Ecoute: a lightweight iTunes replacement

Sometimes I feel like iTunes is a little bit too demanding on system resources, it happends to me from time to time that I start feeling my Mac a little bit slow and then I check my ActivityMonitor.app and iTunes is eating up to 1.5GB of my RAM (out of my 4GB :P) that’s alot of memory for a simple music player. After surfing the net for a nice solution I came across Ecoute.

Ecoute seems to me a really nice lightweit music player, the first thing that I like about Ecoute is that it plays your music right out of your iTunes library so you don’t have to manage 2 librarys when syncing with your iPod/iPhone, I liked that since you only have to download this 3.9MB app unzip it, open and you are ready to go.

This app also has some nice interface features that I found fascinating. The first one I’d like to talk about is that it looks and behaves just like and iPod touch interface, you have a listing of your songs and you can browser them by Song, Artist, Album and they are sorted alphabetically, you can even rate your songs quickly.

The second thing I liked about it’s interface is that while you are playing a song you get this nice cover-album art instead of the song listing just like in the iPod.

What I’m implying here is that if you are familiar with an iPod touch you are really going to feel comfortable with Ecoute since it’s usability is quite the same as the ipod touch.

The third feature about Ecoute that I like is that it’s integrated with Growl and when a new song is playing it displays a Growl notification so you know what song is currently playing, and not only that it also adds a nice cover-album art player to your desktop wallpaper so you can change your song straight from your desktop. That’s nice specially when working with multiple spaces.

It also integrates search capabilitys and an menu which stays on the top bar so you can easily change the song, however what I consider to be the Killer feature is that it allows you to set Keyboard shortcuts, as you might guess I’m more of a keyboard person and I really like having all the work done without the use of my mouse and Ecoute allows you to easily set keyboard shortcuts to to display the player window, go to next song, play/pause,Mute/unmute and search. I really like this feature since I believe is something that iTunes is missing.

Lastly.fm but not least 😛 it also has Last.fm integration so you can scrobble your plays 🙂 so If you like scrobbling this app would be a 2 in 1 ! yaaay! more free RAM for us RAM lovers.

And the best of all you can download Ecoute and give it a try for free, the licence is only 10 Dlls which for me is a cheap price to pay for such a good quality app. So point your browsers at http://www.ecouteapp.com/ and give it a try, you have nothing to loose 🙂

How to install Plesk 9 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

44.pngI love administrating servers but when it comes to fulfilling my clients need I wish I had some magic software that could help me manage the server resources and everything. Well my iPhone does this … nah I’m just kidding obviusly Plesk is the way to go since thats the title of this post.

When I found what was Plesk capable off I was amazed because it offers alot of features that can help you automate your bussiness however there is one thing that I don’t like about it: “Plesk documentation sucks” literally. And i’m sure you agree with me and that’s probably why you are here.

When I wanted to install plesk I started by choosing an OS for it, so I chosed Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS because I’ve been seen all this Ubuntu hype and I wanted to give it a try so here’s my log of what happened.

First I downloaded the whole Plesk installer but really quick I found this useless since it was a bunch of .deb packages that had no instructions on which order I should follow to install it.

Second I downloaded the plesk auto installer but oh surprise it didn’t work either, the problem was I havn’t installed MySQL 5 first. Here I tryed with a simple apt-get but that didn’t work so I had to install first the sources I needed and then update apt-get repo and finally try to install MySQL 5.1 so here’s what you should try first

On your terminal using your favorite editor edit this file and add the following lines:
#nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and at the very bottom add
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/monty/ubuntu gutsy main universe restricted multiverse
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/smurf/ubuntu gutsy main universe restricted multiverse

Press Ctrl-X and Y enter to save and exit

Do both updating and upgrading to make sure apt-get works as it should
#apt-get update
#apt-get upgrade

Get mysql
#apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

If you happend to have troubles at this step try

#apt-get -f install

which should force the instalation of whatever else is needed and finish the installtion

After that browse to where you downloaded your Plesk auto installer , for example I saved my auto intalled to /home/perrohunter/parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386

So first add it execution permissions:

#chmod +x parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386

and now if you want everything to go smooth for you try installing Plesk using it’s web interface

#./parallels_installer_v3.4.1_build090120.13_os_Ubuntu_8.04_i386 –web-interface

this will prompt you to open your server hostname at the port 8447 on any browser, I had some problems using the hostname so I used the IP

htt://172.16.12.131:8447

from there everything was fine, hope this tips help you get straight to the solution 🙂

cheers