Once in a while, a fantastic piece of open source software comes along. Just the other day, banshee 1.0 was released. I must say, I’m *very* impressed. It’s like a much better, really great iTunes. With the addition of video it now covers pretty much everything I wanted in a media player thingi for Linux. Check it out: Banshee 1.0!

Here’s a site worth checking out: Boltfish recordings. They offer cd quality mp3s of almost all of their releases with the option to buy the CD for a realistic price should you feel the tunes are worth it. They have been around for some time, so I guess it’s working! They do chilled out electronic music, worth a listen.

While extracting one of my favorite cds today and noticing it had heavy scratching on it, it occured to me it might have loads of errors while extracting. So I thought “I’ll just run an md5/sha1 checksum on it and verify it against CDDB’s checksums…” CDDB doesn’t have checksums for cd tracks. This is crazy. I might have to set up my own database….if I ever get time. Please let me know if you know of one.

I’m well into bloc party - Silent Alarm at the moment, some kind of mad indie rock stuff, resonably accessible to all! It sounds pretty cool, the lead singers voice may annoy you though. Sounds a lot like Damon or whatever his name is from Blur. More musical reviews here soon. 7/10 at the moment, but it’s probably going to move up to 8/10.