… and because it goes well with my website.

FYI – This site is undergoing some construction.  I have been working on a new theme/design for this website as well as building in some new content and features.

The design may intermittently seem incomplete and certain content may appear broken until I get everything ironed out.

Stay tuned…

A while back I wrote a post about managing music on Linux.

Since then I have bounced back and forth between using Rhythmbox and the Listen music player.  In preparing music and playlists for our upcoming wedding (no way in hell I was going to rent a crappy DJ) I have been putting these players through their paces.  I have been listening to song snippets, creating large playlists, smart playlists, transferring files etc.

With this work I have brought both Rhythmbox and Listen music players to their knees, causing crashes left and right.  Frankly they have both pissed me off to the point of no return.  Rhythmbox crashed and somehow lost/wiped all my playlists which I spent hours creating.

Rhythmbox (0.12.3), besides being very boring, works very well except for one thing: if you start double-clicking quickly from song to song, it will momentarily hang for 30 seconds at a time.  Sometimes it comes back and works for a bit, other times it comes back and will no longer play at all (I have to restart it).  This one bug, which I found to be filed in launchpad months ago (still has no fix) kills this app for me, unusable in my mind.

The Listen player is my favorite (v0.6+).  I’ve come to love its “dynamic” mode and the queue centric behavior, unique layout.  However, as much as I really really want to love this player, it crashes all the time.

What about Amarok?  Screw it, I’ve tried, just do not like its layout, never figured out how to get devices to work right.  If I can’t get something working quickly I dump it.

Bashee.. no.

So… I have been avoiding, but recently decided to download and try Songbird.  It is a cross-platform music app, built on Mozilla technology, open source blah blah.

Long story short, it does what I want.  Actually, I love the mash-up pane for instant artist info.  I got it running quickly, added a few add-ons so I have a now-playing queue playlist similar in function to the Listen player, yet can browse my music similar to iTunes and Rhythmbox.  Best of both worlds.  I tend to prefer simple “lightweight” apps, and Songbird is “heavyweight” in my mind because of the integrated web browsing that I don’t see myself using.  Yet, so far… its solid.  Me likey.  At least I can make some progress now…

I recently updated my system at work to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty.  It provides a more native environment for our development tools. With Hardy, I had to back port and find hacks for things to meet requirements.

Anyway, now happily running 9.04 32-bit, installed VMWare Server 1.0.9 to run a Windows XP Pro client on my Ubuntu host.  I found that something in the newer X server is mucking up keyboard mappings to VMWare such that the arrow keys, page up/down, home, delete etc. and number keys do weird things like opening menus and programs.

After some time, I found that I could at least workaround the problem by hard coding broken keymaps like so:

In ~/.vmware/config (create it if it doesn’t exist), put the following:

xkeymap.keycode.108 = 0×138 # Alt_R
xkeymap.keycode.106 = 0×135 # KP_Divide
xkeymap.keycode.104 = 0x11c # KP_Enter
xkeymap.keycode.111 = 0×148 # Up
xkeymap.keycode.116 = 0×150 # Down
xkeymap.keycode.113 = 0x14b # Left
xkeymap.keycode.114 = 0x14d # Right
xkeymap.keycode.105 = 0x11d # Control_R
xkeymap.keycode.118 = 0×152 # Insert
xkeymap.keycode.119 = 0×153 # Delete
xkeymap.keycode.110 = 0×147 # Home
xkeymap.keycode.115 = 0x14f # End
xkeymap.keycode.112 = 0×149 # Prior
xkeymap.keycode.117 = 0×151 # Next
xkeymap.keycode.78 = 0×46 # Scroll_Lock
xkeymap.keycode.127 = 0×100 # Pause
xkeymap.keycode.133 = 0x15b # Meta_L
xkeymap.keycode.134 = 0x15c # Meta_R
xkeymap.keycode.135 = 0x15d # Menu

yay google.

A while back I signed up for a twitter account to see what its all about.

So far, I think its pretty dumb.  Mostly a waste of time since the few times I’ve tried to log in and “surf” a bit, twitter’s server response seems so slow and choked up I end up just closing the window.

I use gmail for my personal email and really like how it keeps all email strings threaded in a single “conversation.” This feature really cuts down on the inbox clutter and is easily the biggest advance I’ve seen in any email client in a long time.  Well okay, a few other clients have this feature but Gmail is the only one that uses it well, by default, actually making it useful.

At work, I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird to talk to exchange (lack of calendaring yes, that’s another topic). The new division I’m working in generates TONS of email.  I average about 150/day. With the old standard non-threaded viewing of your inbox I find myself constantly scrolling around, re-grouping, re-sorting email to sift through email strings as not to miss any information – a total pain!

I finally spent some time to search for a solution… and found the Threadbubble add-on.  This simply enables threaded viewing in Thunderbird very similar to Gmail.  Awesome!

Upon further reading, I stumbled across the silly fact that this add-on is absolutely NOT necessary as Thunderbird already has threaded viewing capability, its just turned off by default.  The dumb thing is that its not exposed as an option – at least not easy to find.

The solution: Use Threadbubble.  Or, open up Thunderbird preferences(linux)/options(windoz), go to Advanced –> Config Editor.  Scroll down and look for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” and change its default value to TRUE.  Restart Thunderbird, and bam!  However, the one thing you get out of Threadbubble add-on, is that it will “bubble” up threads to the top if sorted by Date.

I also read that threaded viewing will be the default behavior (or at least an option) whenever Thunderbird 3.x comes out.

The only quirky thing, is that sorting via the column headers can muck up the odering with threads… in my case I like having the newest thread always at the top… if I get the view mucked up, I use the View –> Sort by –> Date, then turn on threading again to get it how I like it.

Cheers, -e

I’m an Ubuntu Linux fan.  I use the 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” release on most machines and at work.  To date, its definitely been the most stable and I can’t see moving off of Hardy until the next LTS release.

However, on my home system I tend to get upgrade fever.  Always looking for that new feature and update to Rhythmbox or Listen etc.  I originally upgraded from Hardy to 8.10 Intreprid… and regretted it.

Intrepid was way slow, don’t know why, but the desktop bring up was slower then Hardy, it took a good 20 seconds to connect to the network *after* the desktop was up.  Generally clunky interactivity.   For me it resurfaced the same NVIDIA issues I thought were fixed back w/ Gutsy!

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jakewhatever, I was pretty skeptical and hesitant to move. Yet, Intrepid was sucking and I just backed-up my stuff, so I decided to try it thinking I’d just end up back on Hardy.

Long story short… Ubuntu 9.04 is awesome.  The new 15 second boot up is amazing.  The desktop is up and running, connected to the internet before I can get my hands on the keyboard.  Overall interactivity is the snappiest I’ve seen.

I even did the whole reinstall in less then 15 minutes.  Didn’t bother trying an upgrade, but rather did a fresh install using the CD.  I keep my “/home” on a separate drive, so by choosing manual partitioning, I just reloaded (formatted) “/boot” and “/” but kept “/home.”  Fifteen minutes later, I rebooted, had all my stuff, desktop and even wallpaper still in place.  Slick as hell.  (I stuck with ext3, not touching ext4 until is smells less foul).

I have recently settled on a Linux set-up that works very well for my music needs. I thought I’d post up what I have been running in hopes it helps folks still exploring all the various solutions for managing music available on Linux.

I’m using Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbons”

By default this came set-up with Rhythmbox as the default audio player and music manager. There are other popular choices like Amarok (default with Kubuntu), Totem and Banshee. openSUSE defaults with Banshee. I’m not sure what Fedora is using. Rhythmbox and Banshee are more or less iTunes clones. Both work mostly well, but I’ve had problems with both, mostly with my iPod, and beyond that I find them very bland. Amarok is cool, innovative, and has a huge following with skins, customizations, plug-ins etc… but in my own personal taste, find the interface messy, bloated, and why they can’t just auto-mount devices is f*****g annoying. They have an explanation on their FAQ website that seems good when you read it, but OK whatever, all the other apps just do it. So just do it. Anyway, I digress…

Ok ok… I’ll cut to the chase, on Ubuntu 7.10, here’s what I find works well:

Preparation:

I used the synaptic package manager to install a few pieces of additional software that were needed beyond the default install.  The main ones for this posting are: Listen (my choice of audio player), gstreamer-plugins-bad (for m4a, other odd-ball media support), wincodecs (for .wmv/.wma support), lame for good mp3 encoder support and libraries, libgpod (enables iPod device support in most apps), grip (for audio ripping), and gtkpod (as an iPod manager).

Music player and library management:

I have found that all players including Listen, Amarok, Banshee, and Rhythmbox all have quirks or bugs with my iPod which is a black 30Gig Video model. Listen is written in python, and the python-gpod support is a bit behind the more widely used libgpod, and it flat out just doesn’t work. Banshee and Rhythmbox both actually work fairly well, both for the iPod and tagging. However I found that if I do too much at once Banshee will hang and do weird things, and Rhythmbox has one bad bug where removing files from your iPod deletes the entry from the iPod database but fails to actually delete the file and free up space… screwing your pod. From what I could find, this is specific to the 30G video model and a few others, but not all iPods, and all this should be fixed in the next distro releases.

So, the truth is there currently is no one perfect application on Linux to do all your music management… you have to try them all and use what works, and you may be like me and choose what you like. What I like are small, non-bloated, simple apps that work and are good at what they do…

Music Player:

I like and use Listen as my music player, I think it’s rad…. its an app developed from some French guy: www.listen-project.org

I think Listen is the f*****g bomb, and I have no idea why it hasn’t caught more wind. Frankly I dig the interface, the flow of playlist and album cover management on the left, sources like podcasts, your local library, devices like your iPod or CD, as well as Lyrics, Wikipedia sources in the middle, and then on the right you have your iTunes like browsing. It has a fantastic dynamic playlist mode that incorporates LastFM data, your preferences and playing history into a freaking awesome running DJ. You just seed it with a few tracks and let it go. Everything is at your touch on the main screen, no tabs or bloat, and its all drag-and-drop-able.

I’ll stop gushing about this player, and just say try it. Besides the fact that my iPod model in particular doesn’t work with Listen yet, it is a simple, effective, and brilliant music explorer.

Audio ripper and decoder:

I use GRIP, I think its awesome at the only thing it does, rip and encode CD’s. I have it configured with the default gstreamer ripper, and the switched it to the lame encoder with bit rate set to 192kb for mp3′s. (I just use mp3′s, they are universal between devices and players, and yes I’m kind of an audiophile so I like a high bit rate). Simple, effective, and it works.

iPod manager:

I use gtkpod. To date, out of all the players… none of them work entirely with my iPod, or have some quirk. Gtkpod however, is not a player, but rather a small app and all it does is you point it at your media collection, and it drags and drops stuff without issues to any iPod. Simple, effective, and it works for everything I’ve tried.

So there you have it…. hope that puts someone on the right track.

-e