I just updated my copy of Rhythmbox on Lister (my home machine) to 0.10.0. Since Lister is a Fedora Core 5 machine, that wasn't a small feat, but I managed (and will post RPMs and instructions if anyone wants them). One of the cool new features of the newer Rhythmbox builds is the integration with Jamendo and Magnatune. I'm going to focus on the Magnatune integration for now since there's slightly more one can do with it than Jamendo (which allows you to get a torrent file and just download the whole album for free).

When you click on the "Magnatune" link on the left sidebar, you'll be rewarded with the Magnatune splash page for a few seconds. The reason for the splash page is so it can load the Magnatune catalog information into Rhythmbox. Yes, folks, the entirety of Magnatune is available to you just for the clicking. At the time of this writing, there are 242 artists that are available, ranging in everything from classical music to death metal. How awesome is that?

The beauty of this is that it's the full tracks in 128kbps MP3 format (which is slightly less than CD quality for those extremely picky audiophile types) along with track, artist, and album information at the end of the track. Can you picture shuffle-mode with this catalog? I'm almost giddy like a school girl!

If you're interested in purchasing the track, or learning more about the artist, you can click on the information circle, or click on either the floppy icon or the CD icon directly to the left of the information circle and purchase directly in Rhythmbox. They offer MP3, OGG, FLAC, and WAV files of all of their music, and you can download any or all of the formats (although I recommend FLAC and OGG, personally. :) ) I can see this being very very dangerous for certain folks who LOVE to explore new music. :)

Here's the track "Headphones" by Five Star Fall.

Speaking of headphones, I've long held that my cheap Koss headphones (purchased at that great audio chain known as "Meijer") were superior to most of the headphones out there. I've listened to the Bose headphones, and have found the lacking compared to the Koss headphones (the only thing the Koss headphones were lacking in comparison to the Bose headphones was the price). Recently I did an A/B compare with Steve at work's Sony noise cancelling headphones, and those too sounded muddy and unremrarkable. So, if you find you don't like listening to music much, or if you need some headphone to listen to that wonderful music, check out some Koss Headphones. Your ears and wallet will thank me.