Jul 30
Jul 30
Jul 30
Joining us via skype, wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales talks about open source search engines
Jul 30
Aug 08
I just got back from Wikimania 07 in Taipei. I had the chance to present Jamendo twice, both at a Creative Commons Taiwan conference and at Wikimania itself.
This week in Taipei was a real eye-opener, I met a lot of people and discovered some new interests… more on that later.
In the meantime, here is my presentation:
Jun 03
This is one of my favourite albums from Jamendo.
It has a sweet groove I really like. The pianist has some good spots all over the album.
Please send more music to jamendo! ;-)
Jan 07
Everything at jamendo is crazy these days. Albums are coming in faster and faster, we got a link on Creative Commons, the word is spreading about us in French press, translators are knocking to the door every day … The future has never looked so bright.
I still manage to release a new feature each week on the website, but it’s getting harder to stay in sync with the overall status of the project. I released the new backoffice for artists a week ago after a few days of testing and everything went fine ;-) The next big thing we are going to work on is the new member area (improved registration, profile, recommendations, “blog this album” feature, …)
In the meantime, I spoke with Mike Linksvayer from CC who recommended me for an internship in San Francisco this summer. Simply amazing! Entering the CC sphere was one of my main motivations when I created jamendo. Maybe I could have done it simplier but anyway… it’s not done yet. The only problem if I go there is… will I come back to France ? ;-)
Aug 22
We’re now more than 400 torrents to seed on jamendo. That’s about 100Go. We currently use btlaunchmany.py but I don’t think that’s sustainable. So before it’s too late, I think I have to reconsider a new solution to this problem.
As we also operate the tracker, I think there’s really some cooperation needed between both sides, the tracker and our permaseeds. Here are a few of my ideas :
- We don’t need to seed files that are already seeded by many users. Let’s find a lower limit, like 5 seeds.
- But we have to make sure they really seed ! So we need to make some control on the uploaded/downloaded statistics of the client. Are they reliable ?
- Maybe some clients will send the IPs of our servers to the other bittorrent clients, or even use Azureus’ DHT. So we have to really stop seeding these files.
- As the seeds are permanent, it should be easy to store their IPs in the tracker, and turn off announce on the seeds.
- Use that ultraseeding feature ?
- Would it help to turn off the seeds when there’s no client downloading ?
Just some thoughts… TBC
Aug 18
YouTube just launched, it’s the flickr of video. All this “web 2.0″ stuff really got my attention last week, and we’re clearly heading to that now with jamendo. Maybe we’ll become the flickr of audio. Or something like that. Here is our todo-list to add web 2.0 “compliance” to jamendo :
- more Javascript/podcast/RSS syndication tools
- rework URLs. they are way too obscure right now
- folksonomies
- more CC integration
- test the XSPF flash player in order to be really “web only”. for P2P we’ll have to wait I guess.
- we already have a public XMLRPC API, but try to extend it a bit more.
- more social features in the website
If you think of more web 2.0 features just tell me ! We’ll see in a month what I’ll have implemented :)
May 14
Two photos from the first jamendolive… The first was taken at the very end when everyone but the four jamendo staff members was gone :) From left to right : Vianney, Clement, me and David. What a GREAT concert it was ! You can check out the jamendo gallery for more shots. The second is a nice narcishot ! :)
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Mar 30
We’ve been working since yesterday on the first really big jamendo banner, in order to use it tomorrow at the first european Creative Commons concert :)
It’s been quite hard since the banner is 6m long, and we made it with paint bombs (don’t know the right word, hope you’ll understand :)
I hope tomorrow will ROCK, after 3 long months of planning :)
Mar 09
I never though distributing flyers was a fun task ! Well, given the proper circumstances, it can be really nice :)
Today we gave about 1000 flyers for the upcoming jamendo LIVE in the campus of Metz. We were 4 (Vianney, Clement and guest star Maurice) and there was 2 girls near us distributing flyers for a “String Party” in a local night club…. So we began using a new approach on jamendo marketing… “Free concert, much funnier than a String Party !” It really made all the people laugh and I think most of them took the time to read the flyer :)
Mar 05
It’s not very serious regarding my previous post, but I released ccLive 0.2 today. It’s the first public release, because we’re going to do its first real test tomorrow at a Both gig.
Here is the current homepage :
http://www.jamendo.com/index.php?s=jamendotools_cclive
I hope a few developers will join to help because I’ll not be able to work on it anymore until July.
Feb 27
I registered LesAutres.org March 21st last year. I think this was close to the beginning of the jamendo project (I had had the idea a few days before). What a strange path we’ve followed over one year.
A little jamendo history… LesAutres.org was the name of the non-profit I created with a few nice friends to promote free music. All the primary ideas were already there : P2P, CC, complete albums, etc… We had written a “manifesto” and I knew the project had the potential of becoming something huge (I still do :p).
A few months passed, I wrote about 40% of the current website. But I quickly realized the project wasn’t growing fast enough. We attended the first Both concert, had about 7/8 albums on the website, but that wasn’t good enough. So I decided to split the non-profit and the website. During July/August I went to Luxembourg as usual to work at Neofacto, and started convincing Laurent and Pierre to fund the project.
It all went great, and after many name changes (LesAutres.org => Altitune.org => PeerMajor.org => PeerMajor (.com) ), we ended up on “jamendo”, thanks to a bunch of marketing brainstormings with the damn cool Matthew Duder. We founded the company, PeerMajor. Registered the jamendo trademark.
I also rewrote the iRATE server code and protocol during the holidays, because the ratings were obvisouly going to be very important in jamendo.
Since this March 21st I can’t remember a single day I didn’t worked on jamendo :) The last 5 months have been particularly exhausting because I also had tons of work to do at school. Of course school has always been only my second priority until now. But after all this great work I have to focus for a couple of months on my exams, which are very important if I want to enter a CS & Applied Maths school in Grenoble.
So I won’t work on jamendo anymore until mid-May, maybe I’ll do little patches when needed because there’s really pieces of the code which I’m the only one to understand (and that’s not good but when I’ll have time, I’ll clean up… it’s only 3 to 5% of the code..). If I had kept the non-profit I’m pretty sure the project would be dead during this 2 monthes but now I trust Laurent, Pierre and David to do great work !
Feb 18
Yesterday was a day in history (again…) : we founded the non-profit called Luxcommons , to bring Creative Commons licenses in Luxembourg. Actually I’m not an official member yet but that won’t last…. Luxcommons will focus on the adaptation of the licenses to Luxembourg’s law, agreed by Creative Commons.
I hope there will be exciting new developments of CC content here in Luxembourg. We’re already working hard at converting local bands with jamendo !
On the picture, Olivier, Patrick, Laurent … and me :)
Feb 05
Yesterday I went to the MDE in Metz’s university. This is where we are going to host the first jamendo concert, and first public testing of ccLive.
The place isn’t really suited for concerts. It’s pretty small, max 200 people. Let’s stick to 200 people for the first one, and we’ll see later if we can grow bigger. Moreover there aren’t other intermediate size venues in Metz. Next time we’ll have to do it in Nancy or Luxembourg.
Here’s the full gallery.
Jan 30
Today I made the tracklist of the upcoming album of my former choir on jamendo. It’s a compilation of public domain songs we recorded over our 3 CDs. So we had to check all the dates of death of all the authors. It’s quite sad some of our best songs were harmonized by third-party authors, thus forbiding the Creative Commons license for them. The weirdest part is that when checking the biography of Gabriel Fauré, and seeing he died in 1924, we celebrated it ! That such a great man had died actually made us happy…
Imagine wishing the death of your favourite rock stars (mines currently being Incubus), to be able to remix their songs on your last 90-year album …. Let’s hope they’ll switch to Creative Commons before :(
My first official composition, an Ave Maria dedicated to my cousin Elisabeth who motivated me to learn piano, is also featured on this album. The recording doesn’t satisfy me at all though, because as it’s the last CD the choir recorded before splitting, it was _very_ rushed (2 sessions of 4 hours for 13+ tracks !), and the mix is horrible as it wasn’t released to the public. Maybe we’ll record it again to include it on my first album.
Anyway, here’s the tracklisting of the album, (don’t expect a release until next week though) :
1. Go down Moses (Negro Spiritual)
2. Soon and Very Soon (Negro Spiritual)
3. Go tell it on the mountain (Negro Spiritual)
4. Let us break bread (Negro Spiritual)
5. Ave Maria (Sylvain Zimmer)
6. Cantate Domino (Johann Cruger)
7. Cantique de Jean Racine (Gabriel Fauré)
8. Jubilemus Exultemus (François Couperin)
9. Nocturnes (W.A. Mozart)
10. Psaume 61 (Joseph Haydn)
11. Cantate Domino (Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni)
12. Messe à 3 voix (Antonio Lotti)
13. O bone Jesu (Carl Gottlieb Reissiger)
14. Alma Redemptoris Mater (G.P. da Palestrina)
15. L’immensité du firmament (Benedetto Marcello)
Jan 26
Tonight I attended a little meeting with guys from Provisoire, Linbox, Maurice Svay, Jérôme Fix and a few others. It was nice to have an open discussion about P2P, Creative Commons/Copyleft, jamendo, and the economics of free culture with local people. Arnaud (CEO of Linbox) was very interested in sponsoring the upcoming jamendofest, so we’re going to meet again :) This USB key thing really does motivate people ! “This is gonna be huge” :)
Jan 22
I’ve been working on a new exciting app since yesterday. I called it “ccLive”. It will allow jamendo, and I hope many other commoners all around the world, to record live gigs, and to copy MP3s or Oggs to the audience’s USB keys seconds after the last chord !! Of course files will be automagically properly tagged, named, and so on. I even think we’ll be able to make their CC licenses validate !
Of course, I wrote my first line of python 20 hours ago, so the GUI still looks terrible and the code is quite a mess, but it does work !! I used wxPython & XRCed. I implemented XRC import for the GUI and threads for I/O stuff with the help of Nathan Yergler and of some nice folks on #wxwidgets. The code is in the jamendo tools CVS on sourceforge. It only records on Linux with arecord, but it should be recording on OS X and Win32 in a few days.
How does the app work ? Basically, you fill in metadata, and then you start the recording. you can then push “stop” or “next track”. You have to enter the tracknames while the songs are performed and once a song is finished, its encoding to OGG/MP3/FLAC starts. Handy !
We’re going to test it at a Both rehearsal very soon !!
Jan 21
I’ve always known I could have been a model. Here is the proof :)
Okay, shame on me, it’s a jamendo ad, made by our crazy CEO Laurent…. Whatever..
The french text says “Sylvain isn’t as famous as Bono yet, but he’s on BitTorrent too” :)
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