Experimentations

Music: Skinny Puppy - Schrimpz

I've been away from this for the last few days for no fault by my computers.

You see I have been trying to go all open source on the computers that I own. I already have one running Linux which I'm using as my webserver of sorts. Its been working wonderfully and I have not had a single complaint about it since I set it up 8 or 9 months ago.

The harder one to deal with is my personal computer that I use constantly (too much if you ask my wife) [But thats part of being a nerd. :-)] On my own computer I use for a lot of different purposes, the most imporant is to manage the Photos that I've been taking lately. For this I use Adobe Lightroom, there is no acceptable open source substitute for this program. While messing around on the computer I actually manged to get Lightroom to install on my Linux computer at home. Hurdle 1 was clearly avoided.

Hurdle 2 is a little more tricky. I am music-nerd. I have lots of music and I am particularly fond of the out-of-print 7" vinyl tracks that I've managed to obtain**. To help me organize the collection of obscure music, I've come to trust and love iTunes. This is my downfall.

I have been experimenting with other Linux media players and none offer the functionality and organizational ability that I require. The only one that has come close has been Amarok, but its a sack of shit. When you change an artist, genre, album, year, etc on the mp3 file normally it gets stored in the file so that the next time you load the file it will have all of the information. Not Amarok, its big "selling" point is the Database that is uses for faster searching and interface loading. Now, see the problem. I change my song information and load it into my iPod and things are different, they don't match up. I don't like being tied into an application and having my information at the mercy of one thing in particular. ***

So far this week I've installed 4 different distributions (*) about 9 or 10 times to see if I can certain things working.

Reluctantly, you can see that the responsiveness of iTunes that I have been experimenting with isn't quite up to par. Clicking play normally doesn't take 30 seconds to respond, and using the volume slider in the app shouldn't cause the MP3 to skip.

** Read: file-sharing.
*** Hence, my reluctance to actually buy any music from the iTunes music store. I refuse to purchase music that I can't move, copy, rip, burn, encode, recode at my whim. Call me old fashioned, but you're essentially renting the song. (Though, the DRM-free stuff at iTunes is interesting.... )
(*) - meaning flavours of Linux.