| Version 0.6, Feb 2003 |
| User Questions |
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Muse.Net is a service that simply enables complete control of all your digital
music or media from any Web browser or Internet PC.
Example scenarios:
- Playback your dorm room PC's music collection at any computer lab PC or friend's dorm room PC.
- Playback your home PC's music collection on a work conference room PC using your work office desktop PC.
- Merge the den, basement and bedroom PCs' music collections and playback on the living room stereo PC using a wireless laptop at Tom's house.
- Muse.Net liberates your music from the single collection, single playback PC, single interface lock-up common to every desktop media player
and jukebox software. Muse.Net moves your music from the PC to the Internet so that it's always available for playback anywhere.
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Muse.Net's service is most useful if you have:
- A fast Internet connection. DSL, Cable, Ethernet, WiFi, etc. all work well.
- A major stash of MP3s spanning several PCs. Ripped from your own CDs.
- Several PCs that you may wish to use for playback.
- A local area network (LAN) connecting all those PCs to each other and the Internet.
PCs storing digital media or used for remote playback need to run the Muse.Net
Agent software available from the Muse.Net Web site. Access to your Muse.Net
account media and direct playback, is available from any Internet PC.
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Simply download and install the Muse.Net Agent.
Installing a Muse.Net Agent creates your Muse.Net account. The Muse.Net Agent
pools your PC's media resources and communicates their availability to the
Muse.Net system.
In the near future, new PCs, media players and jukebox software may come with
Muse.Net agent software, so you won't have to install separate software.
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The easiest way is to go to Muse.Net and log-in to your account. You can do
this from any computer with a Web browser.
The Muse.Net Web site has several different interfaces you can try, use and
switch between. Moreover, we encourage software developers and Web site
developers to integrate Muse.Net client support into their offerings so we
trust you'll begin to see all sorts of useful interfaces to Muse.Net. Muse.Net
liberates your music from the single collection, single playback PC, single
interface lock-up common to every desktop media player and jukebox software.
Muse.Net moves your music from the PC to the Internet so that it's always
available for playback anywhere.
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- Your music is important to you and should follow you anywhere you connect to the Internet.
- Muse.Net asserts one's rights to listen to their purchased and ripped CDs anywhere on the Internet. Use it or we all may lose it.
- By supporting Muse.Net, you enable us to further develop Muse.Net's user-driven
services. We're building support for portable MP3 players, CD burners, Muse.Net
clients with deep organization, context and community services and many, many
more features. We love you, Internet music headz. Love begets love.
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- Muse.Net is completely different from your media player or jukebox software
other than both play your music.
- Media players and jukeboxes provide users a single media library interface on a
single PC to a single media collection for playback on the single PC.
- Muse.Net pools multiple media resources from multiple PCs - primarily media
collections and playback - and provides multiple access and control interfaces.
- Muse.Net is also different from Web server scripts found in the UNIX realm.
Muse.Net supports multiple media host PCs, multiple playback PCs and multiple
interfaces. Typically, Web server scripts are single host PC, single playback
PC and single interface solutions.
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Heck no. That prank is tired. Muse.Net is about making your collection
more useful to you. With Muse.Net your encoded CDs, your encoded vinyl, your
legal MP3s and your purchased digital media are always available from any
networked PC for playback anywhere.
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Absolutely not. A stranger will never download music from you using the
Muse.Net service. Muse.Net is for managing your media, same as popular software
such as Winamp, Windows Media Player, and iTunes, and hardware like a Rio or iPod.
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The only similarity is that like those services Muse.Net is all about
ubiquitous access to your music. Those services stored your music on their
servers, Muse.Net does not. Muse.Net allows playback to remote machines, those
services did not. Muse.Net offers a variety of interfaces along with APIs and
SDKs for developers to easily create new interfaces from. Muse.Net offers album
covers, artist bios album reviews and soon other contextual information to
accompany your music. Muse.Net will soon start to offer community features
surrounding your collections. Muse.Net virtualizes your collection and provides
an API to do all sorts of rad things with that collection. It is not merely a
web site. :)
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Yes! You can learn a lot about someone by flipping through their music CD,
vinyl or cassette collection. Or Muse.Net collection. All Muse.Net users can
share their digital music identity with everyone on the 'Net (without allowing
them to listen to this music). Muse.Net users can even customize this
public view, integrating their music identity into their personal Web site. A
Muse.Net user's email signature might link to their collection's public view.
Interested hax0rs should peep the Muse.Net developers site.
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We're currently developing OSX and Linux versions of the agent.
However, playback is currently possible from any web browser. If you have a
Windows machine in addition to your Mac or Linux machine and your music happens
to live on your Mac or Linux machine, you can expose the directories containing
your music to your Windows machine via Windows filesharing, run the Muse.Net
Agent on the Windows machine, and then your music will be available for
playback on any computer, including your Mac or Linux machine.
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Currently, some functions such as ID3 editing, playing back to a machine you're
not currently sitting at, and playing back from a machine outside of your local
LAN, will not be easily done if you are behind NAT or a firewall. We're
reworking the system to deal with your nasty home networking appliances, but
you may need to either do some configuring or simply wait to use Muse.Net until
August 2002 if you're experiencing these problems.
For some functions Muse.Net or your media player will need to communicate with
your various Muse.Net Agents. By default, the agent communicates over port 80,
because many firewalls permit traffic over this port. If you already have a
program using port 80 for communication you'll need to select a different port
for the Muse.Net Agent to use. The Muse.Net agent can help you do this.
If you are behind NAT (you have many machines on your local network that appear
as one IP address to the outside world), you'll need to map a port for each
Muse.Net Agent to communicate over. Ask your local networking expert for help.
Please post successful configurations in the
forums, to offer help to others using the same hardware.
If you are behind a firewall, allow TCP traffic on port 80 (or whatever port
you've selected for communication) from all hosts. If that's too insecure for
you (prude), you're likely geeky enough to figure out the proper config. :)
More trouble-shooting suggestions and improvements to the way Muse.Net finds
its way around your NAT/firewall coming soon. Meanwhile, ask your local IT
expert.
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Not yet, but they're coming. That said, I bet other sites will have cool
looking Muse.Net clients you can use before we even get our "skins" and "views"
stuff up. If you know even a slight bit about PHP, it'd be pretty easy to make
the PHP client look like your dreams|nightmares, especially the read-only mode
(a fine compliment to your weblog, if I do say so myself). See
the PHP SDK or post in the forums
for details.
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We built the system to support all media types. We'll switch on video once
we're a bit further along with audio.
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Not at the moment but you certainly should be able to. Your personal collection
right next to all of the music you're getting from your subscription? It's just
the bridge such a subscription service could use. Mail your subscription
service and let them know that you'd like them to work with us on this feature.
Thanks.
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Developer Questions |
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Muse.Net provides a Web Service for Client development. Our Clients (DHTML,
PHP, SimpleTray) were written using this Web Service as the API, and this same
API is completely available for you to program against, too. Details can be
found in our Dev pages.
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Build a Muse.Net client and we'll shower you with love in various ways. For
starters, assuming it's a "real" Client (not something your little brother made
in 5 minutes), you'll get a complimentary subscription to Muse.Net (of course).
We'll make links to your Client on Muse.Net and send you lots of people to try
out your Client (fame). We're even open to *paying* you for everyone who signs
up because of your Client (fortune). Fame + Fortune. Not bad, really. Mail us
to arrange the "fortune" part.
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At the time of this writing there are SDKs and example clients written in
DHTML/Javascript, PHP, and .NET (VB/C#). Information on these and one day
others is available in our dev pages.
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Yes. Our SDKs are all available under the LGPL license. All we ask is that you
give a link to Muse.Net somewhere within your client and only use the code to
build applications that work with the Muse.Net service.
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Specifics can be found in our dev pages. Questions belong
in the forums. Use the forums to let the
world know what you're working on and spend your days in #mediacode on
irc.cockos.com with the rest of us. If we're not too swamped, we can answer
questions in realtime there, but it's much more beneficial to ask questions in
the forums so the answer becomes indexed, searchable, and available to all
forever and ever. Thanks.
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Philosophy |
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Muse.Net is intended to be more than service, even more than a platform. We see
Muse.Net as the first block of a comprehensive Internet media distribution
architecture that embeds into code values that we as users and Internet
citizens should support: end-to-end systems, competitive marketplaces,
interoperability and extensibility, just to name a few.
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The Internet is what we make it. There are no immutable Internet laws other
than the code we choose to run. It's our privilege and our responsibility in
these formative times to establish our values as the Internet's code, to codify
the Internet's laws. (Newbies to geekcore philosophy should seek the classics:
Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig's
Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and
The Future of Ideas.)
Perhaps no current Internet frontier is more feral than digital music and
media. Beginning in 1993, we (Rob Lord and Ian Rogers, the founders of
Mediacode) were experimenting with Internet music distribution systems,
demonstrating and proving digital distribution's practicality, inevitability
and inherent potential to democratize media distribution. In the near decade
since, one can't help being kerfuffled at the morass digital media has become.
Piracy is rampant; major media corporation's offerings are scant and
restrictive; independent digital artists have had to rely on themselves after
the dotcom bubble payouts dried up.
Make no mistake, digital music is the first significant preterdigital
intellectual property to be sublimated into cyberspace. Digital music
establishes precedents for all digitized intellectual property forms,
time-shifting and space-shifting intellectualy property, even the intellectual
property concept itself.
If we, the 'Net Populi, the Geek Diaspora, can wrest control of digital media
from the incumbent media cartel as we did with MP3 certainly we can plot its
perduring future.
Here's what we propose. First, let's code an XML Web service that virtualizes a
user's existing media resources, liberating a user's digital media collection
from the isolated PC to the Internet. This is Muse.Net: a unified programmatic
interface personal digital media resources. Muse.Net safely aggregates and
reveals a user's specific resources to developers who code against Muse.Net's
supported, standardized and open interface. In the Muse.Net vision, every
networked PC is a potential playback device, a potential host of one's personal
collection and a potential interface to one's personal collection. Muse.Net
connected media players are constellated together and tethered to every user's
personal collection. Many collections, many playback devices, many UIs spring
from one extensible XML Web service interface.
Equally significant, the Muse.Net architecture allows systematic, conscientious
adjustments and limits, to permit or to restrict, each specific "fair use"
scenario. For example, is it fair use for Ian in Southern California to listen
to Rob's MP3-encoded David Bowie "Man Who Sold The World" album from Rob's
laptop in Northern California when Rob's not listening? How about if Ian
listens to one of the album's tracks when Rob is listening to another? How
about both of them listen to the same track at the same time? Oh really? Why?
Our media industry leader personal friends agree these are much more arguable
scenarios than anonymous peer-to-peer piracy. Done. Let's argue.
The Muse.Net architecture ensures all of us, users and developers, stay on the
right side of the double yellow line, while Lessig, the
EFF and other cyberspace rights defender friends judiciously work the
legislature and courts to protect fair use rights. We know anonymous
peer-to-peer piracy is not fair use, however if we fail to implement a fair
alternative certainly the incumbent media cartel will assert its venal,
oligarchical interests.
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XML Web services technologies, specifically XML, SOAP and WSDL, are the
W3C approved heirs to HTML and HTTP, the technologies that made the Web
go boom. The salient point for non-programmers about XML Web services is that
such systems are typically "loosely-coupled." For example, on the
loosely-coupled World Wide Web, any Web browser can be pointed at any Web site.
XML Web service systems including Muse.Net don't require calling ahead for
reservations, but rather encourage spontaneous rendezvous and exchanges.
Muse.Net's internal and external programming interfaces are XML Web service
derived and thus easily integrated, extended and reconstituted into any Web
site, desktop media software, media hardware or device. Visit the Muse.Net
developer's pages for code, examples and documentation.
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Alrighty then, but first a disclaimer. The half-life of 'Net visionary accuracy
is at best six months. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or trying to
sell you something, so here's what we're selling today. ;)
Muse.Net is a shim for the larger idea that we call
Mediacode. Mediacode is the realization that the XML Web services model
as utilized by Muse.Net to service users could and should be replicated along
the entire digital media supply chain. Mediacode actualized is the Visa
International of digital media.
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Shucks, thanks. That somewhat compensates for loved ones gazing askant with
pity when we blearily explain, "We're building a loosely-coupled, XML Web
service derived Internet digital media supply chain for the people. It's
inevitable you know."
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