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I started tonight restarting my PC due to a Linux update. During restart I noticed that I’d left the grub menu on the default 10 second delay. I thought I’d quickly go into the grub config and change the timeout to 3 seconds, just enough to change something if I need to, but short enough to not be an annoyance.

While I was in the grub config I noticed grub_init_tune commented out at the end. Hmm. Quick google. Quick lookup of tunes people had worked out. A quick search for script to test tunes without restarting. Another bit of googling, installed beep and made it work. Somewhere along the line I found the opening riff for “The final countdown”. Cheesy to the max. Two hours later and job done. Shame I only ever restart my PC for updates…

In case you’re wondering, this is line I used

GRUB_INIT_TUNE=”480 554 1 494 1 554 4 370 6 10 3 587 1 554 1 587 2 554 2 494 6″

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I’ve been a fairly heavy user of Spotify for about 3 years, playing about 40-60 hours per week. I’ve liked using it and am pretty happy with it on Android, Linux (at home) and Windows (at work, for my sins).

When Google music all access (snappy!) launched, I thought I’d give it a spin and stopped my Spotify premium sub.

My first thoughts were that it seemed OK. The PC client is web based, so is platform agnostic. I’ve noticed occasional stuttering during playback as it doesn’t cache music as well as Spotify. It also seems to have problems when the browser is bogged down with a few heavy tabs. The music selection seems pretty good, no complaints. The price is pretty much the same as Spotify too.

I’d be happy using it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s Google.

I’ve got nothing specific against Google, but it’s everyone’s best interests to keep competition alive and prevent another Microsoft style monopoly. It doesn’t matter if Google music is better right now (it isn’t). When my free 30 trial is over I’ll be going back to Spotify, not because it’s has better caching or a good full-fat client application, not even because it has an offline mode. I’m going back to keep Spotify and competition alive.