I was thinking about a rather complex addon to amaroK that would probably increase its use and increase the listnerbase of many indie musicians. Here\'s how it works: Artists give audioscrobbler or someone else (possibly just p2p\'d, but I\'m not sure how it could be made to work) music files that they think are 100% kosher for listeners to download and listen to at their leisure. This could be in the form of single tracks (with the idea being that artists give away what they think are their best tracks and thus users buy albums) or whole albums, it doesn\'t really matter.

Then, those files are given some sort of metadata identifier that is easily findable on Gnutella. Then, incorporate a gnutella engine (or a plugin to one) into amaroK.

Based on the (free or non-free) music you lise/Indie artists who sound like K-os. Everyone knows that there\'s a whole ton of really great independently produced artists out there, but few really have the time and energy to stay \"in the know\" about the indie scene. I know that I don\'t. ten to, Audioscrobbler/amaroK is proud to present you with a whole bunch of free tracks that you should like-- all you have to do is click here to download them. You could also have autodownloads for Free music that\'s similar to your favorite non-free artists. For example, I really like K-os, a canadian rapper. I\'d love to find out about Free/Indie artists who sound like K-os, so I have amaroK (or whatever app this could end up being) automatically download artists that sound like K-os. Everyone knows that there\'s a whole ton of really great independently produced artists out there, but few really have the time and energy to stay \"in the know\" about the indie scene. I know that I don\'t.

This could also work in the case of artists who like to give away their live shows, like phish. Hey, you liked that set from 85? Well, other people who really liked that set really liked this one from 92!

The beauty of this is that this program will be F/OSS, giving users F/OSM (Free/Open Source Music). Open source music is definately out there to be had, and some of it\'s pretty darn good, too! While I can\'t remember the name of the record label at the time, I remember meeting some people from it at the NEURO conference in Munich in 2004.

This sort of a thing would have an instant market (people who want free music) and it would promote the ideology of Open Source-- and in a way that many people can readily understand-- hey, I can\'t get sued for using this P2P program? Sign me up!

I know it\'s a complicated idea, and that this could almost definately be construed as program bloat, so maybe it\'s not the perfect thing to add-in to amaroK, but I\'m quite sure it\'s a good idea. The only thing I\'m not sure of is C/C++.

Now that I\'m done with my lengthy post, I\'d love to hear what you all have to say about my idea!

Post edited by: faddat, at: 2005/04/23 06:49

Post edited by: faddat, at: 2005/04/23 20:56

How about http://irate.sourceforge.net/ ?? It uses a similar framework to offer downloads of freely available music.