EDIT: The site is temporarily (or not) down atm. this post thus remains irrelevant until they are back online (if ever) and if they haven’t changed anything to the site (which i doubt though.. damn, they were quick on that one :/ …)

Have you heard about Musiquey?
If not, well, this site’s concept is quite similar to Skreemr. You can search for a song / artist then listen to the song, really cool

But hey, aren’t there download links for the songs on that screenshot?!

Well actually that’s almost right, except that they do not yet “officially” allow people to download songs.

This however does not change the fact that

Viewable media = downloadable media

:P furthermore, with a little tweaking you can even embed a song to your blog post / web page :P

well ready for the double tutorial? then ikuzo dattebayo! :P

I will show you how to:
(1) Embed a song from Musiquey on your blog / site
(2) Downloading songs from musiquey

Embedding a song on your webpage

Well this one is very simple in fact. Firstly you need to find the song or artist you want on the site.
For this tuto i will search for the band Colour of fire* as shown in the screenshot above

When you find the song you want to embed, click on “listen”. a window containing a flash player should pop up and you can listen to your song

Now you need the source of this page. just right click in the window (not on the image or flash player) and then on “view source” (or a similar option if not available)

you should obtain something like this:

<center><img src=”images/oplayer.jpg”>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js
“></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”player.swf
” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=”
player.swf“>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06- 497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3″>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object></center>

well the trick to embedding this particular player with the song is to modify this code in order to replace the relative links to the script and player (i underlined those above) by direct links. for instance,

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js”></script>

should become

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://musiquey.com/audio-player.js”></script>

Also, the first img tag can be removed :P

after editing all the relative links to point to musiquey.com, your source should look like the following:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=“http://musiquey.com/audio-player.js”></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://musiquey.com/player.swf” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=“http://musiquey.com/player.swf”>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06- 497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3″>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object>

(Again the links that have been modified are underlined here.)

And here goes with this piece of code you can embed any song from musiquey in here :P now we can get to the second part of the tuto, that is

Downloading from musiquey

Here it gets really easy

Similarly to the above procedures for embedding the player, when you find the song you want to download, click on “listen”. a window containing a flash player should pop up and you can listen to your song

Now you need the source of this page. just right click in the window (not on the image or flash player) and then on “view source” (or a similar option if not available)

you should obtain something like this:

<center><img src=”images/oplayer.jpg”>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js
“></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”player.swf
” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=”
player.swf“>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06- 497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3“>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object></center>

Notice the url i underlined up there? notice how it points directly to a mp3 file? what could that mp3 file be? :P now you should be able to save this file by pointing your browser to that address. you should also be able to do it via a download manager, although i haven’t tested it personally

Thats it for this tutorial enjoy xD

And oh btw, musical discovery to end this post,

Colour of fire, Just too bad they are so unknown and that band split up…
(But i bought their (very rare) album and EP from japan \o/ :P)

One of the (minor) recurrent problems i ever had with linux involves special characters such as é, è, à, ç and so on using my QWERTY keyboard. Indeed, as someone who must very often type in french, these characters are almost vital!

Having been raised the windows way of doing this (alt + 130 power! ) I was totally lost on how to do this in linux. after almost a year though, i finally discovered there was a rather quick and easy way to do this: the Compose key.

First of all I will try to explain the concept of this compose key. To put it simply, It’s a key that you can use to combine symbols and create special or accented characters that are not on your keyboard.

For instance, on my keyboard, the left winkey is set as compose key. thus by pressing [winkey] then [’] and [e], i get an é. similarly, [winkey] [=] [e] gives the euro sign €.

please Note that these keys are to be pressed one after the other (unlike the traditional ctrl+alt+delete for example )

Now, ready to set that compose key? let’s go, i promise that will be real quick :P

First open your terminal and open your xorg.conf

$ Sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Please feel free to use any text editor (graphical or otherwise) here, i just chose nano to be more accessible irrespective of specific WMs

This should open your xorg.conf file, which contains configurations for most graphics related operations as well as your mouse and keyboard.

To set your compose key you should look for the section on keyboard within this file. in my case it looks like this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Keyboard0″
Driver “keyboard”
Option “CoreKeyboard”
Option “XkbRules” “xfree86″
Option “XkbModel” “pc105″
Option “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection

Here, you just have to add a new line

Option “XkbOptions” “compose:lwin”

just before the endsection. (i have chosen the lwin key personally. you can replace it with anything like lalt, lctrl rctrl etc )

if your xorg.conf already contains a line starting with “Option “XkbOptions” ” (for example “Option “XkbOptions” “lv3:ralt_switch”) all you have to do is to add a comma and the mapping for the compose key inside the second double quotes (which in my example would give something like “Option “XkbOptions” “lv3:ralt_switch, compose:lwin”) i don’t know if i’m being clear here, just ask in the comments if you do not understand :P

here we go now just save the file, restart x, and your compose key should be up and running :P

And oh, before i forget, here you can find a list of key sequences with the compose key

enjoy, and if there are any queries, the comment form is here :P

“Hey, have you heard the news? kyu started blogging again!”
“No way! i thought he abandoned his blog to pursue a career in proscrastination?”
“well that may be but he’s really back!”

:D hello again everyone, and sorry to have abandoned the blogosphere for some two months (actually i was there sometimes, lurking ) the main reason for my prolonged absence lies in the fact that my pc got down several times, (even now i’m hanging on to a dreamlinux live cd to blog this) but i felt that if i didn’t start to blog again now, i probably wouldn’t at all :P

Anyways, i still wish you happy 240 days till 2009 :P

I would have thought my long absence would cause some readers to go away, but my feedburner stats show that i’ve got some new readers subscribed to my feed, so welcome you all, and thanks for following kyusphere

Well, i’ll be back soon with some new tips / hacks, (if those do not get obsolete by that time i mean lol ) anyway, maybe it will be hard to regain the momentum i had before, and achieve a post rate as “high” :P but i will try to be here often

By the way, if any of you remember this post, well guess what? yeah, got it :P (when i say “definitely” i often really mean it :P) well, actually mine looks more like this (i love black way much better anyways :P) and the usb connectivity is just, well, fantastic am not even thinking about buying separate effects pedals now lol :P If anyone in Mauritius is interested, this guitar (behringer iaxe624) is available at Philanne music shop at p.louis ^_^ (damn it, am even advertising freely for them now )

And yeah, results will be here soon, wish me luck (but having to repeat that one as well won’t be as much a problem as in 2006 ^_^)

so see ya soon :P

(@ carrotmadman, haven’t forgotten you i’ll perform my duties asap :P)