Skip to main content

Hurray - I found a "new" Audio player for Linux

Being able to play audio files on my computer is a seriously big deal to me.  My first Apple purchase was a mac book pro which the sole purpose was to rip and catalog my audio collection.  (which subsequently I had to repeat the entire process because it defaulted to using .m4p <apple store> and .m4a <I think...> anyhow I was unable to easily playback those file types on my other systems - which was a Sun blade running Solaris and a few Linux systems)  I digress...

I have always been a HUGE fan of XMMS.  Even since 2001 when they seemed to have the only player worth mentioning for Solaris.  Fortunately not much has changed with XMMS in 10 years (it looks almost identical, if I recall the original) and unfortunately a lot has changed with my music demands.  XMMS still uses a pretty basic method cataloging your collection, whereas the "modern" audio players seemingly use some type of database to store the metadata of your collection.  Certainly it's not the end of the world, but it makes scanning your audio files rather time consuming at 12000+ audio files.

I don't have complicated demands regarding a player, but I am growing more attached to some of the functionality that has been added to the players.  I would like ability to: search (easily), rate the song, create dynamic a playlist, and shuffle.  Now some players will display lyrics, automatically retrieve song/album information, display album covers.

Banshee (for Linux) has grabbed my attention for now.  It's clean and simple.  Yet it still provides all functionality I require, and then some.  I really liked Amarok for all the additional features it had, but I could simply not make the app do what I needed.  Lack of dynamic playlists are a deal breaker and I was unable to make them work.  Realistically iTunes is an ideal audio application.  It handles podcasts, retrieves metadata, has dynamic playlists and does a great job ripping from physical media.  It just doesn't run on Linux ;-)

Lastly Banshee is a GTK-based app and I prefer Gnome over KDE currently.  Also - I still rip all my music on a Mac using iTunes.  It just works.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P2V using dd for KVM-QEMU guest

Preface: I have certainly not exhaustively tested this process.  I had a specific need and found a specific solution that worked. Situation:  I was issued a shiny new laptop running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (with Corp VPN, certs, Authentication configuration, etc...)  The image was great, but I needed more flexibility on my bare metal.  So, my goal was to P2V the corporate image so I could just run it as a VM. * Remove corporate drive and install new SSD * install corp drive in external USB-3 case * Install RHEL 7 on new SSD * dd old drive to a disk-image file in a temp location which will be an image which is the same size as your actual drive (unless you have enough space in your destination to contain a temp and converted image) * convert the raw disk-image to a qcow file while pushing it to the final location - this step should reduce the disk size - however, I believe it will only reduce/collapse zero-byte blocks (not just free space - i.e. if you de...
1 comment
Read more

Extending SNMP to run arbitrary shell script

Why are we here... This is not likely something I would have pursued under normal circumstances.  I happen to be working for a customer/client who is not afforded a lot of flexibility to accomplish their goals.  In this case, the rigor is justified.  They have to sometimes be fairly creative with how they solve problems. In this case they would like to utilize an existing snmp implementation to execute a command (or shell script) on a remote system.  They came to me with the idea of using Net-SNMP extend. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Deployment_Guide/sect-System_Monitoring_Tools-Net-SNMP-Extending.html NOTE:  This is NOT a good implementation strategy in the "real world"  it will simply allow you to test the functionality.  There are a TON of security implications which would need to be taken in to consideration. Implementation Steps: [root@rh7tst01 ~]# yum -y install net-snmp net-snmp-utils ...
Post a Comment
Read more

RHN Satellite Server (spacewalk) repomd.xml not found

"repomd.xml not found" If you add a channel, or if your RHN cache gets corrupted, and one of your guests complains that it cannot find repomd.xml for jb-ews-2-x86_64-server-5-rpm (for example) - you need to rebuild your repodata cache. Normally this is an automated job - which is exemplified by the fact that you have obviously built out your entire Satellite environment and never had to do any of the steps you are about to do. So - some prep work: Open 3 terminals to your Satellite Server and run: # Term 1 cd /var/cache/rhn watch "ls -l | wc -l" # Term 2 pwd cd /var/log/rhn tail -f rhn_taskomatic_daemon.log # Term 3 satellite-sync --channel=jb-ews-2-x86_64-server-5-rpm Once the satellite-sync has completed, you >should< see the count increment by one.  If you are unlucky (like me) you will not. You then need to login to the Satellite WebUI as the satellite admin user. Click on the Admin tab (at the top) Task Schedules (on the left) fin...
Post a Comment
Read more