20
Jan
I was bumming around on last.fm today and started to wonderin’ about a couple issues involved in organizing large music collections and I thought I’d pose some questions to my three readers. I am up in the air about these three questions so following in each question is my current thoughts and dilemma.
1. How do you handle tagging multi-artist albums?
For instance I have a bunch of split albums and the artists don’t necessarily collaborate on the songs. So I think I should put which artist did the recording in the Artist tag but then sorting by artist ends up with a bunch of weird half albums but I am not sure that matters. And then there’s the question of songs that have other artists on them like Billy Joe Shaver’s “Get Thee Behind Me Satan” with John Michael Montgomery. If I add in John Michael’s name then I have a new “Artist” with one song and not an accurate Artist to boot. So I am thinking that the Comments field might be the place for this sort of information but I don’t know. And then there’s compilation albums. Maybe the answer to my question is to sort by Album but so many music players don’t allow a tag for compilation anywhere and I end up with seventeen albums with the same name and one song each.
2. How anal retentive are you about genre tags?
Another one I am torn on. Do I care about the difference between Red Dirt, Texas Country, Outlaw Country, Country, Classic Country, Alt Country, and probably a few more that I haven’t even thought to include? I do use the Genre tag in sorting and sometimes in smart playlists but how granular should I be? And are genres arbitrary or is it easier than I am making it? Is Tim Barry Alt Country, Americana, Folk, Rock, or some other sub-genre I missed. And what is the difference between Americana and Folk, and can a Canadian artist be Americana?
3. If you use Linux what do you use for your music player/organizer?
I am currently using gmusicbrowser and miss Amarok but the new version sucks balls. No player since has matched the smart capability, the options, and the sheer usability of the old Amarok. I think gmusicbrowser could catch up as it’s a young project and the maintainer is active and considers suggestions but it lacks some of my favorite features. So if you have a suggestion that’s not Amarok, Banshee, or Rhythmbox then please let me know. On a side note I think I’ll review gmusicbrowser this week, like with screenshots and everything. Oh and if you use Windows or Mac and get an urge to suggest iTunes for organizing a large music collection then I reserve the right to mock you for iTunes and for using Windows.
So there you have it. If any of the three you want to weigh in I would appreciate it. Meanwhile I’ll suffer through inaccurate tag information as best I can.
I am a dyed in a wool Ubuntu user as far as desktop systems go but I haven’t always been. I used to use Mandriva, and before that SuSE, and before that Slackware but I happened onto Ubuntu and my “I may be a geek but I am a lazy geek” streak kicked in. I have been very satisfied with apt and the Synaptic interface. In face other than for my love of tweaking my OS I would have the most stable desktop/laptop of anyone I know…after an Ubuntu install of course. Now don’t get me wrong Ubuntu took getting used to. I was a KDE fanatic for the longest time and KUbuntu is the red-headed stepchild of the Ubuntu family. But then the KDE folks went and crapped out the 4.x line and killed my love for KDE so Ubuntu was just about perfect. Not was – is. I still love it. Which is why I cannot answer the question: Why did I spend hours trying to get OpenSuSE 11.2 running on a Dell M4400 over the past couple of days?
First off everything didn’t work out of the box. The resolution for the install isn’t supported all the way through so a black screen and multiple reboots didn’t help me fall in love. Well I got past that and since I am a Linux nerd I won’t let a little install weirdness stop me. Then I went to set up my development environment and the version of Eclipse in the repos is Ganymede…ARGH! I won’t bore you with the details but I need Galileo for what I am doing. A manual install worked of course but for the repo to be that out of date on a brand new release is upsetting. Now I went with the defaults during install in hopes that a properly integrated KDE 4.x wouldn’t suck. I was wrong. The first time it tried to update it was a morass of pop-ups telling me the update widget had, for all intents and purposes, dropped a deuce all over itself. Nothing I did would drag the desktop out of what looked a pornado minus the porn. Pop-up after pop-up after pop-up after pop-up…well you get the picture. Still soldiering on I rebooted and did the initial update via YAST which worked. Of course none of this takes into account the fact I have to allow KWallet to be opened twice, even with remember password checked, just to connect to my passwordless WIFI which is an annoyance I don’t feel like troubleshooting at this point.
Now all of this would be alright if the KDE 4.x widgets didn’t randomly crash and I do mean randomly. Then today after all of that I was home sick from the office. I wanted to surf the web just a little bit, maybe watch the video of Barney Frank mouth off about changing the Senate rules so they can cram health care down our throats, but that wasn’t in the cards. Flash simply refused to work at all. I googled and found various solutions but none that made sense or addressed the issue of flash, from the official OpenSuSE blessed install source, not freaking working out of the box on a fully updated system. I went to install my favorite terminal program, Terminator, to try and fix the problem and it wasn’t in the repos at all. Well after so many straws a camel’s back will give in and so I gave up.
If you want to know why Ubuntu is the apparent flagship of the Linux world, why it has so many fanboys running amok, why end users and nerds alike use it without shame then you have your answer. It works. Period. Of course there are quirks but the issues you could run into are no more than getting Windows 7 to the point where you like it. Sure the answers are different than Windows answers but the problems are no more numerous. If you want to build a distro that can compete in the desktop space, kernel scheduler aside, then build one that works. So as of hitting submit on this post, burning the iso that just finished downloading, I am done with OpenSuSE. Period. I want an OS that works thank you very much.
Tune in tomorrow to watch my head explode trying to explain modules and classes in Ruby….
… the Module class of module is the superclass of the Class class of class…
Yeah so…be seeing you from an actual function OS shortly.
18
Jan
Some days are just rough and some folks have a hard row to hoe. This is one for one of those days. Grab the headphones, dig the whiskey out of your bottom drawer, hunker down and press play. It’ll all be over soon.
18
Jan
Well folks it’s a new year and I am head down at work, kicking off two oss projects in two different languages, going in to work earlier, still writing for 9b, as well as spending more time with the wife and kiddos. All this adds up to me needing to find more time to write here. So I will, starting today, try for the three posts a week as I tried for last year. I didn’t make it all the way through the end of the year but I did pretty good. I am not going to try and shoot for specific topics this year though so there’s a change. It’s the 18th of January and I have exactly one post here for the year not counting this one. That will change at the rate of three posts a week, I hope. My lovely wife is doing project 365 again and going strong so I ought to be able to scratch out three posts a week even with all the rest of the crap I am doing. I’ve got a real post coming up after this one and not just this sorry excuse for what I haven’t been doing this year so stay tuned…
2
Jan
I meant to post this on New Year’s Eve but the party got moved to my house at the last minute so I didn’t get around to it but here it is now.
