Linux Audio and music players, part deux
Welp, I've been constantly tinkering around more and more, and settled down with amaroK. It has stopped crashing frequently, due to nothing in particular. I believe it was not dealing with large sets of file imports very well. For whatever reason, I like it infinitely more than iTunes, which I loathe. I've enjoyed, somewhat, getting my albums sorted with covers and so on. The playlist features are kind of dumbly implemented and sometimes buggy. The only way to update a playlist is to save it and give it the same name, and then agree to overwrite it. Also, it's really annoying to move my ancient-to-recent mp3 collection from a directory based structure to a tagged based structure. Sure, in the end it may be more effective(though I'd rather just be able to go PLOP playlist done), but it's still very time consuming. Luckily, I have the benefit of being able to talk to the ipod with amarok, so that at least makes up for some of the annoyances.
Both still lack a couple one thing I really really really want, which is tracker module format support (669, mod, s3m, xm, it, and so on). Finding a decent audio player that supports modules has proven frustrating.
Personally, I don't want a command line based module player, no matter how neat or geeky it may be. I tried audacious(not to be confused with audacity), but it likes to act like XMMS, and take full control of audio period, without playing nice with other apps that want to use it. Usually, that means if I have audacious playing a mod and load a youtube clip or other audio clip in firefox, it will have no sound. If i load audacious while a youtube clip or some other audio source is playing, i have to close the audio sources (totem, firefox, amaroK) before audacious will be able to play back audio. That's ridiculous and inexcusable.
Other than that, there's only minor annoyances. Mostly, it's really kick ass. And by kick ass, I mean it's depressing to boot into windows to run my music programs: Ableton Live! 6, Reason 3.5, Vocaloid2(Hatsune Miku ftw), Sound Forge. Windows XP is just so OLD and it shows very much. Even if you 'trick it out' with shell replacements/side loaders such as litestep or xoblite, it's just a poor, shoddy OS. And vista? HA!
Oh, other major annoyance: IM programs. Pidgin. I hate it. So. So. Much. I do not like useless icons and wasted space and huge text and everything ever. It is a terrible waste of space and there is apparently no way to theme it beyond what's available with the gnome theme settings. stupid. I have not been able to find any other replacement that has the ability to minimize down. Oh, and the other annoyance. With trillian, i can right click in the window and send file. Not so with pidgin. I have to navigate to a pull down menu. I'd much rather use contextual right click menus to access things. It just feels more efficient. That is actually the largest reason I used programs such as litestep, followed closely by the ability to have a persistent run bar available to type whatever in. On my laptop, I can type in urls and it'll load firefox and go right there. That's a lot easier than opening firefox and then typing in the url, or opening a run bar and doing the same thing. Stupid? maybe. Persnickity? you bet.
End all, I'd much rather be in linux than anything else. Perhaps one day, I'll roll my own setup from scratch on a project box for fun.
Both still lack a couple one thing I really really really want, which is tracker module format support (669, mod, s3m, xm, it, and so on). Finding a decent audio player that supports modules has proven frustrating.
Personally, I don't want a command line based module player, no matter how neat or geeky it may be. I tried audacious(not to be confused with audacity), but it likes to act like XMMS, and take full control of audio period, without playing nice with other apps that want to use it. Usually, that means if I have audacious playing a mod and load a youtube clip or other audio clip in firefox, it will have no sound. If i load audacious while a youtube clip or some other audio source is playing, i have to close the audio sources (totem, firefox, amaroK) before audacious will be able to play back audio. That's ridiculous and inexcusable.
Other than that, there's only minor annoyances. Mostly, it's really kick ass. And by kick ass, I mean it's depressing to boot into windows to run my music programs: Ableton Live! 6, Reason 3.5, Vocaloid2(Hatsune Miku ftw), Sound Forge. Windows XP is just so OLD and it shows very much. Even if you 'trick it out' with shell replacements/side loaders such as litestep or xoblite, it's just a poor, shoddy OS. And vista? HA!
Oh, other major annoyance: IM programs. Pidgin. I hate it. So. So. Much. I do not like useless icons and wasted space and huge text and everything ever. It is a terrible waste of space and there is apparently no way to theme it beyond what's available with the gnome theme settings. stupid. I have not been able to find any other replacement that has the ability to minimize down. Oh, and the other annoyance. With trillian, i can right click in the window and send file. Not so with pidgin. I have to navigate to a pull down menu. I'd much rather use contextual right click menus to access things. It just feels more efficient. That is actually the largest reason I used programs such as litestep, followed closely by the ability to have a persistent run bar available to type whatever in. On my laptop, I can type in urls and it'll load firefox and go right there. That's a lot easier than opening firefox and then typing in the url, or opening a run bar and doing the same thing. Stupid? maybe. Persnickity? you bet.
End all, I'd much rather be in linux than anything else. Perhaps one day, I'll roll my own setup from scratch on a project box for fun.