briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Music)

Clementine: A triumph of Free Software

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:48:51 -0700

Ages ago, in the long-forgotten days of 2008, there was Amarok 1.4. And it was good. Then KDE4 came along and Amarok was rewritten, reshaped, becoming something... different. Something unsettling. Something not altogether pleasant.

Fear not. Today we have Clementine.

I consider Clementine a triumph of Free Software. A great project fell off the rails, so someone else picked up the pieces, forked it and kept the spirit alive.

Features present

Clementine embodies everything good about Amarok 1.4, in a shiny Qt4 package. The layout is eminently pleasant to use. It uses the classic "spreadsheet" playlist view that saw so much success in Amarok 1.4. If you care about cramming as much information about your music as possible onto the screen, this is as good as it gets. It's boring, and that's a good thing. It gets the job done.

Like Amaork, 1.4, in Clementine you can very quickly drill into your music collection, filter it, view recently added tracks, group songs by artist or album or year or genre or a combination of those things. Clementine also handles all of the edge cases correctly: it lists albums with Various Artists exactly how I'd want (exactly like Amarok 1.4). It correctly handles songs with non-Latin tag text.

Clementine detects additions and changes to my music collection instantly, without the massive scan-lags on startup that plague some other music players. Clementine doesn't bat an eye at my 7,000 song collection. There's no MySQL integration, but I don't need it. Clementine's SQLite backend supposedly handles 300k songs without much problem, which is good enough for me.

Clementine has Last.FM integration. It has three different styles of desktop notification. It has visualizations. It handles USB devices. It understands reply gain. It has cross-fading. It has an equalizer. It has a transcoder. It has a cover manager.

I'm tired of listing features. Let's just say it has every useful feature you'd ever want. And if you don't need a feature, it stays out of your way.

And for a program under such active development, it's rock solid. I have yet to see a crash. And speaking of active development, if you follow the activity in Clementine's SVN repo, you will find that this program is updated almost daily. How the devs find the time, I don't know, but I'm grateful. This program has gone from non-existent to awesome in record time.

Clementine can use gstreamer, so it even works cross-platform. I fired it up on Windows 7 the other day and I was amazed at how good it looked and felt. It supposedly also works on OS X.

Clementine doesn't cook your breakfast for you, but that might be in the works.

How to make a good UI

A perfect example of the polish of Clementine's UI: Tagging. How do you tag a whole album worth of music at once? You can select some songs and right click and go into a dialog, like most music players allow.

Or:

Edit a tag for a single song (inline) by clicking the field. Let's say you edit Artist.
Select multiple songs in your playlist. (Click and drag, CTRL-click, Shift-click, CTRL-A, whatever.)
Right click the Artist tag in the song you edited, select Set Artist to "XXXXX", and now all the songs you selected will be updated.

This is the kind of UI innovation that I like. It's simple, it's useful, and it's predictable. You can get things done without going through dialog windows, without a million clicks, without spending a minute scratching your head figuring things out.

(Meanwhile Amarok 2 is busy getting rid of the Stop button and making the volume control circular.)

Features missing

Admittedly, Clementine is missing a couple of features I wouldn't mind having. You can't skin or theme Clementine. You can't rate songs. You can't display song lyrics. You can't "queue" songs. But oh well. I can live without these features because the rest of the program is so darned good. For all I know, these features might pop up next week. I wouldn't be surprised.

The Clementine devs seem to be very friendly and responsive to feature requests and feedback, which is also great.

Clementine is also missing a few features/bloat that I'm glad to see NOT ported from Amarok. Wikipedia integration? Good riddance.

I would pay money for this program.

In November 2009 I had this to say:

(Anyone out there reading this, if you port Amarok 1.4 to Qt4 intact, I will pay you. Seriously. I will pay you money.)

The offer still stands. I will pay money for Clementine. I'm still waiting for a Donate link so I can do so. (Clementine devs, are you reading this?)

Why do I care about this so much? Because I have music playing whenever I'm using this computer, and when you add up work plus free time, I'm at this computer 8-10 hours per day. Music keeps me sane during multi-hour debug sessions. Music is an integral part of my life, and a music app is an integral part of playing music.

It's very important to me that the programs and tools I use all day are comfortable. Otherwise I become cranky. If you were a carpenter, would you want to use a hammer with a wobbly handle all day? I'm a programmer, and I want to use comfortable computer programs.

Clementine is very comfortable.

Exaile

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 11:22:50 -0800

In my ongoing quest for a good audio player (after becoming an Amarok exile and refugee) I settled on aTunes. aTunes is really good except for two quibbles...

One, it's a Java app (a Swing app as far as I can tell?) and the GUI is enormous and unresponsive and certain parts of it really behave strangely. Like clicking in text fields to focus them sometimes requires multiple clicks. It's just annoying enough to constantly throw me off.

The second problem is that it crashes all the time. Music keeps playing but the GUI disappears. pkill java has become necessary far too often lately.

So now I'm trying Exaile. It's very Amarok 1.4-like. I can overlook the fact that it's GTK because it's otherwise so nice. Best part, when asked if Exaile is going to go the way of Amarok 2, the dev has this to say:

Never ever ever ever ever ever.

I'm having a hard time coming up with any deficiencies in Exaile so far. Everything in the GUI is laid out nicely. No crashes yet.

One of these days I'll find an acceptable app... Most of these apps are good, but I'm too picky. I love how Linux lets me be picky. There is a wealth of options, and everything is free. I am spoiled.

Linux audio player comparison (nit-picking)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:18:48 -0800

Given my inability to use Amarok 1.4 and my lack of desire to use Amarok 2.0, I tried loads of music players and for now I've landed on aTunes.

It's not perfect. It's far from perfect. But it's the best of the bunch. These are the features I MUST HAVE for a media player and which aTunes possesses.

Last.fm integration. aTunes has probably the best integration I've seen in a player, without going over-the-top and stuffing a whole web browser into the app.
System tray icon, right-clickable with song controls in the menu.
Commandline interface.
Able to display CJK fonts. In Arch (or in Gentoo using the icedtea6-bin VM) CJK fonts are displayed as empty boxes, but in Gentoo using Sun JVM, it works fine.
Tag editing. aTunes has a pretty nice tag editor for single songs or multiple at once.
Amarok-like tree of albums/artists/genres/whatever I want. I want a single expandable and collapsable tree-list, not 3 panes I have to click between.
Equalizer.
Skins are nice; aTunes has these.
"Collection" support and folder-watching/auto-updating when I dump music into ~/music. aTunes does this very well. Scanned a few thousand files fairly quickly, and does updates very fast.
Amarok-1.4-like spreadsheetish playlist layout.
Lightweight build process. No gstreamer. aTunes provides Mplayer and Xine backends and has few to no other dependencies (besides Java). The Mplayer backend didn't work out very well for me, but Xine works beautifully.

It also has some other nice bonuses, like the elegant way it uses the Album Artist tag for albums with multiple artists, the interesting statistics and bar graphs it can produce from your song listening history, playlist tabs, and so on.

Things I dislike about aTunes... well it's a Java app, so it takes a decade to start up. It also has horrid fonts and the widgets are clunky. But it's responsive once it's running, and I don't care how it looks as much as how sane the layout is. Searching is also clunky. But these aren't show-stoppers.

Here's a list of other players I tried, and why I didn't use them.

Amarok 1.4

I'd use this if I could. :( It compiles and runs on my Gentoo box but too much stuff is broken due to bit-rot.

Amarok 2

Covered in detail.

Banshee

It wanted to pull in about a billion and a half Gnome dependencies. This is not fun for a KDE user.

Songbird

So close. This is probably second place behind aTunes. It has a great plugin system, it's skinnable, the layout is extremely functional and compact and easy to use and customizable. But...

No system tray icon in Linux! This is a show-stopper. There's alltray but it doesn't let me right-click and have song controls.
It has a clumsy commandline interface which makes setting global KDE keyboard shortcuts annoying.
Bloat. Do you really need a full-fledged web browser in your media player?
XUL, ew.

gmusicbrowser

This is very customizable (almost absurdly so) and looks promising. However...

Still a bit beta-quality.
Crashed on me a couple times in the short time I used it.
Interface has a kitchen-sink feel to it. Too many tabs and widgets all over the place. I couldn't find a layout I liked.
Looks pretty good, but no real compelling reason to use this.
Written in Perl?

amaroq

Alpha-quality PyQt4 clone of Amarok 1.4. Looks promising. I will keep an eye on this.

MPD

Last time I tried MPD was years ago. If aTunes doesn't work out, I'll try this next. But aTunes has kept me going for a week now, and I have very few complaints.

If they do a complete rewrite for aTunes 2.0 and destroy the interface, I'll jump off a bridge.

ATH-AD700 Review

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:10:30 -0700

Recently I got my ATH-AD700 headphones. I've been FAR more excited than anyone has a right to be, waiting for these things to show up, like Christmas in August. Sweet, sweet anticipation. It was well worth the wait.

The only other headphones I have to compare these with are my Grado SR80's (which have really seen better days) and some Shure "noise-cancelling" earbuds which are nice but are not comparable to either. So I'll compare the AD700 to the SR80's. ATH-AD700's are pictured left, Grado SR80's are right.

(Note: Nowhere in this article shall I refer to anything as "cans". I reserve the right to retain some level of self-righteous, snobbish disdain for the audiophile community.)

ATH-AD700 in two words: Freaking Huge.

One cannot understate how enormous the AD700's are. I thought the SR80's were big but the AD700's make me feel like a toddler. They literally engulf your face like the hand of a giant. If you have a tiny head you might have problems even keeping them on your head.

These are the kind of headphone that completely surround your ear rather than sit on your ear. With the AD700's I could probably fit 2 or 3 more ears into the cups along with mine.

There is no way you will wear these and not look completely ridiculous to those around you.

And yet, freaking comfortable.

In spite of their size, the AD700's are very light. They seem to be made of some kind of thin plastic with aluminum grated sides and a few metal finishing bits. They barely feel like anything when you put them on. I've worn them for many hours without discomfort.

And they feel wonderful. The pads are some kind of soft comfy velour fabric. These headphones are not manually adjustable; instead there are little 3-D flaps on top that auto-adjust on springs, and they seem to help equally distribute weight around your head so it isn't all bearing down directly on your ears. The lack of a proper "band" probably contributes to keeping them light. When you put the AD700's on, and you feel everything magically shift around to fit your head, it's a freakish (yet strangely entertaining) experience. I felt like a cyborg.

By comparison, you can't forget you're wearing SR80's. They are mostly metal and thick heavy plastic and they hurt after a half hour. The cups are hard plastic and the foam pads are oddly shaped so that your ear inevitably sits directly on the poky, scratchy plastic of the drivers. From the first day I owned the SR80's there was no mistaking that they were painful, and they've gotten far worse over time. I put up with the SR80's in spite of this because they sound great.

Which brings us to...

Sound quality

The AD700's really do sound awesome. I had my doubts how much different they'd be from my SR80's, but there is definitely a noticeable difference.

The AD700's are very detailed compared to the SR80's. The SR80's have an overwhelming amount of bass and it drowns out the vocals on a lot of my songs. I'd never noticed until I put on the AD700's and heard the difference.

My music of choice is metal, industrial, hard rock, soft rock, a bit of techno and J-pop, and they all sound great. I don't have to screw around with the equalizer settings on my MP3 player just to be able to hear the vocals clearly, as I sometimes did with the SR80's. The AD700's are probably what people call "neutral".

When I listened to one song of a live concert on the AD700's, I actually heard a police siren in the background as a cop car apparently drove down the street outside the concert hall. I'd listened to that song probably 50 times on my SR80's, and never heard that. There were actually many times this week when I was sitting in my office at work and heard what I thought was a sound behind me, and as I looked around trying to find what was making that noise, I realized it was in the music. It's a bit unnerving.

If your main criteria is bass, the SR80's are probably better. I thought I really liked bass to the exclusion of all else, but maybe I'm getting old or maybe my tastes are changing, because the bass on the AD700's is more than good enough for me. It's definitely weaker but it's also clearer.

Anything else I can say about these is going to be even more subjective and unhelpful than what I already wrote, but I think I do prefer the sound of the AD700's over the SR80's at this point. To be clear though, both of these headphones sound amazingly good and I was very happy with my SR80's for years and years. (The AD700's also have the advantage of being shiny and new and I'm sure this skews my opinion.)

Note that these are "open" headphones, so they will leak noise. People sitting next to you will hear your music. This isn't an issue for me but it may be for some.

Build quality

I won't be able to make a real comparison until I bang the AD700's around for four years in my briefcase like I did with my SR80's, but at a glance they certainly look and feel sturdy. Some of the ridiculous design flaws of the SR80's (like the ever-spinning cups that result in crimped and broken wires) are joyously absent in the AD700's. The headphone cord comes out of only one side of the headphones, which helps you not to feel like you're being strangled by two cords meeting under your chin as with the SR80's. The headphone wire itself is thinner than the SR80's but also feels more flexible and hopefully less likely to snap.

(The cord on both the SR80's is way too long, and I end up looping it and twist-tying it to avoid tripping over it or running it over in my office chair. But too long is better than too short.)

Even the box the AD700's came in was impressive. It had nice Japanese writing all over, and to open it was like unfolding origami.

Price

I got the AD700's for less than $80, new. The MSRP is supposedly $250. I don't know if I got an insanely good deal or if the MSRP is artificially inflated, but you can still get the AD700's on Amazon for around $80 if you look around.

This is $10-20 cheaper than Grado SR80's. I don't think the price difference is significant. I think both headphones are easily worth $80-100. Are they worth $250? Er... maybe not.

Conclusion

ATH-AD700: I love these things. I suggest, nay, demand that you buy them. They feel and sound very good. I am glad I didn't get replacement Grado SR80's as I originally planned.

I think it is easily worth spending $100 to get a "good" pair of headphones. Even if all you listen to is a crappy MP3 player, it makes a huge difference in how much you will enjoy your music. But I also use headphones when I'm at my computer, or even when I'm gaming. For me music is essential for avoiding distractions while programming, and these headphones are excellent for that purpose (especially because of the comfort).

The only bad thing about the AD700's is how ridiculous I look wearing novelty-sized, bright purple headphones in public. Personally, I will pay the price of bearing that shame.

Audiophail

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:17:12 -0700

My Grado SR-80 headphones are more electrical tape than headphone at this point. Inexplicably, sound continues to come out of them. The wires have so many breaks that I'm not sure how this is physically possible.

Also the top of the band is also splitting apart and the pads are worn down and fall off constantly and there are pokey plastic bits that hurt my ears a lot. After prying them apart with a hammer and screwdriver to fix the wires a few times, they look like they've been through a wood chipper. I love those things but it is time for retirement.

Researching headphones can suck up months of your time if you let it, especially if you believe the bullcrap. Going to an "audiophile" site like Head-Fi is like entering a new world. I have no idea what any of the vocabulary means.

"Detailed", "neutral", "open soundstage", I can figure those out to some degree. But what the hell do "sweet" and "dark" and "thick" and "smooth" mean with regard to headphone quality? Are we talking about music or chocolate? What do "forward" and "recessed" and "transparent" and "analytical" mean? These are rhetorical questions, I don't care what they mean. I have my doubts that they even mean anything objective.

Then there are strange beliefs, like that letting your headphones run for 100 hours to "burn them in" when they're new will make them sound better. I'd really like to see that theory put to a proper scientific test. I have strong doubts that it's anything more than people's minds fooling themselves. It sounds like voodoo. At least it's not as bad as $7,000 speaker wires.

I can definitely and easily tell the difference between cheapo $5 headphones and my Grado's, but beyond that I really start to doubt that it matters. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on headphones seems like insanity to me.

For this reason I decided to do next to no research, and went and bought the first pair that I found online that looked comfy, got mostly good reviews, got a couple good reviews on head-fi (as far as I could decipher) and had a price of around $100. I ended up ordering ATH-AD700's from Amazon. Should be here in a week.

Wikipedia, You Scare Me

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:33:36 -0700

Weird Al's newest song has been on Youtube for less than 30 minutes and already the Charles Nelson Reilly page has been updated with a link to it.

How long is it going to be before the internet acquires a physical body and rules over us all?

Songbird vs. Amarok: How not to design a GUI

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:09:23 -0700

Recently I forced myself to uninstall Amarok 1.4 and try Amarok 2 again. I saw there were some nice updates to the interface coming in the next version so I grabbed the latest version from SVN.

I very quickly started looking for other alternatives, and you'll soon see why. The best I could find was Songbird.

I'll start with a disclaimer that both of these programs are great, and they are free. I am not suggesting, let alone demanding, that anyone change anything in either program to suit me. Kudos and thanks to the devs of both. These two programs are both probably better apps than I could dream of coding. Feel free to respond "Ask for a refund" and "Fix it yourself" anyways if you like. I think it's still useful to give some constructive feedback, and maybe I'll learn something myself about how to make a good GUI along the way.

Next I'll start with my conclusion, so you don't have to read further, because this is admittedly long. Amarok 2's interface is extremely painful, but at least it plays music. Songbird has a wonderful interface, much like Amarok 1.4 had a wonderful interface; if only I could get Songbird to make sound come out of my speakers, I'd be set.

I think it's interesting to compare Songbird and Amarok 2, both being bleeding-edge music players for Linux with a similar philosophy and feature set. So let's compare GUIs. I sized the two windows exactly the same and tried to have them display mostly the same bits of information, so it'd be easy to compare. Click below for larger versions.

Amarok 2:

Songbird:

Playlist

In Songbird the playlist dominates the window by default. This is good because seeing a list of music is what I want. It's the whole point of a music player.

I strongly dislike the "filter pane" style of browsing my music. Thankfully you can turn it off in Songbird. You can also install "cover flow" sorts of eye-candy extensions if that floats your boat. I avoid such things, and Songbird's interface is easy and comfortable by default.

In Amarok by default the playlist is a little sliver of GUI off on the right, and the middle context pane dominates the window. Enough people complained about this that in later versions you can turn off the context view entirely, in which case the playlist will stretch to a reasonable size. Whether the information in it will look good is another story (see below).

Amarok's "Local Collection" browser is an expandable tree. You can customize how things are grouped. This was great in Amarok 1.4. It works similarly here. It's not as lightweight or responsive as in 1.4, but I can't complain. By default it's way on the left, with the playlist way on the right and the context view in between, but in later version of Amarok you can change the order of the panes.

I'll call this a tie even though you have to fight for it in Amarok.

Sorting the playlist

Songbird has a bunch of columns with column headers. To sort things you click the headers. Note that this is how Amarok 1.4 worked. This is how every program in the universe works.

In Amarok you have drop-down menus that you can add and remove with buttons, and you pick sorting criteria from that list, left-to-right in order of priority. This is clumsy. According to the devs' blogs this part of the GUI is a work in progress, which is fine, maybe it'll improve.

But note that the design of Amarok's playlist fundamentally limits the ways you can sort it. There have to be some magic GUI controls floating up top, disconnected from the playlist. You aren't going to get a bunch of column headers that you can click because the playlist isn't just rows and columns. Each song in the playlist can take up more than one row and there are grouping-headers interspersed. This is painful and I imagine it's always going to be painful.

Playlist readability

There are no labels in the Amarok playlist to tell you what information you're looking at in the playlist. I initially customized my playlist to show disc number and track number. Doing so, you get a bunch of numbers. What do the numbers mean? At a glance you can't tell. Am I looking at an Artist or Composer? Play Count, or Score? Does that big empty space mean my song is missing a Genre or missing a Year?

In Songbird the columns have headers.

Playlist length

How many songs can you squeeze into the playlist vertically? This is an important metric for me. I want to be able to find a song quickly without scrolling through a list for a year and a half. Sure I can search, but search doesn't replace my eyes in all circumstances.

In Songbird even with those filter panes above the playlist it fits a few more songs than Amarok. You can turn off the filter panes entirely, in which case you can display tons more songs in Songbird than in Amarok. Songbird wins.

In Amarok, by default the playlist has a bunch of multi-row header stuff mixed into the middle of your playlist to show artists and album names and cover art. You can make the headers not take up so much room (or turn them off entirely), in which case Amarok gets pretty close to Songbird. You'll just do without album or artist names. Unless you can manage to cram them into the playlist in the rows beside the track titles.

Which brings us to our major problem...

Playlist customizability

In Songbird you can right click and add and remove columns. You can drag-and-drop columns to rearrange them. You can drag the edges of the columns to resize them. It's simple and it works. This is how Amarok 1.4 worked too.

Amarok fails hard in comparison. In Amarok to customize the playlist you go into a special dialog. You pick your components from a horizontally-scrolling list of huge icons. Then you arrange them into rows.

You can put two or more items side-by-side in which case they become multiple columns on that row in the playlist. Kind of. To control the width of the columns, you hover over that component in this magical dialog, and a weird circular icon appears. When you click it, a drop-down appears with a microscopic slider at the bottom that looks like it was pulled from KDE2. This is the only way to resize columns in the playlist. Here's a screenshot.

What in the world is this? What are simple drag-and-drop operations in Songbird and every other application ever made, are buried in this cryptic dialog under non-standard controls in Amarok. I've been using KDE and Amarok for a long time and it took me a good couple minutes to even figure out how this thing works.

I think the widths are percentages and have to add up to 100%, I don't even know. The slider is so small that if you drag it one pixel it usually jumps 5-10%, so it's nearly impossible to get anything to look nice. And when you resize the Amaork window later, the columns don't resize sanely; some fields are smashed into each other or overlap as others take up too much space.

Maybe this will all be fixed before the next release; I realize I'm looking at bleeding-edge pre-release software. But this whole idea is so fundamentally broken I don't know how it's going to be salvaged.

I've heard many times that "You can make Amarok 2 look like Amarok 1". No you can't. You can tediously stuff lots of information into the playlist so that it approaches the level of info you could easily and painlessly get in Amarok 1.4. But it will neither look nor act anything like Amarok 1.4. Resizing the playlist will break things. Nothing is labeled. Nothing is easily customizable.

Playlist consistency

Songs in Amarok are grouped into albums by default. If you have a song that doesn't belong to any album, it's displayed completely differently than a song that does. You can alter this in the scary playlist editor dialog mentioned above, under the "Single" tab (as opposed to "Head" and "Body" which control the "grouped" songs). Sound confusing? It is. Needlessly so.

In Songbird songs are displayed the same whether they belong to an album or not, since the play list is just a list of songs. This seems like it should be a no-brainer.

Playlist: overall

Amarok 2's playlist is unique, imaginative, and I'm sure it's a clever bit of code. It's also nearly unusable.

Why can't we have a grid of rows and columns? There's a good reason so many apps use such a control. It's simple and familiar and it works. I'm open to learning something new if it's an improvement. Amarok 2's playlist is not an improvement. Why can't the playlist be a simple list of things to play?

There's nothing about QT4 preventing someone from making a good GUI. Look at ktorrent.

The little things

Say I want to email or IM someone and ask them if they like some artist, whose name happens to be Japanese and difficult to type on my gaijin keyboard. How do you copy and paste the name of an album or artist in Amarok 2? In Amarok 1 you could just click any field in the playlist twice, and it'd let you edit or copy/paste that field inline. Same in Songbird.

In Amarok 2, you have to right click and go into the Edit Song Details dialog, and do it from there, then close the dialog. A tiny step backwards.

How do you change the rating of a song? In Songbird you click the stars in the playlist beside the song you care about. Same in Amarok 1.4.

In Amarok 2, you can display the stars for each song in the playlist, but to change the rating you have to click in the context pane. (So if you dislike and therefore hide the context pane, you're screwed.) Clicking in the playlist does nothing. A tiny step backwards.

All of these tiny steps add up.

Extras

So how well does each player serve as a web browser?

This seems like a ridiculous question, except that both really do try to be a web browser. You can open song lyrics and wikipedia pages and such things right in the music player. I find these features nearly useless. Lyrics are nice when it works (which isn't often, for the music I listen to), but browsing Flickr? Really? Does someone really use this?

Songbird does use its inline browser in a nice way to let you browse and install addons from the Songbird website, and Songbird has a cool feature to let you rip audio files from web pages. Amarok doesn't have these, but I don't hold that against it. I can easily live without any of this stuff.

So in Songbird you have an embedded Mozilla engine. It's hidden behind a tab. You can just avoid opening such a tab and then you don't see it. You can even hide the tab bar itself. Victory.

In Amarok the browser stuff inhabits the middle context pain. The size is limited for this pane, which means information is crammed into the available space, which greatly limits its use. It's also clumsy and difficult to turn components on and off, and I can't figure out how to resize them. The context view itself is either in your face, taking up most of your screen real estate, or it's gone and not easily retrievable.

Note in the screenshot, how in Songbird the lyrics pane is big enough to display all the lyrics, yet small enough not to be annoying. You can also hide the pane (as you can hide every other pane in the GUI) via that tiny button with an arrow under the pane. Amarok's lyrics widget is either too big (if you let it occupy the whole content pane) or too small (if you want to have anything else in the pane with it).

Note that Songbird's lyrics pane is added via an addon. It's a completely optional part of the GUI, which is nice. (Note that Songbird also mangles certain text in the lyrics due to encoding problems, which is a point against it.)

Wasted screen real estate

See that tiny little red icon in the bottom-right of Songbird? That's the Last.fm integration. It's all hidden in a little square of pixels, out of my face, not sucking up screen real estate. This is a common theme in Songbird. Everything is tiny and/or hideable. Tiny is good.

In Amarok everything is huge and round. Even ignoring the content pane, there's white space everywhere. There are buttons strewn all over the interface, like the seven in the lower right. Export Playlist? Does that really need a button? And other buttons appear (and disappear) in awkward positions at the top. "Add Position Marker"? Does this really deserve a prominent button right beside the main play controls?

And yet things I do need buttons for, such as changing the Skip or Repeat options, have no buttons. This is possibly the first player I've ever used that doesn't have a button for Skip and Repeat.

GUI skinning

Songbird is skinnable. So was Amarok 1.4, to a degree. Amarok 2 isn't and I don't know if it ever plans to be. I can live without skins but it's nice to have the option.

Desktop environment integration

As one might imagine, Amarok wins here, if you use KDE, as I do. Global keyboard shortcuts are already set up, it sits in the system tray, and there are nice Plasma applets you can put on your desktop.

Songbird meanwhile does not play nice. First, it has window hints set to hide its border and window title bar, and it tries (and fails) to manage windows itself, giving your window manager the middle finger. I had to force kwin to display the title bar and border just so I could resize certain dialogs that were otherwise broken.

Then, Songbird doesn't sit in the system tray. You can force it down there via alltray, but right-clicking the icon doesn't give you Play/Pause/Next/Back options like in Amarok.

There are no global hotkeys, but you can easily fix this in KDE too because you can set your own global hotkeys to do anything, and Songbird has a commandline interface to let you do what you need. It's still not as graceful as Amarok.

So KDE thankfully rescues Songbird from its own deficiencies, which is nice. Except...

Playing music

Ah, Songbird. Why oh why won't you work? Songbird uses gstreamer. In my years of bouncing between Gnome and KDE and XFCE and others, and using various distros, gstreamer has never worked for me consistently. I can get Songbird to play music, but Flash videos stop producing sound while Songbird is running. This is a known and reported bug, I'm not the only one. While Songbird is playing, other KDE apps randomly produce sound or not depending on the phase of the moon.

Amarok actually plays music, so I'm stuck with it. Unless I go back to Amarok 1.4 which I may still do.

Conclusion

Songbird is pretty good. If I can figure out how to make gstreamer play nice, I'll probably use it.

Otherwise just consider this yet another voice in the wilderness wishing for a Qt4 version of Amarok 1.4. There was nothing wrong with it, from a user's perspective. I'm not the first wishing for this, and won't be the last. If I had a couple years to get good at C++ and a team of programmers to help, I'd probably try it myself.

Why write an 87-page essay about the GUI of a music player? Because Amarok 1.4 was a really good program. I'm a programmer and I appreciate a good program. Songbird has a pretty darned good GUI too. It's painful to see Amarok 2 going in this direction.

I paid for music

Sun, 24 May 2009 20:06:32 -0700

As a general rule, I don't pay for music. The main reason of course is that the music industry are a bunch of thugs. If you don't know that already, you've been living under a rock for the past few decades. I won't even buy music for other people as a gift if I can help it.

Recently however I did buy music, specifically Jonathan Coulton's latest DVD. JoCo releases his music under Creative Commons, which is awesome, and when you buy it (from What Are Records) you get MP3s that are not infested with DRM, which is also awesome. When you buy that particular DVD, you get a DVD of the concert, a music CD of the same concert, AND you can immediately download MP3s of said concert while you wait for the DVD in the mail. All for $20. Well worth it for such quality music.

I first heard most of JoCo's music via shaky concert recordings on Youtube and via MP3s acquired "elsewhere" (nearly all of which are free downloads on Joco's website though); otherwise I'd never even have known he existed. And yet I ended up giving him my money, happily and willingly, and probably will again. Amazing how things turn out.

The other music I bought recently is Stephen Lynch. Again I heard most of his music first on Youtube. Again I gleefully spent money on his latest CD because it's good music and because it's DRM-less and thug-less entertainment and a good portion of that money is going to the artists.

Most of the music I like comes from Japan or various corners of Europe. Amazon sells a few (very few) Japanese music CDs, for between $50 and $90 each (plus shipping). Do you know how much it costs to ship a stream of bytes from Japan to the US via the intertubes? Hint, it's not $90. How does a stream of bytes increase $90 in value when it's written onto a piece of plastic?

These are strange times. There's such disparity between what the average person believes is right and wrong on the internet and what the law says is lawful and unlawful. This kind of disparity can't last forever. My high school history teacher said that in America at least, a law that is opposed by the majority of citizens in the country never lasts long; I think that's true. And it's as it should be. In a few decades, we're going to look back at how things were in the 90's and 00's and laugh.

My Poor Headphones

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:45:01 -0700

My precious Grado SR-80's needed some emergency surgery a while back, resulting in this disaster. They still work today, in the sense that sound is still emitted from them, but in terms of aesthetics, the situation has rapidly deteriorated. I've got bare wire and sticky electrical tape hanging all over the place. Also I'm probably one good yank away from snapping the wires off again.

If anyone reading this has a good tutorial or information on re-wiring a set of headphones, it'd be appreciated. I've never soldered anything in my life. I don't know where to acquire the wires; I imagine any wire will do, but I'm clueless when it comes to such things. I think I might like to do something like this mod and run the wire up over the top, to prevent the inevitable twisting from destroying the wires in the future, but I'm uncertain I could pull it off without complete destruction.

(At least I know enough about these things to cringe when people start talking about the "performance" of their headphone wires. $400 for a hunk of wire? Wow.)

Cowon D2 = awesome MP3 player

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:33:15 -0800

I finally broke down and replaced my crusty old Creative Muvo². Like any self-respecting geek, I agonized over which to buy. I settled on a Cowon D2.

I did tons and tons of research before settling on this. I knew exactly what I was looking for and the D2 met my requirements almost to the letter. So maybe I can save you some time and effort if you share my tastes. My requirements, which the D2 satisfies:

16 GB flash memory. More importantly, expandable via SD / SDHC cards. This means this thing is going to last me a good long time. 8GB of flash memory is $20 or less nowadays, and there are already 32GB cards though they're crazy expensive. The price is going to drop fast though, giving me almost unlimited storage space.
Shows up as a simple FAT partition. This is essential for me. (Also supports MTP, if you can stomach it.) Music transfer via Devices in Amarok 1.4 works just fine.
Folder browsing or ID3 tag browsing. I obsessively tag my music, so I like that way.
Supports non-Latin alphabet filenames and tags. Most of my music is Japanese, so this is also essential for me. Cowon is a Korean company anyways, so they've got this down. The interface itself can be switched to many different languages, which is nice.
Audio codec support: MP3, FLAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, APE. You can't beat that. All I needed was MP3, OGG and FLAC, but the others are a nice bonus.
52 hours of battery life for music, optimally. You'll never hit this in real life, but you're still likely to get almost two days worth of playtime. Comes with an A/C adapter, charges in 3.5 hours. Can also be charged via USB, of course. (The USB connector is a standard cable, no proprietary garbage, which is also nice.)
Displays album art, including embedded art in MP3 tags.
FM radio.

The only one of my requirements the D2 didn't meet was to have a replaceable battery. From what I've read of people who disassembled this thing, the battery is screwy and may be difficult to replace, but I'm not too worried.

The D2 does lots of other things I don't care about, like playing movies and displaying pictures and text files and Flash, and it has a scientific calculator and displays the time and so on. All I wanted this for was to play music, and it does that amazingly well.

The sound quality on the D2 is noticeably better than my old Muvo. It sounds very good. There are a lot of equalizer settings, bass boost, and a bunch of things I don't understand. I turned them all on, and everything sounds awesome. I can turn this thing up VERY loud (ear-shatteringly loud) before getting any distortion. With my Grado SR80's, music on the D2 sounds as good as or better than the sound card in my computer.

The touch-screen interface is good enough for me. I'm not thrilled by such things and I'm smart enough to adapt to any usable interface; "user-friendliness" was not on my list of priorities. I'd rather have power than simplicity, and this gives me the power I want.

This player is like the KDE of MP3 players; there are options for almost everything you can think of. The interface is crammed full of information but the stylus works well to get through it. If you like a dumbed-down minimalist iPod click-wheel kind of interface, the D2 isn't for you. The D2 also has three hardware buttons, two for volume and one for menu, and their function can be customized.

All of this for $175 from amazon.com. This is a very good time to buy a D2, because the next generation of Cowon players is right around the corner. The D2 is likely to be discontinued in favor of fancier, flashier, more expensive but less awesome players. I couldn't let this pass.

AnythingButIpod has a good review of this player including videos.

Please die already

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:19:36 -0800

My one and only MP3 player is (still) a Creative Muvo². Complete with all of the state-of-the-art technologies you'd expect in an MP3 player:

4 GB hard drive. They don't make them like this any more.
A microscopic two-line black-on-greenish-grey monochrome display. It takes so long for song titles to scroll across that the backlight goes out before I can read them.
Two buttons. Play, and a sort of primitive swivel thing for everything else.
2 cm. thickness, so you never have to worry about losing it. You can't miss it. (By comparison, an iPod Nano is 6.2 mm.)
Cheap plastic exterior. Mine has all the corners cracked off.
Inability to display foreign-language ID3 tags. My Japanese song titles show up in some mixture of Chinese and Korean characters.
All for a low low 2004 price of $250.

Well, it's old. I want a new one. But similarly to my darned Grado headphones, this thing simply won't die and I can't justify buying a new one while this one works.

It's been dropped from great heights onto hard concrete, had heavy objects slammed on top of it, had cell phone power chargers plugged into the USB data port, had the filesystem all but corrupted by unproperly unmounting it from Linux, but nearly four years later it just keeps going. It has a HARD DRIVE in it. You'd think just wearing the thing while jogging for years (which I have done) and banging it around on the front seat of my car to and from work every day (which I have also done) would wear it out. But no.

I don't want to just break the thing outright. So I'm subtly trying to mishandle it in more and more extreme ways, to maybe coax it into giving up the ghost. I sort of accidentally listened to it in the bathtub and splashed water all over it today (again), and now none of the buttons work and it keeps booting into recovery mode. Then I put it directly in front of a space heater for 15 minutes to dry it off. This is awesome, except that I tried the same thing before, and once it dried out it came back to life.

Next I'm going to pry it open with a screwdriver. But it's probably still going to work. I'm going to have this thing until I die. I'm going have to pass it on to future generations.

Crap... I fixed them

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:24:58 -0700

I couldn't give up on my precious Grado SR-80s. Turns out the cable was only broken in three places; nothing a couple hours and a lot of electrical tape couldn't fix. Now I can't justify buying a replacement.

They really do sound amazing. If only they weren't so fragile and difficult to transport. And ugly, for that matter.

Grado Labs SR-80: RIP

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:00:46 -0700

My precious Grado SR-80 headphones died today. :( I hardly new thee.

This picture may not be suitable for small children or those with a heart condition:

These headphones sounded really great, best I've ever owned. They should, for how much they cost. But they were designed so so so poorly. The cups can rotate 360 degrees, which means no matter how well you take care of them, the cables from the cups to the Y-splitter will get twisted. Once I realized this I electrical-taped the cables together to avoid some of the twisting, but it didn't help. No matter how carefully I wrapped the cords up and stored them in my briefcase, 10 minutes later I'd pull them out and they'd look like a tornado hit.

Today I plugged them in and the left cup was sputtering and hissing in its death rattle. I immediately put the headphones on life support and performed emergency surgery, but the left wire snapped in my hands. You can only twist copper so many times before it gives. What followed was a good 45 minutes of hacking away at the plastic Y-splitter to get to the wires. But it was no good. I think something broke in the cup too, and that thing is impossible to get apart no matter how much force I applied. I tried heating it up to melt the glue but that didn't work either. I made it hot enough that the working parts are probably a puddle in there.

I'm almost glad this DIDN'T work, because then I'd be wearing that mess on my head for another year. Now at least I can justify possibly buying a replacement.

I absolutely need music while writing code. Depending on my mood, either angry German music or cheerful Japanese music. Foreign-language music seems to be just the right mix of brain-stimulation without the distraction of needing to pay attention to the lyrics. So yeah, I'm now in dire need a of replacement. I have backups but they're the in-ear bud sort and aren't the comfiest thing for an 8-hour session. Plus they cancel noise too well and I can't hear my boss talking to me.

It took me MONTHS of research to find these, but I can't justify buying another set after these broke in a few short years of heavy daily use. I need something sturdy and comfy that sounds really good. I need good bass in particular. Back to the drawing board I guess.

EDIT: Crap, I fixed them. :(

mp3gain

Tue, 27 May 2008 17:52:00 -0700

I listen to MP3s in the car and it's annoying when the volume isn't normalized. I can't be fumbling around with the tiny buttons on my MP3 player to adjust the volume while I'm driving. I found mp3gain and used it on a bunch of files and it appears to have worked.

If anyone knows of a better program for normalizing volume of lots and lots of MP3s, post now or forever hold your peace.

MusicBrainz Picard

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 23:02:58 -0800

It's not often I'd call myself "excited" about a program, but MusicBrainz Picard is a really great program. It lets you tag MP3s by looking the up in an online database.

That's very much like what a ton of other programs do, but the interface for this program is nice for doing a lot of MP3s all at once. The thing I really like about it is that it makes it easy to assign metadata to those MP3s that the program couldn't identify itself. It identifies what MP3s it can, and then displays a list of albums that it thinks the identified MP3s belong to. You can drag-and-drop unidentified MP3s onto the correct tracks in those albums manually to tell it what to do with the songs it missed.

The other nice thing is that it works well for tracks with non-English metadata. My many folders full of Japanese music were easily identified by this program and filled in with correct Japanese titles and artists and album names. Whatever tagger I'd used in the past (I can't even remember now) had used horribly mangled Engrish romaji for metadata, which was always disturbing.

The only thing that's annoying about right now is that this program is a QT4 app. This is the first QT4 app I've used, and I can't figure out how to set a QT4 theme, without installing KDE4 which I don't want to do. So the GUI looks horrible. I'm sure the GUI looks nice when it's using a proper theme, but even with screwed-up fonts and colors the program is very usable.

This program is in Portage of course. It apparently has some heavy Python dependencies on top of QT4, but such is life.

MP3 players

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:26:49 -0700

I'm still in the market for an MP3 player. At the time I got my 4 GB Muvo^2 it was way more than I needed. Now amazingly I have 12 GB of music on my hard drive. So I have to pick and choose what I take out with me, which sucks. Sometimes I want loud angry music, sometimes I want soft relaxing music, sometimes (like at work) I need something in foreign language so it doesn't distract me.

I'm looking forward to the next generation of iPods being released. Because it will probably drive the price of all the non-iPods down enough that I can finally buy a new one. I had the misfortune of having to use my sister's iPod for a while recently, and I can't see what the fuss is about. Certainly not worth the price tag nowadays. Certainly not worth whatever price tag they put on it if/when they replace all the buttons with a pointless touch screen.

But everything else on the market right now doesn't look that great either. Either lacking in features, or too expensive. anythingbutipod.com is a pretty good site for posting news about non-iPod MP3 players, which is nice. But I don't even see any pending soon-to-come MP3 players that I care much for. It seems like the majority of the market is aimed toward cheap flash-based tiny MP3 players for non-geeks.

All I want out of life is a ~60GB MP3 player with a small color screen that maybe displays album art but doesn't necessarily play movies, with good battery life and most importantly a little door that lets me take out the battery and replace it, with no silly Windows WMA dependencies or massive DRM crippleage, for a reasonable price. Create such a device and I will purchase it.

last.fm sadness

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:49:33 -0700

I tried to play a "custom radio station" in Amarok via last.fm today, and I get a message stating "This item is not available for streaming". I did some googling and read that this is a problem that may have been fixed as of Amarok 1.4.6. I upgraded Amarok via Ubuntu's backports and it still doesn't work. So I apt-get installed the lastfm Ubuntu package and tried that, and it still doesn't work. Depressing.

Then I read that last.fm streaming was gimped up a few months ago due to pressure from record companies. Those J-pop songs that I almost certainly can't buy in America were really bringing the industry to its knees. Thank God that was put to a stop, before all music on the planet ceased to exist.

The very latest version of the last.fm client (downloaded from last.fm manually) does let me play a custom radio, but only searching based on one artist at at time. The sucky Flash-based web player also works in the same way. Amarok does not, and I don't know what's going on there.

Neither of the official clients supports pausing the music either though, again because the music industry forbids it. I believe this is because every time someone pauses music coming from a radio station, a 20-dollar bill somewhere in America bursts into flames.

So there you have it. I'm not really going to use last.fm any more. Not a lot of point in it.

MP3 player purchase

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:47:47 -0800

I have a Creative Muvo^2 (image). I paid $250 for it two years ago. It's 4 GB and has a tiny hard drive in it; it's pretty thick, you can't tell from that photo.

I toy with the idea of buying a new MP3 player sometimes. Nowadays they have all these fancy MP3 players with huge color screens and upwards of 30GB and about 1/8th the size of mine. But everywhere I look, MP3 players are crippled in one way or another, or else just not worth buying. Either having an unremovable battery, or some kind of DRM scheme, or not being usable as a plain old removable hard drive, or costing way too much. I got lucky with the Muvo. It's survived being all but soaked in water (note to readers: don't use MP3 players in the bathtub) and being dropped dozens of times, constantly bashed around in my backpack and pocket and car. The battery still holds a good many hours charge even after 2 years, and it recharges in less than an hour from what I can tell (and the battery is replaceable by me if it ever goes). The tiny screen is my only real problem with it. Other than that it works fine.

I'm a programmer and the biggest computer geek there ever was; why is it that I find gadgets like MP3 players and cell phones so unexciting? I had a cell phone once for 1 month before I got rid of it; other than that I've never had a need for one. I've toyed with getting a PDA but never seriously. All of these little gadgets seem so crippled. You sacrifice a lot for the sake of portability. Does anyone really need to check their email at the bus stop? Or carry a web browser with them 24 hours a day? Or instant message people from the bathroom? Even to me, it seems pointless, and the service charges for all that crap are ridiculous. Apple's new iPhone excited me for all of 12 seconds, then I thought, what's the point? And $600? Insanity. I'll probably keep my Muvo until it stops working, and I'll probably not get a cell phone until I have an employer who demands it of me.

DualDisc

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 12:44:19 -0800

I went out with my sister recently and we got Weird Al's new "CD" (Straight Outta Lynwood). I put "CD" in quotes because it's actually not a CD, it's a DualDisc. The great thing about DualDiscs is that they don't play in CD players in your car. Oh wait, that's not a great thing at all. It's a very bad thing. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of buying the CD in the first place, in fact. It actually says in extremely fine print on the CD case something to the effect of "This disc does not conform to audio CD standards and may not play in CD players". Maybe they should've put that as a huge bright red sticker on the front, rather than waiting till people buy it and get screwed.

So I'm not bothering any more; I'm downloading MP3s of the album. I haven't even tried ripping the CD into MP3s myself; God only knows what kind of DRM backlash I would suffer. Not worth the time or trouble, when it'll take 20 minutes to find and download "illegally". For as much as Weird Al seems to "get it" sometimes with regards to the music industry, I wish he'd release his songs in a different way. I've bought every album he's released except one, most on cassette back in The Day, a couple on CD. It's unlikely I'll buy any more if this is the way they're sold. I only violated my "Don't pay the music cartel for their overpriced broken trash" rule in this case because I really like Weird Al; maybe I shouldn't have broken my rule.

Amarok

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:07:01 -0800

Let me just be the 57th person to blog that I like Amarok. A lot. Best audio player ever, and like many Linux users I've tried a lot. XMMS, BMP, MPD + lots of clients, Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Banshee, some others I'm probably forgetting. Clearly Amarok is better than Winamp (especially modern-day Winamp). And I like Foobar2000, but I think Amarok beats that too. Automatic lyric fetching and album cover art downloading is the greatest thing ever. Among other things.

I have no problem with the addition of Magnatune. My concern is: if Magnatune disappeared tomorrow, would Amarok still exist, and would Amarok still work? I can see no reason why the answer would be anything other than "Yes", so who cares? And as per their motto, I do think Magnatune looks like the least evil music store I've seen. It's a worthy goal to promote it. I haven't found much music on there that I like, yet, but I'll keep looking.

Last.fm

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:45:48 -0700

If you haven't see Last.fm yet, you should check it out. You can listen to streaming music basically for free. If you put in the name of musicians you like, it will play things that it thinks are similar based on what other people listen to. It's how I recently found Rammstein. (Whom I highly recommend by the way.)

Best thing about Last.fm is that it works in Linux. In fact Amarok even integrates with it. (I also highly recommend Amarok by the way. If only for the auto-fetching of song lyrics!) Or you can use Last.fm's own weird web-based player, which works fine in Linux too.

iTunes + Amarok = Good

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:16:43 -0700

The sound card in the Mac Mini (first generation) sucks. It sucks very very hard. It has a single headphone jack for output, and even with headphones it's not all that good. My other (PC) computer, on the other hand, has a nice Audigy 2 card with 5.1 outputs. I'd really love to play music from my Mac, because I rather like iTunes. But short of buying an external soundcard, that's not gonna happen.

So, what I do is use iTunes for one thing, which is actually just about the only reason you'd want to use iTunes anyways: Organizing music. iTunes is very good at organizing. It stores music exactly as I'd always stored it myself: ../artist/album/songtitle. It also plays nicely with ID3 tags, so when you change the Artist tag on a song, it moves the song to a new artist directory. I still shudder to think of all the crap I used to go through in the olden days with Perl scripts and command-line ID3 tag editors.

Having iTunes organize the music, all I need to do is point Amarok on my PC to look in the "iTunes Music" folder on the Mini, and have it play over the LAN. I get the best of both worlds this way; I can use program in Windows, Linux or OS X as a "frontend" to the iTunes-managed music files, so long as that client stays read-only.