Reinventing the Wheel: A Better Media Player

As I’ve posted in the past, I am a picky media player user. I’ve tried most every free player under the sun, along with some not so free solutions and have yet to be entirely satisfied with any of the available products. To that end, I’ve started to think about the possibility of writing my own media player. The following are some of the considerations that I’ve been mulling over:

Base Requirements:

• Playback of both mp3 and flac files. Support for other formats could be added as required by me or other users, possibly with us of some sort of plugin engine.
• Some kind of a rating system, preferably with a high level of granularity. I’m not married to the standard 5-stars idea, and may explore alternative ideas, including tagging.
• Truly smart playlists that allow for the standard global AND/OR rules, as well as more advanced expressions that support brackets and branching logic.
• Smart importing from existing iTunes, Songbird, Media Monkey, and Windows Media Player libraries, various playlist formats, and other types of media collections.

Feature Wish List:

• Blackberry Sync: When not at home, I listen to music from a flash card on my Blackberry Curve. The device can be filled with media by simply dumping it all on the media card, which appears as a removable drive. As previously mentioned, I listen to a mix of mp3 files and lossless flac files. When dumping these files to the Blackberry, I would like to see one thread dedicated to converting the flac files to mp3s, while another thread actually fills the device, resulting in a sync process that is not significantly slowed by media conversions. Additionally, since I have hard drive space to spare, I would like to cache some or all of the resulting mp3 files so that they don’t have to be converted again on the next sync. I would also like to see the ability to import files from the Blackberry to the library so that I could pick up media on the go and bring it home with me.
• Library Export/Backup: With a library of 10K+ tagged and rated songs, losing the library of meta data about my music would be a traumatic experience indeed. To solve my paranoia over losing this data, I would like to implement the export of single playlists and entire libraries to all of the major playlist formats, as well as to a structured XML document, similar to the one that iTunes maintains. Some kind of automated backup feature like the one that iTunes has would also be nice.
• Online Integration: I currently report all of my song plays to last.fm, which is an excellent resource for discovering new music. I would like my media player to link in with last.fm and other online resources, but am also open to developing my own online resource that lets users to easily compare and organize their collections, correct their meta data, and actively discover new music that other users have rated.
• Library Sharing/Streaming: We run a large network with lots of computers, and I’d like the ability to listen to my music from anywhere in the house. I really like the work that Subsonic has done in this area, and hope to implement some or all of it’s features, while at the same time linking it into my database so that I can see my playlists and edit my meta data from anywhere in the house, and indeed, from anywhere in the world.
• Cross-Platform and Open-Sourced: Given all of my recent experience with Debian Linux, I’d like to see my media platform running on both Windows and Linux. This one might take me awhile to accomplish, but is definitely a goal of mine, given that I am now a confirmed Linux user who still keeps a couple of Windows platforms lying around.

Implementation:

Of course, with all of these goals in mind, the next step is to consider which platform I’d like to build on. This basically comes down to a number of choices, some cross-platform, some not:

• Visual Studio .NET: My development IDE of choice, Visual Studio provides extremely quick GUI creation and a great number of useful libraries that cut out a lot of the nitty gritty time consuming base code necessary for a project as large as a media player. Additionally, the Windows Media Player control allows for drop-in playback of media, and I have a ton of example code lying around that implements most of the features listed above. Unfortunately, while .NET 2.0 is supported on Linux under the Mono platform, I don’t know how far that support goes in terms of media management and playback.
• SFML: The Simple Fast Media Library is available as libraries that are pre-compiled to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac, with support for Visual Studio, C/C++, Python, and Ruby. It includes packages for windowing, graphics, networking, and most importantly, audio capture and playback. This is a definite contender as it is open source, meaning that I could build the libraries directly into my code, and simply recompile for different platforms. Of course, the downside is that I’ll have to code in C++, and without any kind of graphical interface builder.
• Juce: Jules Utility Class Extensions is like a more featured version of SFML that provides packages for just about every conceivable task, including some serious audio libraries that support all kinds of playback, effects, and hardware accelerated features. In addition, it does audio CD reading and writing out of the box on Mac and PC platforms. If I were to strike out from Visual Studio, this would probably be my library of choice, as it can do nearly everything that VS can do, but is fully open sourced and supported on just about every available platform.
• Java: I have no idea how realistic this idea is. I do know that in the past, I’ve created Java apps that can play both wav and mp3 files, and stream those files over a network connection. That said, as much as I enjoy coding in Java, it is widely regarded as being slow and clunky – not exactly traits that I’d like associated with a media player that will be running all day. On the other hand, Java is not C/C++ (a huge bonus as far as I’m concerned), is fully object oriented, has decent audio support, and makes networking extremely easy. That said, programming GUI’s of any kind of complexity in Java is not a task to be taken on lightly.

Well, that about sums it up. This project is definitely something that I intend to undertake in the coming months, and until then, I’ll keep thinking about my requirements and what library I’d like to use to implement it. If anybody else has experience with some useful audio libraries that they’d like to share, please do so in the comments.

The Return of the iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter

Hey all,

After a couple of irate posts regarding the failure of my old iTunes to Zune playlist converter tool to work with newer versions of the iTunes and Zune playlist formats, I’ve rebuilt the project from the ground up and re-branded it as yourTunes. You can find the support page here, where downloads and tutorials can be found, and you are welcomed to leave some feedback.

This first version is a rebuild and incremental improvement on the old project, but plenty of cool features are planned for future releases, so keep on top of it!

Cheers, Jon

Outlook, How I Loathe Thee

I fucking hate Microsoft Outlook. I cannot think up another English language sentiment that more accurately sums up my feelings regarding Microsoft’s Outlook application. As much as I hate on the Almighty Goog, I long for the days when I could use the simple, clean interface of the superbly well-designed Gmail web application. Then I went and got myself a Blackberry. All hate aside, I love my phone – it is the best phone that I’ve ever carried, and I wouldn’t consider downgrading if you paid me to do so. However, without an Exchange server, the Blackberry is inexplicably linked to Microsoft Outlook. It is the only well-supported application that the device can sync calendars and contacts with. This, in turn, forces me to use the bloated, cluttered, buggy, and altogether frustrating behemoth that is Outlook.

My current problems began with The Linux Experiment, a blog that I helped start whose purpose is to record the experiences of seven computer users with varying amounts of Linux experience who have committed to running various distributions of Linux on their primary platforms throughout the next four months. Previously, I had maintained two devices that checked my google mail account – my Blackberry, which pulled new email down from the server via the IMAP protocol, and Outlook on my Vista PC, which did the same via the POP3 protocol, and immediately deleted the messages once they came down. It was a fine balance that owed its existence to more than a few quirks in the Gmail, Blackberry, and Outlook systems, but in the end ensured that I got my email on both devices, but that it wasn’t stored on the Gmail servers, which the tinfoil-hat wearing paranoid inside of me greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, I then decided to add a third client to the mix, the Evolution client for Debian Linux, which frankly, is an extremely impressive Outlook clone that seems (initially anyway) to do some things better than Outlook itself.

In order to add a third client to the email mix, I had to remove the fine balance between IMAP and POP3 that had originally existed, and set all three devices up as IMAP clients. Further, Outlook was set to delete all messages on the server that were over 30 days old. This provided some modicum of security, while allowing all three devices to share my email. Along the way, I found out that Evolution actually has the best IMAP support of the bunch, and (unsurprisingly. If there’s on thing I’ve learned recently is that Linux does everything, and usually does it right the first time), Outlook the absolute worst that I have ever seen. For easy reference, my various complaints have been summarized into the ordered list presented below:

1. IMAP folders appear outside of the “Personal Folders” area, forcing me to maintain multiple email inboxes, instead of allowing me to funnel all of my email into a single inbox. (This may be an issue common to other clients as well – I honestly don’t know).
2. Outlook tends to keep IMAP connections open for too long, resulting in Gmail forcibly closing the connection, and Outlook bitching that said connection was closed by the server. There is no option (that I can find, but hey, have you looked at the option dialogs in Outlook lately?) to adjust this timeout length.
3. The program does not accurately reflect message status. For example, if I receive an email on my blackberry while away from home and read it, the message status is set to read on the server, and Outlook should reflect this change. It doesn’t. Evolution does, as does the Blackberry. What the hell?
4. When an email message is deleted on the Gmail server by another client, Outlook does not delete the message locally – it simply shows the message with strikethrough formatting on the subject line. In the same vein, when you delete a message in Outlook, there is no way (that I can find) to delete that message from the IMAP server so that it is reflected on other devices.
5. The Linux Experiment uses a self-signed certificate to verify it’s identity to connecting mail clients. Granted, this isn’t how certificates are meant to be used, but it’s better than nothing, and we don’t have the money to pay for a CA. Outlook (as one would hope) complains that the certificate is self signed, but lacks an option to ignore this fact. In theory, this is a “feature” that notifies a user that their transaction is potentially insecure, but in practice, it’s a pain in the ass. I know that the email server has a self-signed certificate. I helped set it up. Now shut up and do your job.

Those are the big complaints about IMAP support in Outlook. I have other complaints about the application, but they’re the same as many people’s and I don’t want sore fingers, so just Bing the issue if you’re looking for a half hour rant. The point to take home is that this lackluster support is inexcusable. According to Wikipedia, the IMAP protocol has been in it’s current revision since 1996, and Gmail is hardly a fly-by-night mail server.

In any case, at the same time that I got everything set up and working between all three devices, Outlook became crash-happy, and started going down three times a day. Sometimes it would crash when I wasn’t using it at all, sometimes while I was changing account settings, occasionally when I tried to open an email, and even once while I was trying to retrieve email from the Gmail servers. The idea that Outlook (previously rock-solid stable, among it’s few good attributes) could start regularly crashing for no apparent reason whatsoever seemed far fetched. So what had changed? Well, I’d added an IMAP account and disabled a POP3 account. These changes modified the Outlook PST files (the unreadable binary blob in which the program stores everything including it’s kitchen sink), which could have potentially been corrupted in the process.

So I backed everything up, deleted my PST files, uninstalled and reinstalled Outlook. I did not realize that the program had littered my drive with settings files in both C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook and C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook, as well as (likely) numerous registry keys, and when I launched my fresh install, it attempted to read from these files, and to recreate it’s missing PST files. Balls. So I closed the application, re-deleted the newly recreated PST files, and also nuked the settings files in the two locations. Upon launching Outlook, it again somehow managed to restore all of my settings, including my RSS feeds and both of my IMAP accounts.

Fine. You restored my settings. Not the via the method that I had hoped, but the effect that I was after has been achieved. The old and possibly corrupted PST files have been recreated, my email accounts are once again being monitored by my Vista PC, and the program hasn’t crashed yet. Then I tried to sync my Blackberry with Outlook using the RIM Desktop Manager software (an application almost as poorly written as Outlook itself), and the whole house of cards came crashing down. Somehow, whatever I’d just done absolutely ruined the underlying Intellisync process, and resulted in an error that merely said “Function OpenFolder failed” with no further explanation. A quick web search resulted in nothing of value, and the sync process refused to restore my calendar and contacts from the device. The synchronization log files state only that Internal Error #4238 occurred, and that the translation of contacts failed. I Bing’d up a post on the Blackberry Forums that instructed me to delete my Intellisync folder to restore my synchronization abilities.

After following the instructions and recreating my sync profile within Desktop Manager, everything worked as expected, and my contacts and calendar were restored to Outlook. Needless to say, this entire enterprise was far more painful than I felt it should be, and only time will tell if I’ve actually fixed the crash problem, or if it will resurface in a couple of days. Regardless, I will be exploring alternatives with renewed interest. There are plenty of other email/calendar managers out there including Mozilla’s Thunderbird, which I use for my small business and absolutely love. Unfortunately, Blackberry sync is high on my list of requirements from an email client, and so far, Outlook is the only client that can do that reliably without writing a bunch of intermediary code. As a part of the Linux Experiment, I will be looking into the Barry project, which is promising, but seems to be Linux-only.

Stupid Outlook.

The Snap, Crackle, and Pop of Windows Vista Audio

In a previous post, I complained that my Windows Vista x64 machine was suffering from audio that popped, clicked, and sounded like it was, for lack of a better term, ‘losing frames.’ At the time, I had looked around the ‘net some, and tried a few different drivers for my on-board sound card. The problem seemed to get better for awhile, but steadily worsened again to the point where I considered purchasing a new sound card, something that I haven’t done since 1998.

Tonight I took a deeper look down the tubes, and found this forum post that seemed to suggest that the problem was actually with the way nVidia’s 8800GT drivers access system memory when the Vista machine in question is host to more than 2GB of RAM. Following the suggestions in the thread, I headed over to the nVidia website and picked up the latest copy of their drivers (March 2009).

After the installation and a reboot, everything seems to be working just fine, with perfectly clear audio from multiple applications, and none of the annoying popping and clicking sounds that were driving me crazy before.

Of iPhones, Blackberries, and Opera Mini

A good friend of mine recently picked up an iPhone 3G, and I have to say that it is an absolutely gorgeous device. I’ve been a smart phone user since picking up a Blackberry Curve 8310 about a year ago, and would never even consider returning to a ‘normal’ phone. While I love my Blackberry, but I must admit that the iPhone really ups the ante in a couple of respects.

For me, the most obvious difference in the two phones is the web browsing experience. The iPhone runs Safari, built on top of Webkit, and pages actually look and act like the real thing. The Blackberry, on the other hand, uses a proprietary browser built on Java (like everything else on the platform), and provides a distinctly last-generation experience. While his pages look like the real thing, mine are often butchered, missing functionality, and hard to read.

Wanting an iPhone but not willing to pay $700 for the device, and being limited by rumours of Roger’s new 2 year minimum hardware upgrade policy, I decided to take a shot at improving my mobile experience with Opera Mini for the Blackberry instead. I had heard excellent things about this app from a friend, and while Opera only claims about 2% of the browser market, I’ve read some excellent reviews, and encountered a few rabid fans.

After downloading and installing the browser, I was immediately greeted by the best web experience that I’ve ever had on a mobile device (short of the iPhone of course). Pages render beautifully, Javascript runs fast, and the entire page is displayed on load. You can choose the section of the page that you’re interested in, and the browser zooms in to an appropriate size for reading. While browsing the page, each link is highlighted so that you can easily see where they are, and the view automatically shifts and resizes so that the entirety of the current paragraph is in view. The user can choose to download low, medium, or high quality copies of images depending on the speed of their connection (I chose low because my phone does not support 3G or WiFi), so even image-heavy pages look great while loading fast.

While using the browser, the idea that gets into your head is that it was designed by people who had actually used mobile browsers for a long period of time, and thought really hard about features that made sense on a low-bandwidth connection with a smallish screen. As an example, I often bookmark RSS feeds from sites that I like to follow, because it’s faster to browse the headlines and then click through to interesting stories than to load up each page individually on my 2G connection. Opera Mini places a link to a listing of all RSS feeds available from a particular site in the top corner of every page, making it fast and easy to add new pages to my bookmarks list.

The only complaint that I have so far about this program is that it seems to eat the keypress events from my system keys, meaning that I can’t raise or lower the volume or pause my music while simultaneously browsing the web. No matter, as a quick tap on the end key minimizes the app, after which the keys work as expected.

All in all, I am incredibly impressed with this application and highly reccomend it to anybody looking to add a little love to their mobile browsing experience without shelling out for a steve-phone just yet.

Givin’ Props

A couple of guys that I went to school with have gone on to live the dream – they’ve started their own video game company, called Shadowcat Productions. I just wanted to take a moment to draw some attention to one of their current projects, an arcade game called Battleshape. As the name would suggest, it’s very Geometry Wars, but with a few new twists and some really cool effects. Check it out under “Other Projects” and “Battleshape”

They Just Don’t Get It

This quote from MPAA & RIAA lawyer Steven J Metalitz is why I get so worked up about DRM systems:

We reject the view, that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.

To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options.

The quote is taken from a discussion about whether content providers who coat their wares with DRM should be required by law to ensure that purchased media continues to work for perpetuity. Their argument of course is that no piece of machinery can be expected to work forever, and so bully to the customer who purchased DRM’d music or video. However, with all of the major online music retailers selling DRM-free Mp3s, many honest people (read: people who didn’t say fuck it to DRM and pirate all of their music – the very people that allowed big content to continue to survive in the digital era) are left with a significant amount of media that cannot be unlocked due to anti-circumvention laws, and must now be replaced as the old DRM servers are slowly taken offline.

Even after all of this time, the big content owners still don’t understand the digital age. Back in the era of physical media, when formats changed, customers had to purchase their existing media in the new format if they wanted to be able to continue to use it. Because physical media costs money to research, manufacture, and distribute, this makes sense – the customer was simply paying the cost of the record companies developing and manufacturing a better sounding medium. However, where digital music is concerned, none of these costs exist. There was no research to develop Mp3, because it is ready to be licensed. There were no manufacturing costs, besides the few CPU cycles that it took to re-encode the existing media. Likewise, distribution is essentially free, because in most cases, it is third-party retailers who host and sell the content, not the rights holders themselves, and it costs exactly $0 to make a digital copy of a song file. So what exactly are consumers paying for when re-purchasing their previously DRM’d content? The luxury of not being limited in where and how they can use their purchased content? Oh thank you Mr. Rights Holder, thank you! thank you! thank you!

You know how this issue should be handled? Every song that was sold with DRM is now sold without, right? Then a tool should be written and distributed that allows customers to strip the DRM from every file in their collection. For free.

Edit: Comment from Slashdot:

Canadian Copyright Reform Consultations

This week, Arstechnica ran a piece detailing the history of copyright reform in Canada, and providing coverage on the government’s current efforts to revive the program. It seems that after the blowout surrounding Bill C-61, the government has decided to at least pretend to listen to citizens this time instead of simply bowing to the interests of foreign industry groups. To that end, the government has launched a website where Canadians can follow the process, and submit their own thoughts on the issues at hand. The new website is open until September 13, 2009, and puts five questions to participants:

1. How do Canada’s copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time
3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?

My answers to the survey went something like this:

1. Copyright laws effect every person with a desire to utilize physical or digital media in this country. While current laws are reasonably fair, they tend to be applicable primarily to physical medium, and lack use cases that address digital distribution, storage, and usage schemes. The changing landscape of media consumption calls for a modernization of copyright law that should be centered on preserving relics of our culture and society for future generations to freely enjoy.
2. The primary purpose of copyright law is to ensure that artists’ contributions to society stand the test of time, while allowing the artist to make a living from their works for a reasonable period of time. To that end, any media that has ceased to be distributed by rights holders should be released into the public domain. This includes music, television, video, and written word that is no longer producing a profit for it’s owners and may otherwise be lost to future generations. How bankrupt would our society be without access to the works of classical playwrights, composers, and painters? At the same time, rights holders should be prevented from charging exceptionally high fees for back-catalogue media, as the digital age ensures that the storage and distribution costs of aging content are minimal.
3. Innovation and creativity are largely driven by exposure to and inspiration from the works of others. To that end, Canadian copyright law should call for explicit bans on Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes, which serve only to hinder the availability of media and to frustrate honest users of such. It would be beneficial for lawmakers to remember that any lock can be broken given enough resources and time; and that the only purpose of a lock, be it on your front door or on your digital media, is to keep honest people honest. Those who want through the locks will accomplish as much in short order, while those who are unnecessarily prevented from using their media by poorly designed or no longer supported DRM systems are left frustrated and are given incentive to hang up their honesty all together.
4. It is unfortunate that most industry groups consider the fostering of innovation and creativity to be at odds with the increase of competition and investment in the marketplace when in truth, a healthy marketplace with reasonably short copyright durations can serve to directly increase the former. Current copyright schemes assign rights to their holders for a duration of life plus 50 years. In an age when immortal corporations own the majority of such rights, these laws actually serve to reduce competition in the marketplace. If companies knew that their works were to enter the public domain within a reasonable period of 10 to 20 years, they would be forced to continually develop better products to stay relevant in the marketplace. This would create an atmosphere of nimble companies that are forced to release new products on a regular basis that are not simply incremental updates to existing properties.
5. With a global digital economy in mind, changes to copyright law need to consider the vast power of the internet as a medium for communication and distribution. Current licensing laws prevent many internet properties that distribute media from working to their full potential over international borders. Many sites that stream video or audio, or allow visitors to purchase media, are vastly limited in countries other than that where the site is based. To this end, copyright reforms should concentrate on breaking down international boundaries and utilizing the internet to its full potential. Furthermore, reforms should focus on doing away with laws based on digital media, and look constantly toward the future with digital distribution schemes in mind.

I would urge any Canadians who stumble upon this to check out the survey and to submit their opinions to the government. We as citizens should encourage this kind of mass public consultation whenever applicable in an effort to force our politicians to represent our interests over those of foreign lobbyist groups.

Cheers,

Jon

The Return of MC Double Def DP

Just like Queen, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and countless others, MC Double Def DP is dusting off his mic and going on tour after an almost 20 year hiatus:

Remember the original? It’s been Digitally Remastered!

I for one will be buying tickets for every show along the tour.

Ups and Downs of Audio

Lately, all of my technology seems to by systematically failing on me as if a demon sent by some higher being of tech has decided that I am no longer worthy to own and operate any of my toys. It started with a flatscreen monitor, spread to my blackberry, took out my iPod along the way, and stopped in for tea at my parent’s house, where it made enough of a mess to call me away from my own problems for a couple of days trying to fix their computers.

My room mates insist that I have a “midas’ touch” that breaks all the technology that I fool about with. I prefer to consider myself unlucky.

Blackberry Media Player

Since I never leave home without my phone, I have recently tried to reduce the amount of crap that I carry around by using my Blackberry as a media player. It has a 4GB memory card in it, and Media Monkey (my jukebox software of choice) treats it just like a USB device that can be filled up with songs from my library.

Normally, after filling the card with music, I simply launch the media application and tell it to shuffle all songs. While it starts playing, the device scans for audio files in the background and fills up a database file of some sort with information gleaned from ID3 tags.

The problems started with a refurbished device that I picked up on a warranty replacement of my original (which mysteriously started to freeze up whenever I used the camera application) – now when I load the songs onto the device, the scanning process seems to find one or two of them, and just ignore the rest. Imagine my joy after leaving the house this morning for a day at work only to find that I had a grand total of two songs available for listening on my device.

My interim solution has been to tell Media Monkey to export an m3u of the playlist that it puts on the Berry to the device. Then I can just tell the device to shuffle that list instead of waiting for the scan that doesn’t work to complete before listening to some of my media. If that doesn’t work, I’ll likely source a different media player app for the device.

Windows Media Playback

Lately, whenever I play music files on my computer (regardless of format, bitrate, or player), they pop and click as if the volume is up too high and the machine is clipping it to compensate. Increasing the amount of buffer memory that Media Monkey keeps helped, as did turning down my levels to prevent clipping; but the noises are still present in the stream.

This one truly puzzles me, as it seems to have started out of the blue, and affects all audio on the system (but not video for some reason). Nothing at the driver or hardware level has changed in recent memory, and the problem spreads across all players, formats, and bitrates, so I don’t think it’s an issue with specific software or codecs.

I’ll keep banging my head against the wall until I figure it out and get back to head banging.

Last.FM Scrobbling

On a good note, I recently decided to try playing about with Last.fm after an official scrobbling plugin was released for Media Monkey. Wow. I cannot believe that I went for so long without using this incredible website, and as a music lover, suggest that anybody who collects music start using it immediately.

The plugin is seamlessly integrated with my player, and does all the heavy lifting in the background so that I don’t even have to worry about it or run a separate app, and the site itself is pretty much astounding.

Occasionally, my music collection feels stale – even though my standard playlist has about 2500 songs in it (as selected by rating), I sometimes get bored of it and go looking for something new. Previously, I accomplished this primarily by listening to Alan Cross, comparing notes with friends, and trolling amazon.ca and wikipedia pages for information about related bands and albums. Now, last.fm allows me to click the ‘related artists’ link from any artist page, or check out it’s suggestions for stuff that I should listen to.

Consider me a convert for life.