Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Last night I wrote a bit about using a Palm T|X as an iPod-alternative, but having spent some time today reading about what other Linux users are using instead of iPods I’m starting to wonder about the Sony-Ericsson W950i.

This is a 3G mobile phone that sells for about AU$450. It has 4GB of internal memory and presents as a USB mass storage device. It supports MP3 and AAC, among others, and the Walkman application has a pretty good reputation. It has a touchscreen and runs UIQ 3.0 so it’s effectively a smartphone.

This review makes it sound pretty good. It doesn’t have a camera, but from my perspective that’s a plus.

The main “gotchas” I can see are that it doesn’t have any memory-card slots at all (they figure 4GB is enough) and it uses the stupid “Fast Port” thing for headphones rather than just providing a 3.5mm jack. But they do include an adaptor.

None of the Australian phone networks are offering this handset but it can be purchased outright for about AU$450 which is, while not exactly competitive with the iPod range, still not a particularly bad deal.

Anyone got one and care to comment?

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Tags: Tech by matt
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Or, more specifically, the sorry state of Linux music player software.

I think I’ve tried most of the available options now. Here are my impressions:

Rhythmbox

I’m used to iTunes on Mac and Windows, so Rhythmbox is an obvious choice. It has a similar three-pane browse interface and that basically works pretty well. What stinks is stability. I do not want my music player falling over randomly. The version shipping with Gutsy is less-prone to keeling over than earlier revisions, but it’s still far too often.

Banshee

Come back when you get a browse mode.

Exaile

This is what I was using on Feisty. Not the version that ships with Feisty, of course, because I wanted DAAP support, but the backport version. That worked pretty well and I was happy giving it to my partner to use. Unfortunately the version in Gutsy has gone a bit senile and now “forgets” track numbers. Which makes it unusable if you’re the sort of person who still likes albums.

Amarok

If Exaile’s UI is OK, then why not try Amarok? Well, mostly because the versions in both Feisty and Gutsy are incapable of parsing more than the first 10% of my music collection before they go catatonic. Yeah, OK, I can accept that maybe there’s some weird shit in my music tags, but I cannot accept that “sit still and do nothing” is the right response. Throw an error and move on to the next file, damn it. I believe this is a problem with the KDE tag library it relies on, but I really don’t care whose fault it is.

Totem

OK, so the fancy-pants library-based players are all failing to work. Surely the bare-bones “movie player” can handle the job? Sadly not. In Gutsy at least it has the random crashes down pretty well, just like Rhythmbox did on Feisty. It’s fine for playing a single track or a single movie, but gets all upset with a playlist.

VLC

Getting really spartan now, aren’t we? This worked OK the first few times, though I don’t know that I like the playlist editor much. But then it started deciding to play only one track at a time: it’ll play a song, then stop. I can tell it to play the next one, but I have to do so by hand. Gah.

Audacious

A “modern” rewrite of XMMS? Yeah, OK, why not give it a try. Feeling a bit like it’s 1999 all over again, but it seems to work. Except for the bit where I start finding Warcrack hiccuping — screen and sound updates pause for a second or two — pretty regularly where it hadn’t done before. This with Audacious idle. Quit Audacious, suddenly the problems go away. Clever.

XMMS

So now it really is 1999. And guess what? It actually works. So far, anyway.

What is so difficult about writing a reliable music player, anyway? Genuine question, I really don’t know the answer. I can understand that the more bells and whistles you add the more likely you are to run into trouble, but this is one area where I think there needs to be a really serious push to get behind one application and make it really rock-solid. You aren’t going to get granny to stick with Ubuntu when it turns out she can’t play her Nirvana albums on it.

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Tags: Linux, Music, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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