Based on what I’ve seen on this site and what I see on Technorati there about audioscrobbler … it seems there are at least a *few* people interested, more like “crazed” to see what they have up their sleeves for audioscrobbler and lastfm.

It’s not just the service, what it’ll be upgraded to, but similar to what one of the blog-sters listed on the tag page mentioned, it looks fantastic just to peak at their current index page. It’s really sweet. I’m just a regular audioscrobbler user. I’ve not been with them THAT long. I love what they offer for free though. I love that you can donate anything and have more. I’ve yet to do that, I have been waiting. The wait may soon be over. At least that’s what the energizing vibes building higher and higher off this silly wait are doing to me.

I’m psyched up. I solved my DRM License problem with MusicMatch tracks. I didn’t solve the overall “activation” problem with them, but I did solve my ability to play the three tracks I bought from them.

Through the WMP store option they allow 5 PC to be activated. If you deactivate a computer you can never play a file from Musicmatch on that computer again.

I had two computer activated. Through sheer coincidence both computers went kablpunk in the same month.

One, the laptop, totally just not useable ever again. No pre-knowledge of hardware failure, since it was “a freak four-year-old-boy juice experiement” that caused the failure of the computer. So as an activated musicmatch computer, it’s history, I can’t use it, nor deactivate it.

Two, the desktop, the previous motherboard and harddrive worked one day, then the next day they wouldn’t work. So I did stuff and couldn’t get the computer to come on. We could upgrade pieces, so we did upgrade the Power Supply, Motherboard, and Processor. I had no choice but to do that. I was unable, therefore, to “deactivate” the previous setup before it refused to work. I had no way of knowing it wouldn’t work when I left it that one evening. DH turned it off, and in the morning it wouldn’t post. History that setup was then, and I had my second “activated PC” with musicmatch go “unavailable” to me in a short time space.

That computer then, upgraded, wouldn’t play my tracks from musicmatch, it “couldn’t get the license” for either of the three files.

Musicmatch never helped me. I’m still waiting for a reply from my initial reply to their first answer to my problem. Their first answer was no help, just Q’s … urg. So now I sent them another help, asking them to just delete my other two activations, I can’t do that, and that I helped myself with the rest of the problem:

Go here, read this page at MS about “licenses for your media files are corrupted …:

support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;810422&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

It’s DRM related. Basically, if you only have musicmatch tracks with licenses, forget about the article, just do what I did, find your DRM folder, which for Win XP is in “All Users” and is a protected file, so you have to allow yourself access to it via Tools, File Options …, View and go down to Hidden Files and Folder and choose the radio button for “Show Hidden Files and Folders” and then go down further and uncheck “Hide Protected System Operating Files”. Click “Apply” and “OK” then the DRM folder should be viewable.

Right-click on it and name it DRMbackup.

Then go here:

drmlicense.one.microsoft.com/Indivsite/en/indivit.asp

You HAVE to go there in Internet Explorer. So if you have Firefox or something, you might have the View in IE right-click context extention, that’s useful here. If you don’t have it, make a note to get it installed later for other usefulnesses. This time then just copy the URL and paste it into IE and go there. The button to “upgrade” will be active, just click it and wait for it to be done.

Then open WMP and click to play one of those dumb musicmatch tracks.

It’ll aquire the license, might want you to input your password for musicmatch, maybe your user name too (which is your registered email address with them.)

You have to OK a screen to activate your PC, it tells you how many are already activated.

Immediately the license is updated and you are good to go. All other tracks update their licenses when you click to play them immediately. (All this contingent with being online, DSL connection preferred.)

Maybe the shortcut for this is to just go to the second URL in IE and do that part only, maybe you don’t have to read and do the previous linked page. I read through it and I did it “just because you never know”. No situation existed for me to ‘backup’ licenses, or reinstate them. So it was only a shortcut through it to the DRM folder to rename it and get it out of the way.

This help was buried in the microsoft site. It wasn’t easy to find. I will say that windows media player threw an error when it couldn’t download the license, and the web page for more info had no clue what that error meant, of course. I wish so much that they could link to REAL HELP like the actual files I turned up finally, as suggestions, or at least a menu to search through that I would have found them in.

It’s precisely annoying of them to have so much info to sort through, and to have to go and find stuff on their site, or in the support feature search on Win XP. Real-time help for issues without having to “call” someone, would be nice. Automatic connection if you ask for help with an error, to the right links that you can use to resarch help you actually need. Pie in the sky stuff, it is.

Anyhow, my three little tracks are back, I can play them now. I only want to get them to release the other 2 activated PC’s from my account, I can’t do that, and I’m not so sure they will do that. I know they can. Of course they can. It’s just WILL they.

I also found this article Copyright Crackdown, posted on Aug. 1, 2005, about licensing and protections on products that are coming out from Sony BMG and others. It’s an article worth reading for anyone who buys music online as DRM tracks, or transfers music to devices, copies CD’s, even just plays CD’s in their own computer. It’s an article side-related to my own post here.

I’m glad to have a computer to use again. I’ve been catching up on some things I hadn’t done in awhile and now have found myself the only one up, everyone else gone to bed without totally telling me. It’s been awhile since I’ve had the computer like this, and now I’m stuck down in Frank’s “office” since it’s the only logistical place in which I can access an ethernet connection right now.

The biggest downer to this whole experience is that I have three “songs” I downloaded previously from MusicMatch in Window’s Media Player. One on my Vaio laptop and two on this desktop.

In order to listen to the songs on any computer you have to have that PC “activated” to work with Music Match’s licensing.

:rolleyes:

It’s nothing but trouble for me now. I can’t get a license for my three songs since I have messed up licensing with the upgrade of the mobo and processor, I can not deactivate my old Vaio, since I can’t get onto the computer anymore. Music Match lets you have 5 PC activated with their service. So I have two unavailable Activations which I can’t deactivate nor activate.

I sent the tech support an email through their form system, I surely hope they solve my problem, but I am not holding out hope.

I want my access to my songs back, it’s only three though, and I can get them again if I must. I don’t know though if Music Match is going to work with my new computer setup, though it’s still the same stuff, just new hardware. Even Microsoft dufeses insisted on “reactivating” my desktop computer once I logged on successfully after the upgraded hardware worked. At least it worked, whereas Music Match says “just click on one of your songs that you got from us and the license aquisition will automatically start” or “you’ll be able to activate your PC as soon as you play one of the songs you got from us” Nope. Error! Can’t … Urg.

I’m glad I only got three songs, and that I have no plans to download whole albums and never bunches of songs. Licensing is for the birds. Buy the CD’s. It’s less of a hassle. Even just for one song. I wasn’t liking the agreement in the first place, but figured “for this one song and the occasional odd song, OK, it’ll workout”. But now I see what happens when you have computers crash and never revive, and when computers crash and need new parts and come back to life but “not as they were before” and this nightmarish stuff begins. Augh!

I’m not too happy. I was working on my websites behinds the scenes since Frank is out for the day and I have his laptop to work on fulltime. I had to do stuff to find some passwords that I’d forgotten and drag stuff off of my old laptop harddrive connected via USB external box enclosure we got for it after my laptop died. So I was engrossed and disconnected to physicalness in a way that I hadn’t been in a long while now, not having 100% available computer access, until today.

So it goes on in the story that Asa started causing trouble with a watergun downstairs, and I went down to referee, and decided then to also go out and check the hens. I determined then that no one had given the hens their feed, nor watered them, just that Victoria had given them the leftover Au Gratin Scalloped Potatoes I made last night (from scratch, of course.) They’d been forgotten on the table overnight, not put away, so to the hens the taters went.

It was late morning, maybe after Noon already. I opened the back door and called for Russell to help me, to water them. I went out, the sun was so bright mixed with hazy clouds, everything was super bright, and the next moment I was falling, falling, falling thinking I’d twisted or broken my ankle. Not sure which, but one seemed a surety. The step down is from the house with no step to intercede with the ground grade being quite low right there. We’ve planned all along to put a patio there and never have done anything about it. We had the deck access to the yard up to the point this year when we took those deck French Doors out of the kitchen, so our only access to the backyard from the house has since been the downstairs slab access, which is higher than 1 whole step, maybe more like 2, and I just lazy-daisy went out and fell instantly. My right foot hurt so bad, but me being a high-pain-threshold-type-person, I can’t tell you how it felt compared to anyone elses ankle twisting event. In any case I drug myself in and had Russell help me up and open the door, etc. I felt my ankle first, and couldn’t tell if it was broken or not, so stood on it and held my weight OK. It was the walking on it that sends the splintery pain shooting up. Still does. It aches, aches, gently and deeply, it isn’t puffing up though. It’s not been that long, an hour or half-an-hour more than that. I can feel it sort of hot-to-trott as I sit, and upon standing and moving, then it gets going. Going down steps is alright, up the steps is another thing. I had to go to the bathroom a bit ago, was downstairs and the pain thoughts had me use the basement bathroom, which I never use. :rolleyes:

I had to go upstairs after that though, that’s two flights of stairs that are about 8 steps or so each. The first flight hurt a bit, the second I ended up sitting down and scooting up backwards. I know that if it’s slightly hurt it’ll just get worse by using my foot. I don’t relish it getting worse. I have three younsters that’ll get away with murder possibly if so, they are super-duper-crazy children, of course, being my children.

So after my twisting event UPS showed up with a box for me. It was my BIOS chip that I’d ordered. I limped down to install it, and had to struggle with the old chip a bit and standing on my twisted foot wasn’t so bad, but after awhile it started aching more and all that. So it’s up and down, it hurts more then not as much, but I can say I have never, ever had a twist that was bad, and only once maybe a sort-of-twist, and this is way worse feeling than that one.

In Gatlinburg over the 4th of July I trip upwards on a step that interceded with the sidewalk, I wasn’t looking down and smacked it hard with the top of my left foot, and that left a deep bruise that really hurt, but it didn’t inhibit my walking ability, just made me wince to put on shoes that brushed it. It’s mostly better now, but now I have a painful issue, not emergency, just bad enough to make me really mad it happened and have to deal with it not knowing for sure how bad it is, maybe something is cracked, maybe just lightly twisted, but so well done that my foot is not LOOKING different, to me, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad news.

All I know is that Frank will be home, later more so than earlier, he has a Client dude in town today and tomorrow, and won’t be able to help me though. I had something planned for dinner, but the details of it needed me to do something earlier, and this foot twist thing has me offline from my plans, so now I have to figure out a secondary thing and still finish off the soaking beans that should have been cooked already.

The good thing about this is I have been prompting Russell and Victoria to help me more in the kitchen. I actually have spent the last week or so, when home, having them look for things, bring me things, do parts of things as independently as I can get them to, and they have done well. So now I do find myself in need of their help, and hopefully they’ll do what I need. I don’t need much, just help getting things together and fixing it up, so that I don’t have to stand up and walk around, just stand some, let them do all the moving about.

The secondary cause of my unhappiness is my desktop. The BIOS chip that came is installed, but still there is nothing but lights on and fans on, no beeps, no post, no video. Urggh. We’ll get a new battery. Maybe that’s the whole problem? I may be naive, but thought it’d post, just not save BIOS settings, if the battery was dead, so then every time restarting would mean resetting. In any case, it won’t hurt to get a new battery. After that I don’t know. Maybe I’ll return the motherboard. I sure don’t have all the tools I’d need to test it. I can still take it all apart and test it out of the case to see if it runs or not, or does anything different, take off the processor, everthing. Just it’s so bothersome to do with out a good work space, and the system is dependant on a big monitor CRT type, so it’s not easily moved around. Not at all with my foot as it is now either.

Lighter note: I have a LP-Record player now too, so at least I can spin the records I hadn’t heard in so very long. Huey Lewis, for example, SPORTS. One of my old favorite albums.

Frank wanted to get something for me, just because, and he did today. A Rave MP Arc 2.5, it’s a stylish little MP3 player, 2.5 Gig hard drive type … he got it at Costco. The package included a headset, not just the “earbuds” as it’s packaged online and found elsewhere.

It’s made with an Li-ion battery little thing. So that means it’s re-chargeable, like a newer cellphone, for example. It needs to charge for 5 hours at first, then it can be uplugged and play for 10+hours or so straight. Nice thing is, as it’s initial charging is happening, you can connect it to your computer and load it up. That’s great.

It uses mp3′s and wma’s, WindowsMediaPlayer files, in other words, and that’s primarily a good thing IMO, since that’s what I use, WMP10. I like it best of all the “regular” players out there. So I loaded everything I’ve listened to in the last month on my computer, onto the mp3 player, from one of the WMP10 auto-playlists.

I’m not sure how it’ll work, but we’ll see. I am listening to music from it right now. It has great EQ settings and there are many ways to listen to the music, via artist, album, track, genre, etc.

I am very excited to have this mp3 player. I’ve wanted one for quite awhile now, and it’s cool that the time is now. So I can bring my songs to bed, in the van, in the yard, etc.

I use Audioscrobbler too, which is a free online service that aggregates the music you listen to. You have to have a plugin in your media player, and many are available for the various different players out there. So if you install a plugin and sign up on the site, you have a page that the data aggregates on, and weekly parts of it update to show top tracks and top artists for the previous week, and then there are accumulated top artists and top track lists, and total tracks, which are supposed to update more often, depending on many things right now. The service is going through some bumps right now, but I like it the near-month I’ve been using it. The thing I’m not sure about with my new mp3 player is, when I Sync it with my computer, will that send played track info to WPM and will the audioscrobbler plugin read that info and update online …? I’ve read others talking about a process that sounds like that, I’m not sure if it was WMP or another media player. In any case, it seems that it should be so that it’ll work out.

So this kind of mp3 player is different than a regular iPod, for example. It’s tiny and holds only 2.5 Gigs of data. Only. Ha. That’s a lot of music. About 83 hours, or so. iPod’s hold different, depending on which, but a 20 Gig is one iPod model, for example [they make much smaller ones too, but their main lines are large]. There are other types of players, iRiver, and Creative Labs make them as well, plus others yet. Rave is made by GoVideo. They’ve been around, and their player was just the one at Costco that we liked when we looked at them. We also had looked at Fry’s. Frank went alone to get this today, and did go to Fry’s again as well. The deal at Costco was good. This is the one I have, on the manufacturers website. It was $129 at Costco, and came with full-size mini-jack headphones as well as the rest of the usual package.

There are other players that have less hard drive space, some of them have expansion slots, SD cards, etc can hold music. I was looking at that type at Fry’s before. I wasn’t sure about it. So Frank made the decision. I am glad he did. 2.5 Gigs is big enough for now. The internal re-chargeable battery is a big deal nice thing too. So it’s a really cool present to get, something you wanted, but something that you weren’t sure of what brand or model exactly.

Thank you dearie!