Search song that plays on your computer (Linux)

Since I am working as freelance developer, I spent most of my “otaku” time with Animenfo Radio. Now, when listening with some nice songs you like, and you would like to know what the song is, then you can use Shazam to detect it. But using Shazam requires you to turn on your volume and use your mobile phone to detect it.

What if, you are listening the songs with your ear-phone?

To make it work on your Linux computer,

  1. Listen to a music or song, make sure it is still playing
  2. Run pavucontrol (PulseAudio Volume Control), install it if you didn’t
  3. Open a music searching website such as Midomi (so far I only know this website)
  4. Click the recording button (make sure it starts recording), allow using microphone as prompted by the web browser
  5. Then you will see this in pavucontrol
  6. PulseAudio Volume Controller record audio
    PulseAudio Volume Controller record audio
  7. There are two options, one is “Built-in Audio Analog Stereo”, another is “Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo”. Choose the “Monitor” something will redirect your computer audio output to your computer recorder (input).
  8. Then, the website like Midomi will get what you are listening, and submit for a search!

Yeah! No Shazam, and you can search when you are listening with the ear-phone.

Windows – Linux Edition (opinion only)

This is just an opinion, not the fact.

Not long ago, there is an announcement that Windows can run Bash on Ubuntu on Windows. Not only that, there is Windows subsystem for Linux.

Surely, Linux and UNIX have a lot of powerful features, especially developer oriented. That is why Windows has to adopt them. Because they really solves a lot of problems, such as bash and other commands like grep, find, and vi. Cloud computing is emerging, command-line is much more efficient than GUI. Text file for collaborative development is much more efficient (using git) than working on binary file, as you cannot diff and patch.

Since Windows now supports Linux subsystem, in my opinion, Windows may come out Windows – Linux Edition that

  • uses the UNIX filesystem hierarchy standard
  • supports commercial device drivers (like printers)
  • supports Linux container virtualisation
  • can run Windows applications natively (without WINE)
  • run X window customised with Windows theme
  • uses its own package manager with package repository
  • is cheaper price

I believe, there will be a group of users interested in it!