

I touched “Voice Search” and said “Listen To … Disintegration”

“Listen To
Disintegration”
“Go Cancel”
Window Loads
Then the music app with “Disintegration” in the search field and the Abum category showing the album on top, with the song below it. The keyboard is also open, of course. Without touching anything, the album begins playing. Yes, the first song in the album, then the next, etc.

How to distinguish you want the song, not the album, or Vise Versa? I don’t know.

I really wish it would play what you want when you ask for something specifically, without the search junk showing, just play it and show me the Now Playing screen.

Because of this I am now more into the idea of using Playlists, naming them with quippy unique names. It’d be nice to have the Instant Mix thing of Google Music. It’s not in the Music app I installed yesterday. I can make a new playlist, but just a regular one. Oh well. I know the video they have for the new service shows using the web browser version to do that, but I did read the info for the Android version and it mention doing it in the app (but you must be online to do it, hence why I can’t access it though I am online, I’m not allowed access to Music Beta …. )

I just want a cleaned up way of dealing with what loads with Listen To, and what to say to get this or that implemented better. Accessibility to the cloud storage in order to easily have any of my music at my beck and call without having to “load it” on every device!!!!!!

Like I have the new Duran Duran album. I still haven’t gotten it on to my phone, and I just don’t feel like connecting it to my computer, accessing it like a drive, dragging or syncing anything now. Just waiting for full implementation of what it should be like to live in the 21st Century!

Today I decided to start Rockboxutility when I connected my sansa e280 to the computer for my qtscrobbler cli submission (scrobble my listens to last.fm.) I looked at themes there, and noticed nothing new in dates changed for any. So I just installed the newest rock box stable, 3.7.1 and disconnected, rebooted my sansa, then went to theme settings and changed some things around, no go. Still the same.

So I then:

I had to reboot my player again, but this time, themes work. Now album art displays on any themes that use it, and While Playing Screens including graphic track playing status line work correctly now. (both those things were really messed up under my 3.6 and other people’s too, which info I found via looking online, as well as working with my daughter’s Sansa Fuze player here too.)

In 2010 when I had the initial trouble I did delete themes and install them again, but nothing worked better with doing that. Good that I can play with themes properly now!

I followed the instructions on the Wiki about it. It wasn’t as straightforward as that, since I use Windows Vista. Most of the instructions are geared towards Linux users. I got the correct Python install for Windows. That was easy enough. Then when that was installed I had to use cmd to set the path to Python, to make it easier to use. That much I got easily.

Then came the understanding of how to run a Python script, which I eventually did get going, the lastscrape.py which is the first part of the job, the getting of the information from last.fm. That was a bit heady, all that info streaming in the small black cmd window. I was mostly frazzling myself over what was to come, the worst part, the “deleting duplicate entries” deal. I haven’t done this sort of work before, and doing it from instructions not really meant for Windows users was frustrating, and searching the web for help, as directed from the libre.fm wiki, had me still not knowing what to do. I finally gave up on that angle and searched for a Python script to do the job. I found something, and I fiddled around with getting it to run, and finally did. It re-ordered the results, but that didn’t seem to matter, as everything uploaded fine, but I can’t tell on my profile if the dates go back to 2005 or not.

My biggest struggle after the duplicates thing was to get import.py to work. I ended up having to type the full path to the script and to the file, I guess whatever I did in the beginning I made work to make it easier then, but that was pre-29,313 tracks dumping from last.fm, I hadn’t written it all down, as I SHOULD have, thus I can’t be sure as to what I did that was different beforehand.

I did get the import.py to work though, it went fine for 7,386 tracks, then errored. I found a blank line in the file right there. The only thing I had on hand to open the file and jump to a specific line was Firefox (view source) where the “jump to line …” command is available. It worked out fine. I copied the remainder and put it into a new text file, and gave it a new name, then started the Python import script again. It works for 16,198 tracks, then hiccupped again, but this time I couldn’t find anything in the file where it stopped, that seemed to indicate anything … so whatever. I just did what I did before, copied the remainder of the file that wasn’t uploaded yet into a new file with a new name and re-started the Python import script. That part was 5,729 tracks.

The total tracks that uploaded to Libre.fm were 29,313. The dump included a couple of days of multiscrobbling, so I deleted those from the top of the dump before deleting dupes and importing it to Libre.fm.

Overall:

That’s a difference of 458 tracks. I’m not sure if it’s real or not. Absolutely my top several artist show the biggest discrepancies, on last.fm my The Cure listens is at 4,057 while the same group at libre.fm is 3,985 listens, for instance.

I figure I’ll make a comparison chart for myself tomorrow. It’s just one of those weird things I like doing, charting things. I used to make index cards of my last.fm stuff as it changed week by week. In the old days I’d keep lists of songs on the radio, and their ranking with the weekly top whatever shows. It’s cool to look at data that changes. I guess it’s not everyone’s thing, to be so into it, I have to admit that I’m overly into it. FWIW, so I’m tyring to push myself into some kind of coding stuff, learn something new & useful on the computer, as I’ve been wanting to, but just haven’t. This little exercise in Python scripting use had awakened my PHP understanding wishes, my desire to use SSH into my websites but haven’t done it, setting up a dual-boot with Linux on the second boot portion … being able to write programs for solutions to things I’d like is what I want, to make a nice script that would take my rockbox .scrobbler.log and submit it to as many services as I want easily. That would be great. How about things to aide putting music on a player, moving certain data, solving wishes and desires in how things work. Not waiting for others to do it.

I’m there. I guess so since I put myself on libre.fm the day I truly looked at it, and got myself multiscrobbling that very day, and just a couple of days later I’ve gotten my data moved to the new service, while it remains at last.fm, I can multiscrobble as long as I want to. I just need to get my rockbox problem solved, so that I can multiscrobble. I made myself not look into that, to write this tonight instead. Which is good, since tomorrow some of the fuzzy details right now would be only even fuzzier.

I was struggling around the ‘net, and I can say I know I did modify my “hosts” file as described on one page about getting it going (my mind is overloaded, I’m not sure which page that was now but it was simply about putting the audioscrobbler ip into windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file) and I did notice that WMP tracks had scrobbled to libre.fm at some point. Either before that or after. But the point being it still works, and I un-modified the ‘hosts’ file and it’s still working. Thus far. FWIW. I realize now that the first place I found about “how to scrobble to libre.fm” was that Turtle page. It was beyond me what to do about it, I did also see the Client Support page and was still in WMP mode, so I was looking for a way to stick with WMP (since I have Vista and use Media Center some, but I’m not stuck with having to.)

During all that I started to consider Songbird (I have a slight recollection of downloading it in an earlier version before, like a very early version, and totally ditching it) as a media player since they seemingly are on the way up, as was Thunderbird & Firefox when I switched to them (so long ago, it seems.) I downloaded it last night and couldn’t make it do what I hoped it would. The Last.fm plugin alone wouldn’t even work.

I found more info today after searching more and more. I changed something in the Songbird config file to not challenge things it thought weren’t compatible, and had it successfully install an older last.fm plugin that was modified to scrobble to libre.fm.

Then I looked at the Client Support page and understood it fully, though I had looked at it before, just wasn’t learned enough about it yet. I had Songbird, took out all the last.fm/libre.fm anything that I’d installed in it, then loaded in the order from the Client Support page about Multiscrobbling with Songbird: the libre.fm modified one, then the other one linked that will send scrobbles directly to the official Last.fm Client (i.e. the one WMP sends scrobbles to.) I have “always” had the Official Last FM client installed, which is an essential part of Multiscrobbling with Songbird.

I now have two online profiles, and am scrobbling to both.

I ponder over how I can get my last.fm data and import it to libre.fm now, but it’s python scripty so I haven’t sat down to tackle it yet. I don’t know what to do about it, and also I do want something that will send my scrobbles from Rockbox to both services, and if I had to pick one it isn’t a choice, since last.fm is the only thing I have to submit to (I currently use qtscrobbler) so both these things have me not sure about where to go from here, for now.

I have thought of finding another something but hadn’t found what I wanted, happy enough on my end with Last.fm, how I use it, but definitley if I can have a more independent online profile, I’m all for it, but I do not want to leave the last 4+ years of accumulated listening data lost, nor do I want to move all that and then listen only to via libre.fm scrobbling, but then where do my Rockbox scobbles go … I really do like Last.fm, listener pages, being a top listener, or recent one, or something, but some artist pages are so bogged down bieng so popular, I’m lucky to show up on any of them ever, nearly always show up on something more independent, but what’s it matter. Thing is, in May 2005 Audioscrobbler was one thing, then they were Last.fm, then they were … are now but are not but … I’m looking for a way to make it work out for the best.

Thing is, I got two of my children into Rockbox & Last.fm recently, so this is something I’d like to see happen, switching happily, for good, soon.

Stryper was fantastic too. It’s the 3rd time I’ve seen them, which isn’t as much as I would like it to have been. My first was in 1988 Sept. in Disney World “Night of Joy” event. My friend and I went just for them, though I’d been to other NoJ events before that. That year it was precisely Stryper that I wanted to see and that was that.

I never did have friends interested in Stryper like I was, and being an introvert wasn’t one to find ways to get to concerts unless people I already knew would want to go, the internet not being a way to connect to others back then … sigh.

So I went through the mid-80′s with that one Stryper attendance, and then finally in 2005 I got to go again, when they released a new album and toured again after a hiatus. This year they released another album, and I wasn’t able to get it until just this month. I didn’t listen to it a lot, but loved it the first listen I gave it. I didn’t plan on attending the concert, things being tight of late, but mentioned that the concert that I knew would be in Atlanta had changed from what I last knew and it was to be that coming Wednesday. I said something about it to my husband and he initiated interest in seeing if there were tickets available. There were.

So we had a date. It was tiring, but fun. It was exhausting, but worth it.

I have some horrible cell phone pictures that I have to sort through, tag, and load up somewhere online, so I’ll make a Page here about it when I get that done.