walkah: netjuke

as was made public yesterday on both sites, the netjuke and jinzora projects have decided to merge - to create what I think will be the ultimate in web-based jukebox / music management software.

those of you playing along at home know that I've been involved in the netjuke project for a while now - and there hasn't been much by way of news to report. like several free software projects, we've suffered from lack of resources. basically, the team has consisted of three of us - two of us are always swamped with work, and the other is a full time student. this means, that while we have great ideas and vision of what something like netjuke2 could be - we've spent a long time not really getting as far as we'd like.

in comes jinzora, a project that is making headway much more rapidly. while consisting principally of only two people - they each have far more time to devote to the project - and it shows.

so, I had a brief skype call with Ross Carlson (lead from the jinzora prjoect) yesterday for introductions, etc. and i must say i'm pretty psyched. this should give me a chance to (in my copious spare time) get some of my ideas actually implemented and unleashed on the world. stay tuned :)

it looks like they might be giants (of all people) have finally caught on to what (i think) is a positive step toward the future of music distribution. they've opened they're own music store. that's right. owned and operated by the artists. they're selling DRM-free mp3's of a couple albums online - directly.

blake and i have discussed a couple times, that this would be an awesome outlet for netjuke. i hope more and more artists will realize the power they can have with this approach (and i hope that netjuke becomes their platform of choice). it's been a long time since i've listened to any they might be giants... but i think i'll buy an album based on principle. :)

after a semi-long hiatus activity in the netjuke world is picking up again. we (rather mostly blake) got a new server and migrated the site and a bunch of other stuff to it... and since it runs gentoo it took 4 weeks to compile everything ;)

my most recent contribution, however, is to get developer.netjuke.org up and running using ... you guessed it... drupal. so far the guys are digging it.. and blake has entered about 4,000 tasks. time to get crackin'!

so, it would appear that they beat me to the announcement, but yes, i've "officially" joined another open source software project. netjuke is a really cool piece of software - web based audio management tool. but what's cooler is some of the things that are in store for the major rewrite that will be netjuke2. i've spent some time chatting lately with blake and he's got some great ideas.

so, watch this space for more news about that.