Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

I really really like my Palm T|X. It’s starting to look like it’ll be a perfectly good media player as well as doing all the nice PDA stuff, and I’ve been slowly getting hooked on using it to dial my phone via Bluetooth.

Which leads to the obvious question: why not just be done with it and buy a Treo when my phone contract comes up?

Easy. Because Palm don’t actually make the Treo I’d like to buy.

What I want is a T|X with a phone built in. No keypad, no keys at all apart from the navigation keys down the bottom. Maybe stick a jog-dial on the side if the OS can be made to use it sensibly. The critical thing is the display. The T|X is simply the best PDA I’ve ever owned — and I’ve owned a few — because it doesn’t waste screen space on a fixed writing area nor does it compromise by having a keyboard.

I will almost certainly not be getting an iPhone when those come out next year. I like having the freedom to install third-party applications. I like being able to choose the phone service that suits me rather than Apple. And I like not having my desktop OS choice dictated to me.

But a T|X with a phone? Golden.

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Tags: Tech by matt
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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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I’ve been looking at the many reviews of the iPod Touch and thinking it sounds like a pretty nice device, but it also looks artificially limited in a way I just don’t feel comfortable supporting. There’s no good reason for the built-in apps to be limited the way they are, there’s no good reason for there not to be a way to put third-party apps on it, and there’s no good reason it should be locked down to stop non-iTunes clients putting music on it.

Well, I write “no good reason” but of course there is a good reason as far as Apple is concerned: they want to control the iPod experience as much as possible, and if that means a few geeks won’t be happy then, hey, screw ‘em.

So. No shiny new iPod Touch for me. I don’t run Windows or OS X any more — note to Steve Jobs: when pixel density keeps going up, resolution independence becomes bloody important, not something to talk up and then drop — so I’d have to stuff about to put music on one anyway, and word is that they don’t play nice with VMware either.

So, I think. I have a Palm T|X sitting here. I don’t use it quite as much as I thought I would when we bought it. I do use it, but my schedule isn’t terribly hectic so it’s not as important to me as my partner’s is to her. It has a reasonable touch-screen, a stereo headphone jack, and an SD slot. And I just happen to have a 2GB SD card sitting around…

Having read a bunch of software reviews I settled on Pocket Tunes as the app to try. It does AAC and MP3 among others. My collection is a mix of AAC and MP3 and most of the PalmOS music apps don’t do AAC.

Loading it up with music wasn’t terribly difficult. CardReader on the Palm turns it into a USB mass storage device. Ubuntu’s automounter doesn’t notice it — I probably need to tweak something somewhere — but it’s a mountable VFAT volume. Copy music files into the Audio folder, turn off CardReader, and off we go.

Sound quality is reasonable. I don’t expect brilliant from a portable anyway. I think it sounds a little flat through the nice HD580s I use at home but the results are still perfectly acceptable.

Interface-wise pTunes is pretty good so long as you choose a skin with big finger-friendly buttons. The one thing I can’t tweak and wish I could is the font used in the music-selection dialog: it uses the standard Palm “normal” font which is a bit small for my eye — iPod wins over this with the modified-Chicago they’ve been using for years.

The next step is to see how it copes out and about. If this works well I can see being tempted by a Treo in a year or two, if they’re still around.

Million-dollar question: how long before someone does a Touch interface knockoff for Palm? Seems a pretty obvious move, if the hardware is up to it.

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Tags: Music, Tech by matt
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Further to my last post, after some more mucking about with Gutsy on the home machine.

The audio problem with Rhythmbox seems to go away if I turn the volume down a little from the default. This is using the application’s volume control, not the system one, which is what I’d been using previously. Presumably it’s doing its own processing and at 100% it is distorting.

Warcrack runs pretty well even with Compiz enabled. Framerates are about what I was getting with Fiesty, possibly a little higher, and it works nicely with Expo mode as you can see in this screenshot. The one flaw so far is that very occasionally — and I’m not sure what triggers this — the Gnome panels will insist on sitting over the top of the Warcrack display and the only way to stop it is to quit the game and restart.

The other small Warcrack annoyance is that the freeze-on-exit bug found in the last few months’ of Wine builds is back. It’s fixed in the current Wine, but Gutsy is using something slightly older. Not a huge problem, and I expect that once Gutsy goes release the WineHQ people will start providing binary packages for it.

One final exciting bug: the title-bar on Firefox (so far) is sometimes corrupted. You can see what I mean here. If it’s forced to refresh (e.g., switch windows) it is redrawn correctly. Most often happens when I’ve switched back to Firefox via Expo mode.

In any event, I am broadly happy using the Gutsy beta both at home and at work, and we will probably install it on my partner’s new machine when that arrives this week. She’s seen what Compiz can do and really likes the look of Expo, Scale, and Enhanced Zoom.

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Have been running the Gutsy beta at work for about a week now. So far so good. From an end-user perspective the main change really is just the default use of Compiz, and while that is disabled on my machine — it has an Intel X3000 GPU which is blacklisted — it does mostly work if you remove it from the blacklist. Just don’t use any of the 3D screensavers or the water effects.

And I now find myself missing Compiz when I do stuff at home, specifically the Expo and Scale modes. Having set those to trigger on the bottom corners of the screen, I find myself using them constantly for window and desktop switching. As I typically have a lot more windows open at home I can see it being very very useful.

I’ve tried the Gutsy beta at home but something somewhere is making sound from Rhythmbox distort on bass. Have done a little poking, Totem and Exaile both play the same material just fine, so it’s clearly something specific to Rhythmbox and this machine, as it works fine at work. At least I have a very simple test case: play “Electronic Performers” by Air and the distortion comes through pretty much right away.

This is a pity as I quite like where they’re going with Rhythmbox.

The other question will be how full-screen Wine stuff (i.e., Warcrack) copes. The machine at work is behind the sort of corporate firewalls that mean there is absolutely no point even trying so I haven’t checked this out recently, but last time I tried there was that whole annoying business where the Gnome panels would sit over the top of the Wine window.

The timing of the Gutsy beta is unfortunate in terms of my personal ability to properly test and debug — life has been a bit hectic and draining of late — but I’m sure it’ll be a fairly solid release.

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Tags: Linux, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
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