HIS morning I got myself isolated for 3-4 hours. I spent a long time mechanically erasing unwanted music. At the end, I was 5GB leaner; around 1200 unwanted files were fully disposed of. The existence of so much ‘grabage’ is an artefact of recursive downloads and the procrastination that follows. The approach is based on the accumulation of piles of arbitrary music, then getting rid of the undesirable bits. I concentrated too much of the former part, yet the hard-drive’s capacity has reached its limits.

I finally had the opportunity to take some time off (owing to the holiday), so I got a few mandatory chores out of the way. Now that media files have been filtered, I will have fewer cases of bad music coming up when I change tracks in shuffle. mode The method of music erasure involved a few tricks to increase overall efficiency:

• Deletion from the physical disk directly via the music player (in this case XMMS)
• Deletion in batches of up to 12 files at a time
• Seeking for 5-10 seconds per file using the track poisition bar, thereby getting a sense for what tracks are unwanted and what tracks must stay
• Global shortcuts, particularly for skipping tracks
• Prompts for deletion confirmation – use the ENTER key which is adjacent to the keypad and thus nearer to the mouse. Meanwhile, the other hand (usually the left) hovers near the ALT, SHIFT and CTRL keys to take advantage of keyboard accelerators.
• Use of the playlist highlighter feature (of any) for selecting of multiple items, with the aid of the SHIFT key. This becomes natural after hours of repeated keystrokes and actions.

A big burden has been lifted off me. The result: more free space and improved ‘successful hit rate’ for music.

The next challenge which involves a mechanical-type job is organisation of my references. They tend to float around in different documents and some text files; all in a flat or inline text form, thus no semantics. One needs a better storage form, a better structure, more like a database. Putting some papers on-line has enabled me to use Web searches for quick discovery, but this is far from convenient. I want to embed everything in a BiBTeX-friendly tool. I have been planning organisation under a tool such as JabRef, which I have had installed for a while. Some time in the past I was using EndNote, but soon departed from that lock-in which involves expensive proprietary software and integration with Windows-centric programs.

Songbird teasers: pre-release screenshots

ONGBIRD is a new media-type Open Source project. It is intended to clone, at least in some sense, the popular iTunes from Apple. Songbird will offer users the ability to buy music from a variety of sources on-line. To me, this seems like amaroK with an option to spend money.

I already have amaroK (see image at the bottom) and rarely do I feel tempted to switch. I get music by running wget recursively, so I needn’t purchase anything, no matter the cost. amaroK does everything I could possibly wish for. It even comes pre-installed with KDE-oriented distributions like SuSE. GNOME users can use Rhythmbox instead, but it is poorer in terms of looks and functionality.

I have recently been told that amaroK 2.0 will be based on QT4, so with the arrival of KDE 4 (around the third quarter of 2005) expect a Windows version too. Open Source music managers could truly take off in a broad market, rather than just a niche. In fact, both amaroK and Songbird have the potential to have impact that is on par with that of Mozilla Firefox.

Related item: amaroK’s recent open review in the KDE News site

amaroK in action

MMS and Winamp, among other popular music players, begin (or have long ago begun) to lag behind more bloated applications such as iTunes and Windows Media Player. Bloated software from the giants is continuing to develop and evolve. The target audience is easily manipulated into using anything that comes along these large marketing ‘pipelines’, either pre-packaged or pre-installed.

AmaroK is a fully-featured player/playlist management suite for KDE (Linux). Believe it or not, it boasts an endless amount of features that got me overly excited. I have been toying with AmaroK for the past couple of days as if I was a 1-year-old that has just discovered baby wipes. Here are the top 10 features the way I personally perceive them:

• Lyrics of most songs can be brought up at the speed of a mouse click. This does not only apply to popular chart hits.
• Album covers are easily fetched and displayed, also at the speed of a mouse click, apparently using an Amazon service
• Smart list accumulation is handled by the application
• ‘Jump’ function (equivalent to ‘j’ in XMMS)- character patterns are searched for among all songs. Indexing makes subsequent matches immediate. For example, type in “dless” and every song in your playlist which contains that string (even part of a word) will be listed immediately for you to select.
• Universal keyboard shortcuts like the ones XMMS offers. The user can change track, for example, while desktop focus is placed upon another program.
• Show all songs from the same artist, often subcategorised by albums while any song gets played
• Media library management – breakdown of songs to form trees of artists, albums, or genres
• iPod synchronisation built-in and included in the core of the application. I rank this feature low as I use a Palm Tungsten for MP3′s, not an iPod. For iPod owners this might be considered a “must-have” feature.
• Popularity analysis – for each song, statistics are recorded, e.g. time last listened to, time first listened to and related songs/artists. That feature makes my log files merely obsolete
• Transparent on-screen display (OSD), just like in XMMS

The following bulletpoint cannot properly be labeled “features”, but they are also worth listing, perhaps as “selling points”:

• Rich graphical user interface, which is highly customisable. This includes some 32-bit transparencies.
• External small GUI, much like that which is offered by XMMS/Winamp. This enables the user to control playlist flow without taking up plenty of screen space.
• Various plug-ins I have not had the luxury time to play with, yet

On File Type Support

Support for MP3 files is not build-in when SuSE 9.3 initially gets installed, which is a PITA (setting aside that primitive, buggy variant of Real Player 10, which has spyware tendencies). The same applies to Fedora Core and has become a major notoriety. Other distributions like Ubuntu are no exception.

For SuSE, one needs to get update and recompile the multimedia components with MP3 support. This is something I discovered when I set SuSE up a few days ago. That possibly explains the declined pace of blog posts, by the way.

As for Ubuntu, XMMS with MP3 support can be trivially installed using the package manager called Synaptic. By default, older versions of Ubuntu (at the least) come with no application that handles the MP3 format. That is just a painful reality as far as I can gather.

AmaroK supports a variety of formats including WAV, OGG and the like. In fact, virtually any filetype is supported, provided that it is understood by the underlying multimedia layers.

N excellent and comprehensive review of the iPod nano comes from ars technica. The review is full of clean shots of the nano. To spice things up, the durability of the iPod is put into the test with cars running over, bashes into the ground, etc. I warmheatedly recommend this visually-rich review, which is not vandalistic in nature. The picture shown above is somewhat misleading.

Manufacturer: Apple (product page)
System requirements: Macintosh computer running Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later, USB port; Windows PC running Windows 2000 SP4 or Windows XP SP2, USB port
Price: US$199 (2GB), US$249

Also see: Sony’s ‘iPod’

The display blends with the player’s body

AVE you had a peek at the new Sony Walkman, which aims to compete with Apple’s iPod? Since Apple have introduced the ultra-thin iPod nano and will soon incorporate a mobile phone, Sony appear to have fallen behind already. Their 20 GB player does not look elegant to me. Have a look, however, at how its display blends with the actual body. The white captions are part of the display, which is almost unbelievable and probably unprecedented.

Even the Queen of England might fill out the form

Dear iPod users,

Be sure to read this earth-shaking item and fill the form if necessary.

A San Mateo County judge on Thursday approved the settlement of a class action suit that will offer relief to as many as 1.3 million iPod owners who may have been victim to poor or defective batteries.

• Claim Form

enjoy listening to music, but yet again who doesn’t? There is always catch though — a pitfall if you like: records and files get ‘used up’ after a period of time. Obtaining new music is a time-consuming process whether it involves walking, browsing or loading CD‘s.

Since peer-to-peer (P2P)) downloads are illegal, I have been downloading a lot music from small bands’ Web pages en masse. What I do not like, I can immediately dispose of. Using the command line, I am able to download music in the background without any manual intervention, simply by spidering the Internet.

I have come to realise that I do not know the names of songs that I listen to. I rarely bother to look at the filenames or tags because it is the same time-consuming ‘luxury’ mentioned above. In most cases, I fail to remember the names of bands too. To use an extreme example, a song which I must have listened to 50+ times in past few days has been completely obscure to me up until now. To repeatedly play it, I would typically use the “jump” function followed by the string “be” (for the word “belief” contained in the song’s title). This plays the song merely at the power of will, taking no more than a second to find and play it. It all leaves song titles and artists’ names in the dark unfortunately.

While on this issue of ‘music productivity’, XMMS accelerators, for instance, are used to control the music player without changing application focus. In other words, key combinations involving SHIFT, CTRL and/or ALT work universally and affect the player’s state at any time. You can change tracks, adjust volume etc. while in the midst of writing a sentence. The mechanism which enables this is described (also visually) towards the end of an old item about Music Log Files.

I have reached what I consider to be a Utopian situation. This is analogous to have a radio station with infinite supply of music. I have the ability to skip tracks, repeat tracks and organise the music supply at great ease. Moreover, the music supply can be handled purely by robots (cron jobs), as described in an old item on music mass-downloading.