Google Play Music using openSUSE

Feliz Cinco de mayo ! I thought today would be a great day to just chill out, knock back a few rum and cokes or las cuba libres and figure out a decent way to share my music collection over multiple devices.

My first instinct was to set everything up on amazon music ! Boo hiss Amazon. Although you can listen to Amazon music just fine on any device for some reason they just don't like working with linux. Amazon music only allows uploads with Windows and Mac. Ironically, I called Amazon tech support one day about something else and the tech guy said it's funny because all the customer service people use linux systems. I think I remember him saying they use Ubuntu. Oh well, I find myself using Amazon less and less these days ! AMAZON Y U NO ACCEPT BITCOIN OR HAVE LINUX SUPPORT ?

O.k., I digress, after a little thought I figured I would try Google Play Music. Wow, what a pleasant surprise. Not only do they offer Linux support for some distributions, they honestly make it as easy as using a Windows computer. This was really refreshing and the first time I've experienced this. I hope this is a sign of things to come in the future. Kudos Google.

So the first thing you have to do is download the Google Play Music Manager. You can find it here.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/1229970

I clicked the "Download Music Manager" button and after a couple seconds it automatically detected I had a linux system and gave me a few different distro choices. I selected the Fedora/openSUSE 64 bit link and it downloaded the file and opened and installed automatically with apper. Holy crap on a cracker in my two years of using Fedora and now openSUSE, this has never happened. The install couldn't of been any easier ! I haven't had an install this easy since the days of using Windows.

After the install I had a hard time finding the program, but after going through application launcher I found it under "applications". I clicked the program, it asked for my Google user name and password, asked which folder contained my music, and then automatically uploaded over 600 songs in under an hour. I can't tell you how impressed I am with this whole thing. Much props to Google !

There were a few other configuration choices like whether you want it to automatically upload new music, or if you will upload manually. If you decide to use Play Music, I'll leave the configuration up to you. It's really easy to use.

Now, I need to get back to some rum and cokes, download the rest of my music from Amazon, and get it uploaded to Google Play. I can now stream music from my Android tablet, phone, and openSUSE laptop ! Rock on dood !

wget A Super Duper Image Scooper !

I love downloading images on the internet! Cars, pin up girls, scenery and of course I've downloaded my fair share of stupid human tricks and fail pix.

Occasionally you come across a page of content and you just don't feel like clicking on each image or video individually. The other day I came across a site of hot rods with over a thousand images. That's a lot of clicks ! Who has time for that. Here's what you do.

wget to the rescue !

 You may have used wget to download stuff from the internet. A simple file grab with wget would look like this :

wget http://www.websiteName.com/filename.mp3

If you've never used wget before to download a file, search the internet for a file to download, open up a terminal, type wget and paste the download link after it like in the example above.

I don't know why but for some reason when I download something from the command line using wget it seems to download so much faster than downloading it in Firefox or using a browser. So I often cut and paste download links from the internet and download with wget from the command line. Ahright, I digress ! Assuming you understand the very basics of wget, here's how we would use it to grab images from a webpage.

Note: Use man wget to learn more about this command. This is the very basics and just something I've been experimenting with. 

The Command

wget -r --level=2 -v -A jpeg,jpg --wait=2 http://www.targetDomain.com/webpage.htm

The above is all one line of code. So what do we have here and why does it work?

wget (command line utility used to download files)

-r (this is recursive, and will continue scanning directories to find the images or videos)

--level=2 (this will only allow it to scan 2 levels of directories, the higher the number the more directories it will download.)

(if you wanted to download an entire website of files you could omit the --level=2 NOT RECOMMENDED, but you could if you want)

-v  (this is verbose, and will show you whats happening as it downloads, again this is optional)

-A jpeg,jpg (this creates the accept list in this example jpeg, jpg,. You could just as easily change jpg to gif, flv, mp3, mp4 etc, etc, or change it up a bit and download jpg, and mp4. That would download images and video. You can add as many file types as you want here separated by comma.You get the point ! )

--wait=2 (this is really important, this gives you a 2 second wait before each downloaded file. This command will download files so fast, that you really want to add this to help decrease server load. If you were to download an entire site, leaving out --level you should probably increase this number to around 5 to 10 seconds. You don't want to DDoS the server.

Finally ...

http://www.targetDomain.com/webpage.htm  (the web page or website you want to download. Again I would refrain from downloading entire websites, as this can really strain the server your downloading from.)

So there you have it. This is the very basics, and you could really get more detailed in creating a Super Duper Image and Video Scooper command.  As always to learn all the command options type man wget to learn more about this powerful tool/command ! Once you create a really great command , create a script for it and then you could just run the script and add the web address for instant downloading fun.

Enjoy !

Here's a link to the ftp: man page on wget.