briancarper.net (λ) (Tag: Amarok)

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.

Clementine: looking great

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:59:59 -0800

Amarok is looking really good these days:

Hold on, that's not Amarok! It's Clementine, a Qt4 port of Amarok 1.4, aka "my dreams finally come true", aka "what Amarok 2 should've been". It's functional right now, not quite as fully-featured as Amarok 1.4, but all the major bits are there, and it's being actively developed.

Once again I am amazed at and eternally grateful for the number of choices of media players there are in Linux. It seems like I write a new blog entry every other week saying how great some media player is. The reality is that there really are tons of great options. And this is yet another.

But Amarok 1.4 was special. And I really hope Clementine succeeds.

Exaile: The best Amarok since Amarok 1.4

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:29:10 -0800

Like a sad dumb dog who still hopefully visits the grave of his dear, departed master, every once in a while I try Amarok 2 again. Unfortunately, there has been no improvement in usability since the last dozen times I checked.

But have you seen Exaile lately? This is what the bleeding edge version looks like:

It's pretty nice. It's about as close as you can get to a stable, fully-functional Amarok 1.4-ish player nowadays.

Aside from looking good, Exaile is good at handling ID3 tags (a few Japanese tags that Amarok 2 displays as ????????, Exaile displays properly) and it's pretty fast to rescan my collection nowadays, which is nice. It does fairly sane grouping of multi-artist albums under "Various artists". It supports moodbar and song lyrics and cover art fetching and such, if that's the kind of thing you enjoy. It even splits the library display by the first letter of the artist names, just like Amarok 1.4 did, which is awesome.

I did have some problems installing the dependencies (python bindings for webkit?) for some of the plugins, but oh well. I figured it out.

Today I went so far as to install gnome-settings-daemon and gnome-control-center just so Exaile wouldn't look like crap. I use KDE4, and I haven't touched Gnome or any Gnome libs in a few years, so this is saying something.

Mark Kretschmann, an Amarok dev, recently wrote an article about the paradox of choice, in which he said (probably correctly) that being presented with too many options and too many choices end up paralyzing people and making them miserable.

Sorry, but the irony was overwhelming...

I really do believe there's a good program buried somewhere in that mess of controls, desperately wanting to be free.

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.

Amarok 2.2: DISBER GROGTH GROCKS

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 01:14:49 -0800

Remember Amarok 1.4? Remember how awesome it was? Here's a screenshot just in case you don't remember.

Does it bring back fond memories of music and comfortable GUI interfaces? It does for me. Those were good times. Keep that picture in mind.

Let's play a game called "Can we make Amarok 2.2 look like Amarok 1.4"? I've heard this as a response to complaints about Amarok 2's GUI: You can make it look like Amarok 1.4 if you want.

So let's try. Ready? Here it is:

Does it look the same? Not really. Kind of close. That's as good as I could do though. There are no headers on the columns in the playlist, so you can't tell what half of those things mean. You can't resize the fields (like you could in 1.4). You can't sort them by a simple click of a header (like you could in 1.4); instead you have that strange breadcrumb thing up there. You can't add new fields by right-clicking and picking them from a menu (as you could in 1.4). Not as many songs fit in the playlist in 2.2, but it's pretty close.

Now, here's the good part. How do you get Amarok 2.2 to look this way? By doing THIS!

AAHHHHHHH! Too bad Halloween is gone, because I could use that dialog to scare children. The title of this blog post, DISBER GROGTH GROCKS, comes from the mangled and truncated labels in that horizontally-scrolling list of icons. Doesn't it sound like the deranged grunting of a once-proud beast, now fallen into ruin, stumbling zombie-like through the world, a mere shambles of its former self? I think so.

Once in a blue moon, I'll witness the behavior of an application that's so off-the-wall, bat-honking insane that I'm reduced to maniacal laughter. That's not an exaggeration; I literally gape at the computer screen and cackle like a madman, curling reflexively into a fetal position. This was one of those times.

It took me well over a half hour to drag and drop all of those controls into that window in the right order with dividers between them. Thank God for 1920x1200 monitors or the dialog wouldn't even have fit on the screen. (No, it's not resizable.)

Why a half hour? Because I also had to click every single one of those elements and set its width as a percentage using a slider in a sub-dialog. By default every field is an equal width, so that a field with a single digit in it has a mile of whitespace on either side, while song titles are displayed as "C...". And this dialog is the only way to fix it:

How did I come up with 25% there? Laborious trial-and-error. Amarok 2.2. takes what was a click-and-drag-to-resize operation in every other application ever written, and turns it into an algebra problem. Twelve fields I had to tweak, one by one. I was probably in and out of that dialog 3 or 4 dozen times.

(I'll spare you what happens when you resize the window in Amarok 2.2. Suffice it to say once you get it looking OK, never touch it again.)

Now, I'm no expert on GUI design. But I'm guessing there's a reason most applications don't do things this way. Columns of data with headers at the top are nice. They're kind of boring, but they're boring like a doorknob. You turn it and the door opens. There isn't much room (or need) for improvement. I don't want to have to solve a logic puzzle to get out of the bathroom every morning, and I don't want to play a video game of line-up-the-widgets and guess-the-percentages just to get a playlist to display some fields of information.

In Amarok 2.2 there's also no button for Repeat/Shuffle, and the Equalizer tells me it disabled itself because I don't have the right version of Phonon, and the collection list is very unresponsive (even expanding / collapsing an artist's albums lags), and there are no visualizations, and no themes, and the volume slider is hidden behind a button in the bottom-right there unlike Amarok 1.4's perfectly functional slider, and well you get the picture. But hey, you can browse Flickr in Amarok now. Finally!

Amarok 2.2 is what I'd now call "just barely usable", which is actually an improvement from previous versions, but that's not saying much. I've used it for over a month, only because 1.4 can no longer even scan a collection on my computer, Last.fm is broken, and I got a notice today that Gentoo is deprecating KDE3 entirely. Amarok 1.4 is the new XMMS; Qt3 is the new GTK1. Some people will cling to them, somehow barely keeping them running on their systems, until bitrot and neglect force them to fade away into history, whether there's a good replacement around or not.

I was a huge cheerleader for Amarok 1.4; it was a flagship KDE / Linux GUI app. Now I don't know what to say. Final grade, Amarok 2.2: D+. It avoided an F because I can get sound to come out of it, and it didn't erase my hard drive.

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

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 hope someone maintains Amarok 1.4

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:40:46 -0800

Amarok 2 was released on December 10th. I have KDE 4 on my experimentation laptop, so I tried it. I don't like it. Aside from technical glitches and missing features which will hopefully be added again someday, the whole idea of it is wrong.

Amarok 1.4 is good because it gives you extremely dense, detailed information about your songs. I've got 13 columns of information in the playlist pane and I look at them all. Score, Rating, Play Count, Year, Disc number, Track number... I like to see these things. I like to sort by these things. I like being able to see the bitrate of my MP3s at a glance. I'm a nerd, that's why I'm using Linux in the first place.

Amarok 2 on the other hand has a tiny little column down the right hand side to display song information. It groups things together so you don't need as many columns, but it's nowhere near what Amarok 1.4 gives you. Bad bad bad.

On the very rare occasion I want to see lyrics or something, in Amarok 1.4 they're hidden away in tabs I can ignore most of the time. This is good. The majority of my window should be devoted to DISPLAY SONGS.

Instead, in Amarok 2, half of the GUI is devoted to this center pane to display "context" information. This is bad. I don't care about browsing web sites to buy music, or browsing Wikipedia from inside my music player, or "discovering" new music. And if I did care, I would use a WEB BROWSER. A music player is not a web browser. If I want to discover music, I'll go use last.fm or some website that's devoted to it, using Firefox. If I want to see a Wikipedia article, I'll look at Wikipedia in Firefox.

Music players should play music, and web browsers should browse websites. When you have one enormous program that tries to do both, it just ends up doing both poorly. This is nearly universally true and it's certainly true in what I've seen so far in Amarok 2.

KDE 4 isn't even usable (as of KDE 4.2 beta1) and Amarok 2 fits right in, unfortunately. I hope they give us back some of the things that made Amarok 1.4 great. Or else that Amarok 1.4 keeps working for a long time.

Firefox 3 beta 3

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:34:21 -0800

Firefox 3 beta 3 finally has updated their add-ons dialog window. I ranted about this way back in 2006. Goes to show that typing blog posts is a good replacement for fixing things yourself. (No it isn't.) You can now sort of download some Firefox extensions in the Tools => Add-ons window.

I say "sort of" because it still doesn't do nearly as much as I wish it did. For example it only seems to offer you a few of the top "recommended" extensions for immediate download. It still retains the magic link that takes you to the Firefox addons website if you want to view more than those. And there's now a search box for searching plugins, but doing the search in the window only shows a few results, and if you want to see ALL results you still have to go to the Firefox website.

Also this new magic add-ons-browser only seems to work for extensions. Not themes. Oops. Another annoyance is that when searching themes on the Firefox website, it shows themes for all versions of Firefox, including old themes that don't work with the version of Firefox that I'm using. This is highly annoying. It'd probably be hard to write a web page to automatically filter out themes and extensions I can't use based on my browser, but it doesn't seem like it'd be hard to do that if everything was in a window in Firefox itself.

And installing extensions still pops up an annoying Vista-like "ARE YOU SURE I SHOULD INSTALL THIS?" dialog, which counts down from 3 to 0 just to make sure the annoyance is complete. And installing themes still requires me to restart the browser before I can use it. Opera doesn't require a restart. Early versions of Firefox didn't require a restart, but admittedly if you didn't restart, horribly bad things happened until you did. Maybe no one can figure out how to get Firefox to do it right, or maybe there's some technical reason for it, but it's still annoying.

So Firefox 3 beta 3 is a bit better than before in the add-ons-installing department, but still oh so far from optimal. Why do I need to go to a web page (a clumsy webpage that seems to be perpetually changing its interface) to download themes and extensions? Opera has this solved beautifully for themes. Even many KDE apps (e.g. Amarok) let you download themes and plugins via a popup window in the app itself. Why do I need to restart Firefox (thus losing all my session authentications, thus forcing me to re-type a billion passwords for everything I was doing) just to change how the buttons look?

This is just a minor nit-pick. Firefox 3 beta 3 is looking pretty good in general. Bookmarks work better now. No more annoying focus-grabbing yes/no dialog boxes about saving passwords. And so on.

In other Firefox news not related to the beta, I finally figured out how to turn off Firefox's God-awfully annoying form auto-completion. Note to self: browser.formfill.enable in about:config. Formfill is the bane of my existence. I can't remember how many times I've typed a google search, then accidentally clicked the formfill dropdown and replaced my carefully crafted search string with something from the formfill history. Argh. Well now I need worry no longer.

(Took me forever to figure out what to search for in about:config to locate this option. "Text field"? "Drop down"? "Auto complete"? The term "formfill" somehow never occurred to me.)

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.

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.

Saitek Eclipse II

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 21:25:49 -0700

I just got my new keyboard from newegg. A day early, as usual. Can't beat newegg. My keyboard is a Saitek Eclipse II, and I highly recommend it. The keys are just the right firmness and as a bonus, this keyboard makes no noise whatsoever when you type. The space bar is extra wide so you can hit it easily. So far as looks it can't be beaten, obviously. Lights up in three colors, and the font of the keys on the keyboard is even nice. It also somehow has a narrower base than my old sucky Dell default keyboard, meaning it fits better on my keyboard shelf. It also has rubber feet so it has no chance of sliding around. It feels sturdy, nice and heavy. One of the greatest things though is that it does NOT have tons of stupid useless keys. It has a few multimedia control keys I could probably live without, but other than that, nothing. No "EMAIL" key, no "HEWLAT PACKERD!1!!!11" key, nothing extraneous. I never use that crap anyways.

Works great in Linux, for the most part. This guide on Gentoo-Wiki worked well enough to get my few multimedia keys working, using xmodmap and xbindkeys (both in Portage). I just set every key to run various dcop amarok player commands. KDE doesn't play nicely with some of the multimedia keys however. XF86AudioMute is usurped by KDE and does nothing but display "Mute On" or "Mute Off" in some ugly OSD window. Apparently KMilo is to blame but I can't figure out how to either turn it off without b0rking all my keys, or leave it on and get it to let me control the keys myself. Such is life.

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.