Elisa – The Open Media Center

I’m not sure if too many people know about Elisa, quite frankly it is quite amazing that something as wonderful as Elisa is not in the limelight(as yet!). For a quick and brief introduction, Elisa is a sleek next generation media center where you can watch videos, browse pictures, manage music etc.

Read ahead for a quick list of features:

MUSIC:

Elisa finds music and arranges it by artist, by album and by folder. It includes all the album art to give you a very interesting interface to play with. Elisa has been designed in a extensible manner by which adding plugins can enhance features. It currently bundles the shoutcast radio plugin.

VIDEOS:

Elisa arranges videos and allows you to play them. It also has a youtube plugin that can be used to browse youtube videos!

PICTURES:

Elisa finds pictures from the default folders. The picasa extension allows you to browse pictures uploaded to your web album.

All locations that Elisa can look into can be defined in home/~user~/.elisa/elisa.conf. Whats better is that the file locations, network urls, anything!

Elisa works on both Windows and Linux, though on Windows its still an alpha release.

Some tips to install Elisa on Ubuntu:

Elisa is packaged with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) To install and get it working properly with all plugins do:

$ sudo apt-get install elisa

$ sudo apt-get install elisa-plugins-bad elisa-plugins-ugly

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-*

$ sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad

$ elisa

Here’s a link to install Elisa on earlier versions of Ubuntu: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=766012

Hey there Delilah

Hey there Delilah is just one of the best songs I’ve ever heard… Its by a pop band called “the Plain White T’s”… This song was originally from their 2005 album All That We Needed which was the 3rd for them… Recently they released their 4th.. called “Every Second Counts” in which Hey there Delilah was included again but in a new form… Since September 3rd this song has become one of the most downloaded songs and didn’t take long to hit the top of the Billboard 100… Currently its on #7… What’s exceptional about this song is that it manages to be so beautiful with just vocals and an acoustic guitar!

Here’s the youtube video for Hey there Delilah…

What more can I say about Hey there Delilah… peaceful, melodious, something that will stay with you in your list of favourites for sure!

lyrics on the fly!

Another great tool for all music fans, this time its a tool that looks for lyrics in such an efficient way! This one’s called lyricsfly and is a search engine dedicated to look for lyrics online!

First of all, i love the interface! Its damn sleek and simple without any complications or jazzy stuff all around, check it out below here…

The best part is that you can look for lyrics by song, artist, album or just put a part of the lyrics.. whats more? the results are so well displayed to give you complete info! You can even correct some lyrics that you find wrong… Plus, a link to the video on youtube! I think this is a great search engine that just gives you what you need without a sidebar full of porno ads or free smileys!

musicmesh.net- a great way to know your music

here i am, with yet another cool site i found. I came across this site called http://www.musicmesh.net/ today. Its a great way to know your music, very interactive, well organized and blah blah blah!

Musicmesh nicely includes youtube into its interface and allows us to first select a band of our choice. Once you select it, it gives a neat graphic display of the band and its albums… like this…

then we just need to click on the album and it displays all the songs for that album… what next?

Click… Listen… Watch… Enjoy!

Pandora- For the ‘Uncle Scrooge’ of music!

For those music lovers who will never stop their lookout for great music, here’s an awesome collection of some of the rarest music you’ll ever find…

Visit Pandora… this is an Internet radio station with a store of some of the best and unheard pieces of music. This is how the radio station basically looks…

Now what pandora actually does is that it gives you an option to select either a song or an artist of your choice and what it doesn’t do it that it doesn’t play the song you asked for! Ok ok, don be disappointed! The best part is that it plays songs that are similar to the one you requested and here is where you’ll find some of the rarest music… Apart from that you can create stations, share it with friends etc…

All in all, its worth it!