Jamendo
Overview
Jamendo is a music-sharing web site (platform/service) aimed at promoting music uploaded by (or with the consent of) the artist. It therefore has two primary audiences:
- independent musicians wanting to promote their music on the Internet
- music aficionados wanting free music to download
Uploading
Uploading files to Jamendo requires their custom uploader application. There are versions for Windows (but not Windows 98 or earlier), Macintosh, and Linux. The Linux version appears daunting at first as it is described in the SourceForge listing as "source code", but it is a Python script and requires neither compiling nor installation. (You may have to install some or all of the Python libraries upon which it depends, but this is usually easy as they are typically available from your friendly neighborhood repository).
Annoyances
The following is true for the Linux version of the uploader:
- (severe) The content of each "album, LP or EP" ("album" hereafter) is set at upload time; you can't upload the files as you choose them and then later arrange them into the grouping you want.
- The order of tracks within the album is set by the order in which you add them to the uploader; you can't collect all the tracks you want and then rearrange them.
- The uploader won't let you add more than one track at a time – and it always starts from its home directory, so you have to re-navigate back to where the files are for each one (especially annoying since you can't select all the files from a given folder at one time)
- The uploader does not recognize .fla as an extension for FLAC files; you have to rename the files to .flac.
Note, however, that albums can be deleted after upload; naming of individual tracks also takes place after upload, as does assignment of cover art, lyrics, etc.