The Mothership

Ubuntu 9.04 was just released, so I upgraded over the weekend and it went fairly smoothly except for two old friends: the sound drivers had to be rebuilt from the ones from Realtek’s site like I had to do before, and Amarok.

Oh, Amarok… This Ubuntu release includes the 2.0 version for the first time, but as far as I can tell, it’s actually a huge step back. There’s an all-new, pretter interface, but a lot of functionality seems to be missing, or is so well-hidden that I couldn’t figure out how to use it. In particular, all of my carefully-crafted smart playlists were gone, with no apparent way to recreate them. It also didn’t help that it kept crashing on me, especially while trying to import my old collection.

I was disappointed enough in it that I tried out some other programs as well, like RhythmBox, but they didn’t even recognize my iPod, since support apparently hasn’t been added for 4th gen Nanos in the library it uses yet.

In the end I removed Amarok 2 entirely and actually went back and completely rebuilt Amarok 1.4.10 from source. It’s literally been years now since I compiled a major program like this manually (just minor utilities), and it took a while just to figure out what it required and get the packages needed to satisfy all of the dependencies, but I finally seem to have Amarok working again.

I think I finally figured out the problem I was having with syncing my iPod via Amarok. The key seems to be that some other KDE services need to be running in order for the iPod to be fully identified properly. Without those services, it shows up but gets treated like a generic, unidentified iPod and there’s no history for it to sync against.

The thing that made it inconsistent was that I wasn’t always running the full KDE environment. Sometimes I’d export it via X11 to my laptop, and after the recent reinstall I was running Gnome instead of KDE for a while. I should be okay as long as I keep using KDE as my desktop and always run it at the console, which shouldn’t be too big a deal as it’s about the only thing I use the console for nowadays anyway.

I’ve been using Amarok as my music collection manager for a while now, and it works well for that purpose, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated at trying to use it to sync to my iPod.

The problem is that it often doesn’t seem to recognize when the same device is attached again, and fails to sync back any updated ratings, play counts, or last.fm updates. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s frustrating to spend two weeks using my iPod and then hook it back up only to have it completely throw out all the updates made through it over those weeks. A huge chunk of my library is still unrated, and I’d much rather rate them on-the-fly as I’m listening to them than to have to sit down and go through the whole list one-by-one.

Amarok just seems to have a poor model of MP3 players as persistent devices, treating them more as just arbitrary filesystems to copy songs to. Playlist syncing is confusing as well, with it being unclear what the functional difference is between ‘Transfer Playlist’ and ‘Sync Playlist’, playlists queued for syncing disappearing for unknown reasons between sessions, podcasts requiring more manual management than expected, the inability to limit playlists by device size…

I’m tempted to just revert back to doing proper iTunes syncing, but then that puts the management software on a different machine than the actual library, scanning of files is less automatic, there’d be a ton of metadata lost or needing to be manually transferred… Ugh.

I upgraded my Linux server box to Ubuntu 8.10 tonight, and it went smoothly enough. Well, mostly… The big, complicated things like Apache, MySQL, and MythTV actually worked perfectly after the upgrade, and instead the glitches showed up in relatively small things, like the MP3 player. The files themselves were fine, but the collection database didn’t survive the change in version of Amarok, and I lost all of the non-ID3 metadata like ratings, play counts, etc.

I was able to recover some of it, from syncing back from the iPod and the playlist I still had loaded at the time, but it looks like I’ve lost about 2/3rds of the ratings. And I have backups of the MP3 files themselves, but not of the directory where it looks like Amarok stores the metadata, though it’s not clear if that would even help if it’s a version problem. Oh well, at least it’s easier to re-rate them on the fly through the iPod…

I’ve put in a couple days of use of my new iPod Nano, and it’s working out well so far.

My main worry was about its ‘pocketfeel’ (hey, if food critics can have ‘mouthfeel’…) so that I can fiddle with it without having to take it out and look at it, and it does have a few quirks there: the shake-to-shuffle feature requires a *really* vigorous shake, which would be kind of embarrassing to perform in public and can’t be done within the confines of a pocket, but using the dial to advance to the next song isn’t a big deal. The ‘hold’ switch is a bit tricky — I can run a finger along the top to turn it off, but have to get the edge of a fingernail and find the switch to turn it back on. And I have to watch out when adjusting the volume. If it’s lying too horizontally, it switches into Cover Flow mode and you can’t adjust the volume there, so I have to make sure it’s tilted a bit upwards before changing the volume. They’re only minor problems, though.

I also managed to get it working with Amarok by installing iTunes on my XP machine and reformatting it with a Windows filesystem. And, as I hoped, it does indeed sync back updated ratings, play counts and times, and updates last.fm. The only quirk is that unmounting it still leaves the iPod saying “you must eject first…” on its screen, but it seems like unplugging it at that point doesn’t cause any harm.

Update: And it turns out I can sync it to both Amarok for music and iTunes for automatic podcast management, if I disable automatic syncing in iTunes and I make sure to sync to Amarok first or the rating and play count updates will be lost.

Update update: Ugh, okay, podcasts have some problems when I do it that way, with multiple copies of them showing up each time I switch between clients. I’ll have to try doing the podcasts from within Amarok as well.

My iPod Nano arrived today, so here’s the obligatory vanity shot, showing off just how tiny even the retail packaging is:

There are apparently still some kinks to be worked out with its support under Linux, since it’s still brand new, so for now I’ve only fooled around with it in iTunes. I’d prefer to get Amarok working with it though, since the collection database is more easily synced there and I’d rather not have to reenter all of the ratings and such into iTunes.

Oh well, I’ve just filled it up with random songs for now.

Alright, uncle, I give up. I’ve fretted about choosing an MP3 player for far too long, so there’s a shiny new 16GB iPod Nano on its way to me now.

There’s decent support for the iPod under amarok now, so it might be fairly painless to sync it up with my existing library on the Linux server. Or I might experiment with the ‘proper’ iTunes way for a bit too, especially if any of those games catch my eye, though it’ll be a bit more of a pain to keep the library synced then.

I got my email and downloaded the new Radiohead album this morning, and I’m liking it a fair bit so far. Though I’m probably a bad Radiohead fan for liking the more traditional rock pieces (Bodysnatchers, Jigsaw Falling Into Place) best so far.

Between all the demos I downloaded now that my 360 is back, and the OCReMix song collection torrents, I’ve probably torn through half my monthly bandwidth quota just in the last 24 hours…

Some of the more recent music I’ve run across:

The Shins, Wincing The Night Away – I’d only briefly heard a couple of their songs before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was pleasantly surprised. The melodies are catchy enough, but the rather dense lyrics tickled my curiosity, and I had to check them out, even though I don’t usually pay too much attention to them. There’s an odd, surreal poetry to them that I don’t see a lot of in the rest of my collection, but I like it.

Front Line Assembly, Artificial Soldier – They got a lot of flak over the last couple albums for letting their side-project Delerium’s style slip into FLA too much, but this album returns them to an earlier, harder sound. I like Delerium too, but this is closer to what attracted me to FLA in the first place, so I still approve. The lyrics are still the same old apocalyptic doom-n-gloom, but it just wouldn’t be the same without them. :)

Sonic Youth, Rather Ripped – A good followup to Sonic Nurse, in much the same vein, even if they seem to have mostly dropped the extended multi-minute noise solos. And you can listen to it for free! (Flip4Mac support might be needed for Mac users.)

Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere – I saw this one on a lot of people’s best-of-the-year lists so I took a chance on it, but I’m fairly lukewarm on it overall. I like a couple of the tracks, like ‘Crazy’, but I guess this style (rap-hop?), still just isn’t for me.

(and no, I don’t live in the vacuum of space, the flash reflection just overpowered the rest of the room.)
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The new iPods are out and…I don’t particularly care. I don’t really feel the need to carry a ton of photos around, and although the black look of the U2 edition *sounded* intriguing, the red click wheel is just too horribly ugly to me.

This now makes me even more tempted to pick up one of the regular 4G iPods though, now that I know it’s not likely to be imminently obsoleted by something vastly better. It’s down to either that or the iRiver hard drive player, and although the iRiver has a couple more features, it’s still slightly more expensive and the iPod/iTunes integration is a big plus and iTMS will be coming to Canada soon…

Out of all of my systems, one of the components that I’ve upgraded the *least* over the last 11 years is the sound card. I first got an SB16 way back in the mid-’90s and continued to use it alone until a couple years ago, when the lack of ISA slots in a new motherboard forced an upgrade to an SBLive. Even then, the SB16 continued to live on in my server box. The sound card is just one of those parts that I never really felt an urgent need to upgrade. It produces sound…what more do I need? Whereas the clarity of a new video card’s higher resolutions or the speed of a new processor are easy to appreciate, the subtleties of a different sound are harder to quantify to a tone-deaf musical ignoramus like me.

Nonetheless, upgrade time has come again and a shiny new Audigy 2 ZS has kicked the SBLive out and down the hand-me-down chain into the server box. The reasons are somewhat more practical than audible, though: the old SB16 in the server box was simply annoying the hell out of me.
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I’ve been trying to rip just the audio stream from each chapter of a DVD I have, but none of the tools I’ve tried so far (transcode, mplayer) seem to work, and just produce noise instead. The disc uses 48khz 24-bit PCM audio, but it keeps getting detected as 16-bit, and the programs don’t even seem to support 24-bit audio at all.

Maybe if I can at least get the raw PCM stream I can manually massage it into a usable form, but it looks like other useful conversion tools like ‘sox’ don’t support 24-bit audio either. Maybe I should just write a trivial app to just knock every third byte off…

Update: Worked around it by playing it in the DVD Player on the iBook and capturing the audio with WireTap (found via Matt). I’m still lacking an automated batch method, but this is good enough for the one chapter I really wanted for now.

While I was walking to the office this morning, headphones on and the PocketPC playing, a slightly-dishevelled gentleman standing by a bike motioned to me as I passed by. I paused a moment and took the headphones off, mentally preparing a polite apology that I could not help, but instead I was surprised to see him reach into a pack and bring out a CD wallet, which he opened to reveal a number of CD-R discs. He then asked if I had a CD player, to which I mumbled something like “Er, no, not really, sorry…” and then went on my way. I’ve heard of the old cliche of someone selling copied video tapes out of their trunk, of course, but this is the first time I’ve personally run into anything like it, and a bit higher-tech even.

Looking back, it doesn’t even make much sense. If I’m so desperate for cheap, pirated music, I can get nearly anything I’d want easily enough for free. Oh well, it helped make the day a little more surreal, at least…

Another interesting read: The Daily Adventures of Mixerman

It’s not only highly amusing in that laugh-at-someone-else’s-frustrations way, but it also helps paint a clearer picture of just what goes on in the recording process, who’s involved, what they do, and so on.

I’ve been on a bit of a CD-buying binge lately.

Velvet Revolver, “Contraband”: Yeah, it’s a gimmick band, but I’m actually enjoying it a fair bit. Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s mostly solid earache rock. There’s a couple of slower ‘ballads’ that seem a bit out-of-place, but that’s pretty much obligatory for this type of music.

Sonic Youth, “Sonic Nurse”: This one was on a recommendation; I hadn’t actually heard any Sonic Youth since sometime in the early ’90s. Definitely not for everyone, with their oft-noise-ish feel, and I don’t care for a couple of the tracks, but there’s a lot to like too. In particular I’d recommend “Unmade Bed”, “Dripping Dream”, “Stones”, and “Paper Cup Exit”.

The Killers, “Hot Fuss”: I’d never heard of these guys before, but I heard a couple songs while doing other shopping in HMV and liked them but didn’t know who it was, so I googled the lyrics later on and picked up the album itself a few days later. Average overall, but a few tracks are new favourites (“Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine”, “Smile Like You Mean It”, “Somebody Told Me”) and I wouldn’t really call any of them bad.

And Depeche Mode, “Music For The Masses.” Hey, it was five bucks.

There was also a cheap movie binge, but it’ll take longer to work through those…

To hell with it, maybe I should just get an iPod after all. The fourth-generation ones are out now, with the clicky-wheel from the mini-iPod, better battery life, and a lower price (I can live without the dock and case). It still doesn’t have the other features I’d like, but it’s better to have something at all than to chase a ‘perfect’ goal forever…

The problem then becomes one of management. I’d obviously need iTunes in order to load songs, manage playlists, and so on, but of the three systems I have, all of the songs are stored on the Linux file server, the one where iTunes isn’t available. There isn’t enough room to mirror the entire library on the iBook, and I don’t have FireWire or even USB2 on the Windows system (which I’d prefer to avoid and is also low on space).

Fortunately you can add songs to an iTunes library from a network share, so I can do all of the management from the iBook, but then that creates a couple more problems. First, it doesn’t seem to let me edit ID3 tags on songs in the library that are from a network share. Whether this is a limitation of iTunes or a permissions problem or what isn’t clear yet, so I still need to do some investigation there.

The second problem is that now I have a redundant data problem. Although I can’t fit my whole music library on the iBook, I *do* have a subset of my favourite tracks loaded on it so I can listen to them while roaming. Adding the songs from the network share makes the local ones show up twice in the library, and it’s not immediately obvious which one is the local one and which is the remote one (idea to Apple: smart playlists based on filename/path). What I really need is two separate libraries, one just for the networked songs and one for the local copies, but iTunes just has one big library per user.

There is a way around it though, if you cheat a bit. Since everything is stored in ~/Music/iTunes, all I had to do was take the existing directory, rename it to iTunes.local, restart iTunes and add the network songs to the now-empty library, quit iTunes, and rename the newly-recreated iTunes directory to iTunes.remote. Now all I have to do is make ~/Music/iTunes a symbolic link to whichever library I want to work on at the time before starting iTunes. (If I were really lazy I’d make wrapper scripts to do it automatically from the Dock or Finder.)

It’s a bit of a kludge, but should work well enough. Now where are all those pennies…

Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to abandon the MP3 player change. I’m not sure how I overlooked this one the last time around, but statwise it looks extremely nice: the iRiver iGP-100

It supports Ogg Vorbis, the 1.5G capacity is almost exactly what all of my favourite tracks total to in Ogg format, it acts as a USB Mass Storage device, has an FM tuner, and is even cheaper than most of the other players iRiver has. About the only major downsides are that it can’t record (not too important), and may have potential battery replacement problems down the road.

The reviews don’t seem too bad either. It’s tempting, at least…