Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

Useful discovery: iTunes will authorise against multiple iTunes Store accounts, and this flows through to AppleTV. If the lack of useful captioning weren’t an issue I could absolutely see subscribing to 10 or so TV shows — the price is similar to buying a season on DVD but you get ‘em as soon as they air in the US, with no ads, and no mucking about converting for playback. 10 shows a year is cheaper than even basic cable here, and much better value too.

Last weekend I got fed up with Vista making things break and nuked the PC, installing XP and using it only for games and video encodes. The “main” machine is my old first-generation G5 iMac hooked up to a decent display, and it’s perfectly usable though I can really notice the difference between this old machine and the first-gen Core2 Duo iMac at work. Not going to do anything in any great hurry, but this does rather confirm for me that I should be looking to update to a newer Mac at home some time this year.

We had a large bin delivered on Wednesday and have spent some of the long weekend clearing out accumulated rubbish. I’ve finally chucked the last remaining big box of cables and we’ve gained maybe 1/3rd of our study back. The kitchen is also looking much better. By spreading this out over the weekend we’ve been able to get stuff done without feeling like we’ve given up much time to do it.

Weight-loss continues, slowly. I’ve lost about 7kg since we started this 3-ish months ago. Our scales have given up, so we’ll need to buy new ones. 7kg is a drop in the ocean — overall I want to lose 60kg from my starting point — but hey, 10% is 10%. It all feels quite viable, I’ve quit with the obsessive calorie-counting now, but that stage is useful for getting your head into the right place.

The new Portishead album sounds a bit mechanically goth. It reminds me a bit of Switchblade Symphony, but with more drum machine. Not sure how I feel about it, will have to give it a few more listens.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: Mac, Music, Random 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.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Tags: Linux, Music, Tech, Ubuntu by matt
6 Comments »

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.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Tags: Music, Tech by matt
2 Comments »

First impression: decent range, lower prices than iTunes, no DRM.

Beyond that, well, it “just works”. The interface is reasonable, the song-preview stuff uses an embedded Flash applet but is quite usable, the search stuff works, the web site is nicely responsive, and purchasing is easy.

The requirement to use their downloader application for album purchases is slightly annoying but it’s not difficult to understand why they’ve done that. I tried the Windows version and it worked, didn’t give me even the slightest bit of trouble. There’s an OS X version also available, and they say they’ll have a Linux one soon.

The downloaded files are 256kbps VBR MP3 and sound it. Apparently there’s some sort of fingerprinting in them, but whether that’s true or just something they’re saying to discourage piracy, who knows?

You’ll need a US billing address, but otherwise they aren’t checking the issuer of the credit card the way some online stores do so I was able to use my Australian credit card with no hassles.

Overall? This is a pretty good competitor to iTunes and nicely complements eMusic. When a Linux version of the downloader becomes available I can see us buying a reasonable amount of stuff from them.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Tags: Music, Tech by matt
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