The-Source.com » Uncategorized

Synchronicity: Amarok in the Field

Jason — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:38:28 +0000

I recently had an opportunity to put Amarok to the test: at a 2-day outdoor rock festival I promote, I dragged out bits of my mini-home studio to provide backstage BBQ and after-party tunes.

It's Business Time

The Gear

You can see from my awesome photography the basics: a laptop (running KDE on Arch), a couple of Mackie Monitors, an Edirol UA-25 USB sound card (on top of the left monitor). Emergency boom box on the top right monitor.

You can’t really make out the external WD hard drive, but it’s there with the tracks.

The Plan

Last year, we just backed our cars up and played music. This worked alright, but wasn’t great. For one thing, I wanted to offer a wider selection of music and I wanted to take requests from people. I also wanted people to feel free to get up there and pick music themselves if they wanted.

The Player

I wasn’t sure exactly what audio player to use. I knew several people there used WinAmp (fairly popular at the local clubs), so I thought about either setting it up in Wine, or finding something very close to it.

However, I eventually decided to just stick with Amarok. I would be on hand most of the time anyway – and I wanted to be able to give decent feedback on Amarok under “battle conditions”.

The Setup

There were a couple of issues getting setup: first, it took about 10 minutes for Amarok to scan in all the tracks. Also, at one point someone unplugged the hard drive and Amarok wouldn’t automatically pick it back up when I plugged it back in. I had to re-scan everything back in. Again, took about 10 minutes for about 25K songs.

The next problem I ran into was that I didn’t have any playlists already set up, and a pure “random” playlist was too random. It would jump from NOFX to Emperor to GG Allen to Elvis, which is a bit too disjointed for even the most adventurous listener.

Also, I didn’t have the time to create a long playlist. During the day, I needed to run around a pretend like I was actually doing promoter-type stuff. At night, I didn’t mind diddling with the playlist so long as it didn’t interfere with my drinking too much.

Playlists

It didn’t take long to really dig the dynamic playlist functionality of Amarok.

Amarok - Dynamic Playlist

The coolest feature is how you can customize it. On the left side there, you can see that the playlist won’t bring up non-music tracks like podcasts and audiobooks. At the time, I had all audio under one “Music” folder, so I needed a quick way to omit that stuff.

Then you can play with specifying how much of a genre/artist/album should show up – this was cool because once I had the genres in there I could play with the percentages and change the overall effect of the total playlist.

Of course, you can add/remove/re-order specific tracks as you like, so usually what would happen is I would have Amarok randomly populate a playlist and then tweak it a bit.

It took about 5 minutes to set up a rough and quick basic dynamic playlist with the various parameters to get a decent-enough selection that, although far short of someone actually picking songs, was still good enough to run in the background.

Problems

While the overall experience with Amarok was a success, I did run into a few problems – one of which was fairly severe.

First, the worst: sometimes when skipping a song, the playlist would go crazy with errors and look like it was rapidly cycling through the songs. The name/title popup would very rapidly cycle through the songs in the playlist. A few times, I just had to re-start Amarok. Even worse, one time someone else was trying to set up some songs and this happened. That pretty much put an end to other people playing around with the setup.

The other issues were much less severe – one time after restarting Amarok, the drop-down controls in the dynamic playlist didn’t show the values (such as genre) – even though the sliders retained the percentage and everything seemed to work as expected.

Occasionally, double-clicking on a song in the playlist (to immediately start playing that song) wouldn’t work, and instead the next song or the song after next would start playing instead. Problems with the file? Not sure.

Closing Amarok (I mean actually closing from the system tray) always results in a crash error. Doesn’t really matter, as the application closes, but still…

Interface Annoyances

There are some interface annoyances, though perhaps these just personal preference.

For example, why have a pop-up when the track starts playing when there is a huge-ass portion of the interface already dedicated to the currently playing song which updates simultaneously?

And check out all that wasted space for the currently playing selection! First off, who really cares about that? In this use case, the most important area was either setting up the dynamic playlist settings or browsing the available music.

(Later I was able to tweak some settings and get the above items a bit more to my liking – the original context is getting things working right “out of the box” in an area with no internet connection while you have a lot of other stuff to do!)

It’s easy to add an entire album, but not so easy to remove it – it seems you can only remove tracks individually or by highlighting a range. But albums or artists are “grouped” in the playlist when they are sequential – so it seems like you should be able to remove the entire group.

Similarly, I could find how to remove an artist or album from the local collection without also removing it from disk. I don’t like this, because as a general rule I don’t want my non-file manager applications to do file management. And, if I could have simply removed albums and whatnot from the collection, I could have simplified my dynamic playlist settings.

Tagging

One issue I ran into that wasn’t an Amarok issue was file metadata. I’ve spent various levels of efforts over the years and cleaning up and organizing the MP3 tags. In a moment of synchronicity (and we finally get there!), I opened up my feed reader to see someone talking about puddletag.

Puddletag In Action

Fantastic little MP3 tagger and I’ll be spending some time (although not near enough, I’m sure) tagging and organizing my files better for next time around!

Minor issues with puddletag: Arch recently moved to Python 3, so you’ll need to tweak it to point to /usr/bin/python2. Also, puddletag crashes a bit frequently.

I did try Picard, but couldn’t get it to match up with my needs. Looks nice, though.

One more for the road

skwizard is a nice little M4A->MP3 conversion script that might come in handy if you are organizing your music collection.

Apologies

For some reason, WordPress is destroying spacing and formatting this post crazy-style. I’ve already re-done it once, and fooled with it and it’s still sticking in stupid mce div tags, so apologies for the lack of line breaks.

Patent Madness

admin — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:14:15 +0000

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-in-the-telecoms-trade/

I am sure, it’s all about innovation and NEVER hindering your competition…

Shuttleworth: Open Textbooks

Jason — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:40:03 +0000

Mark Shuttleworth chimes in on the Open Textbook topic.

“Open Textbooks” is a powerful idea; in some ways I think it even exceeds Free Software. “Open Source” has shown remarkable efficiency in the market, even to those antagonistic to the principles that make it so.

If the idea of “Open” – and the more important, if downplayed, foundation of Freedom - can make headway in the market, imagine the impact it might make in Government and Education. In those areas, once can at least mention concepts like Freedom and Public Good without being accused of being a communist.

On Having a successful GNOME event

Jason — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 11:00:38 +0000

A successful GNOME event involves everyone having fun. If someone in your audience is uncomfortable with something you’ve said, you’re not doing your job. Apologize to them as soon as possible, and try to avoid the topic that triggered this for the rest of your presentation.

Is it just me or is this an absurd “guideline”?

Walk the line

In fact the guidelines as a whole are absolutely reactionary, absurd and promote groupthink. They are overwhelmingly negative. “Don’t” do this. “Avoid” this.

How about instead you suggest a set of positive guidelines for speakers in accordance with the mission statement of the GNOME Foundation and the goal of the GNOME project: to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is completely free software.

Is furthering the development of a Free Software platform the mark of a successful GNOME event? Or is “everyone having fun”?

I’d suggest a successful birthday party for your 5-year old involves “everyone having fun”. Working out a major platform where decisions moral and technical must be made? Not so much. Education, illustration, healthy (and even heated) debate seem more appropriate than “everyone having fun” as a specific checkpoint.

Not only are the existing guidelines absurd and negative, but they are also impossible to comply with, because they are so overly-PC “avoid offending anyone at any cost” that no speaker can touch on any topic – much less one with any debate or controversy – without offending someone. (And boy-o-boy there is a contingent out there determined to be offended.)

Now I’m offended!

Personally, I’m offended everytime Team Apologista tears down Free Software and promotes a company dedicated to subverting and destroying Linux. I’m offended everytime the usual suspects launch another tired barrage of fact-free personal attacks against RMS. But I do my best to argue my point of view in response, not suggest others shouldn’t be allowed to speak. By contrast, the Open Source Offenderati is eager to muzzle and exile those who disagree with them.

For extra chuckles, look at the guilty conscience-assuaging final paragraph:

Please keep in mind that the GNOME Foundation is not the right forum to debate whether someone should feel offended or not; you should simply avoid offending people even if you do not share their views. These guidelines do not constitute censorship since you have many other forums and opportunities to say whatever you wish.

The fundamental problem is that in many cases, you can not “simply avoid offending people” because people take offense – it is an action on their part, not yours. (Assuming here that one is not intentionally setting out to offend) Taking offense is virtually guaranteed when people don’t “share views”.

Black is not black, white is not white

I also love the “these guidelines do not constitute censorship” disclaimorese, like saying something makes it true. Censorship is “the suppression or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.”

By definition, then, these guidelines are indeed censorship – having other forums and opportunities does not change that fact. (There is the consideration that censorship is not necessarily a “bad thing”, but that’s not the argument being made here).

Anyway, RMS is slated to speak at an upcoming GNOME conference and the pre-FUD is already being rolled out. That’s what brought this on – expect to see more pre/during/and post speech.

Upstart woes

Jason — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:54:25 +0000

Sigh.

Has anyone implemented a pure Upstart system? I’ve spent several days now trying to do so, and with little success.

First, let me say, I really like the idea of Upstart. I dig the concept of an event-based init system. I dig the idea of a faster boot. That, and I’m motivated to try a different init system since I’m just playing around and having fun anyway.

However, every implementation I can find – including the latest Ubuntu flavors – basically break down to a handful of ”pure” Upstart jobs, and then start calling all the old SysVInit scripts. It’s very messy and hard to “reverse engineer”

Don’t get me wrong – I understand the why of this – in the vast number of cases Upstart needs to be able to use those existing scripts somehow. This makes sense, sure. However, in my use case I don’t want any SysVInit scripts. I’m building up from scratch, and I’ll be packaging everything myself, so I can afford to go “pure” Upstart.

Here’s some of the bugaboos I’ve ran into:

Upstart says you need a few things to build Upstart:

Linux 2.6.4 or later
GCC 4.1 or later
GLIBC 2.4 or later

Well, you need libnih as well.

If you go off the Kubuntu start up scripts, you need mountall (which has a very scary man page) and calls for plymouth, which in addition to being something I don’t want to mess with at this point in the process, also calls for mountall as a dependency.

If you’ve just spent several hours mapping out scripts and then are faced with untangling dependencies, it’s discouraging.

I can’t find an easy way to track the boot process just from scripts. Here’s what I mean. Since there isn’t an existing set of basic scripts, I tried to look at those in an stock Kubuntu system. But, since events can be fired from just about anywhere, you have to basically print out every script to make sure you are catching the entire “flow”.

Basically, I’d just like to know if it’s been done so I know it’s possible and might have somewhere to look for a clearer start.

Guitar Pro 6

Jason — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:36:35 +0000

Oh my, Guitar Pro 6 has native Linux support!

Guitar Pro is a very common format for guitar tablature online (review here)- I’m not sure if Guitar Pro was the first format to suport text-based tablature with MIDI playback, but it was the first I (and many others) encountered.

Linux has generally had difficulty making inroads in audio production and audio production-related fields. I’ve talked before about some of the difficulties I faced when I went Linux-only for recording, and even a greatly moderately slightly talented guitar player like me pulls up “tabs” from time to time.

I’m encouraged to see more programs pick up native Linux support, especially in “niche” fields that are generally over-run with Mac-based software (and lesser performing Windows-based ports of the Mac version).

I’d really love to see Guitar Pro open up and document their format – there are already several other programs that can read .gpWhatever file formats, but Guitar Pro loves to introduce a new file format with each release. Guitar Pro does support some additional formats (like MusicXML), but IIRC not all effects are available in all formats.

In any case, good news for those of us who make music (or noise) in Linux!

(Hat Tip: Kenshin)

Linux and Crapware

Jason — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:05:04 +0000

Shawn Powers has a new article up on the Linux Journal site, “Linux, Where Crapware Goes to Die“.

It’s a good article all around, but he makes a brilliant point that somehow had never struck me:

Linux Apps Come Pre-vetted!

Go ahead, try to run ‘apt-get install BonziBuddy’ — it won’t work! Linux distributions come with thousands of programs, of varying usefulness, that you can install all day long. Those packages have all been vetted by communities of people before they ever get to your package manager. In fact, while one of the rally cries of Windows supporters is that the selection of software is so much greater for Windows — it begs the question of whether or not that’s a good thing.

Yes, there are 100 applications you can buy, or try, or demo, or evaluate, or install for free on Windows for any given task. One of the big problems, however, is that no one determines if they are any good. Google may be a great search engine to find Windows apps, but it certainly isn’t a good quality assurance method for picking Windows software. As Linux users, we not only have a community of developers making free and open source applications for us to use, we also have a community of users that make sure spyware and malware don’t make it into our software repositories. So the next time someone asks why the Linux community is so important and we make such a big deal out of “community”, tell them it’s because we all help keep out purple apes.