Crossing Over

Through the recommendation of my brother, I’ve installed Banshee Music Player on my Ubuntu PC in my long running effort to find the *perfect* Ubuntu media player.  Installation was as easy as installing most other software items.  Simply go to the Add/Remove Programs option on your Applications menu and search for Banshee in the “All available applications” option.  Click on the check box and apply.

After installing, I set it up to recognize my library and waited patiently.  It took a good 30-45 mins for it to load my 120+ GB music library, so no details as of yet on its actual usefulness.

Looking over the product tour, it looks as though they manage to cover all the bases.  It has the capability to import songs to MP3 format, burn CDs and sync your iPod all built in so that you don’t have to hunt down a ridiculous pile of codecs (like Amarok or Rhythmbox).  It also seems to have the features that an iTunes convert is looking for like drag-and-drop playlist and smart playlist support, play counters and ratings.  The only thing I haven’t seen so far is Artist/Album filters to sort my music, although there is a search box available so you can type your search information in there.

Later on we’ll have some details on its functionality.

So, after the upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon, it seems to me that everything is working a little bit better.  I noticed that WINE was working properly, so I gave another try at installing iTunes, with much success…

To say that it works well… would be a lie.  It works, but barely.  It’s extraordinarily slow and every time I launch it my screen goes black for about 5-10 seconds.  So three cheers for a proof-of-concept installation, but unfortunately I’ll be sticking with other options until some kinks can be worked out.

So I’ve been told that running a large number of windows applications can be easy using WINE on your linux PC.

Apparently iTunes is not necessarily one of these easy running applications.

As a matter of fact, I can’t seem to get past the halfway point in the installation process.

As you can see in the screen, everything seems to be able to get in the half-way point really well, but that’s aboot where it stops.  Three or four failed attempts leads me to believe that I should just stick with Amarok for now.

Over at Mike’s Ubuntu blog there’s a post about getting iTunes running on Ubuntu using WINE. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this one. I’ve been using Amarok and Songbird largely to handle my iPod file transfers, but their functionality and stability are severely lacking.

I started the installation process this morning before work.  The steps for installing WINE worked perfectly and quickly while I was downloading the iTunes install file.  Once the install file was downloading, I used the WINE file browser to navigate to it, double clicked on the file and watched as iTunes began to install.

Then I waited.

and waited..

and waited…

I gave up waiting as the installation status bar stuck at the halfway mark or so.  Here’s to hoping that when I go home the installation will have finished.  I’ll run through it again with some screen shots tonight when I have more time.

So what happened to make my iPod Nano crash after loading the music onto it using AmaroK?  I’m not 100% sure, but I do know that it had to do with certain songs on certain playlists.  I know that there was some sort of issue with a Misfits playlist I had created (I love the boxed set they released a few years back by the way).  It would play just fine within AmaroK, but whenever I used AmaroK to load it onto my iPod, it seems that those particular tracks caused the iPod to crash.  Workaround:  delete the tracks from the iPod and listen to something else.

Yeah, it’s a sucky workaround, but until I know the actual reason as to why those specific tracks caused the crash, I’ll either have to avoid them or load them using iTunes.  And since I’m avoiding Windows XP like the plague, looks like I’m avoiding them for now.

The good news is that after deleting the tracks from my iPod I can now use the “Shuffle Songs” option again.  I’ll have to see if there’s some sort of plugin for Amarok that does some sort of error checking or something like that.

So last night in an effort to try to resolve the iPod Nano crashing problem, I decided it would be best to restore my iPod Nano to its original factory settings.  As Apple does not support Linux (nor do they even pretend to), I decided it best to boot my computer back into Windows XP Professional to do this rather than spend more time screwing around with some Linux product that I was unfamiliar with.

Although booting into windows has always been a tedious process (boot, crash, boot, crash, boot, login, crash, boot, crash, boot, login, crash, boot, login successfully), restoring the iPod to its factory settings is rather easy.  Just plug in your iPod, load iTunes and go to the iPod section.  The Summary screen will have an easy to find “Restore” button that will do this for you.  Just follow a couple of quick and easy steps and there you go, back to normal.

After the iPod Nano was restored, I booted back into Ubuntu and reloaded all of my songs and playlists using AmaroK.  Once everything was loaded I gave the “Shuffle Songs” another click and skipped through a few tracks to see what would happen.  Five tracks go past, looking good, 10 tracks and still looking good.

The twelfth song crashed it.  A second attempt at it all proved the same thing.  It’s a shame because I’m really liking AmaroK from a visual and usability perspective otherwise and Songbird is far from being a rock solid product with the capability of handling such a large music library.

I’ll give AmaroK one more try and maybe even post something on their forum, but I’m not expecting a lot.  Many of the people on their support forum give sarcastic, useless responses because they’re certain that whatever they are doing is superior to what you are doing.  We’ll have to see, maybe they can prove me wrong and I can get this annoying problem fixed.

It seems to me that after most of the day listening to… or should I say ATTEMPTING to listen to… my iPod Nano after having loaded it using AmaroK that there are some pretty irritating issues using Linux based music apps when syncing your iPod.

I’ve discussed my issues using Songbird to sync my iPod Nano earlier, but now I’m running across issues after the Amarok sync from this morning.  If I use the “Shuffle Songs” option to shuffle my entire iPod library or use the “Suffle” option in the settings menu it seems to me that the iPod will now crash after playing - or even skipping through - about 5 or 6 songs.  Usually five.

If there’s anyone out there who’s encountered this problem, drop a comment and let me know if there’s a fix.  I’ll be scouring the linux dork forums for info in the meantime, though that’s generally pretty futile as they’re filled with comments like “why would anyone want an iPod - pile of crap.  get a [crappy feature-less mp3 player] instead” or “iTunes is for idots, linux rooolzzz!!1″

Amarok is a much different music player than what I’m used to using (iTunes or Windows Media player).  It kind of reminds me of the old-school style of creating playlists to play your music a-la Winamp, but has a pretty handy-dandy library functionality.

Creating a playlist is easy.  You can double click files to add them to the current playlist, or select large numbers of files, albums or artists and right click to add to the current playlist or create a new playlist.  Throwing them on your iPod is just as simple as there’s an option on the right click menu - just remember to go to the portable devices section and click the transfer button when you’re ready to sync.

Though visually I still prefer Songbird to Amarok,  Amarok seems to be proving itself to be a far more functional and fast application.  Keep in mind though that Songbird is still in the very early stages of development.

From what I understand as well, you can spend a little more time messing around with the configuration of Amarok and put it’s music library into a MySQL database to improve performance.  That might be handy for me as my music collection is now pushing 120 GB and although Amarok is proving to be a much faster alternative to Rhythmbox or Songbird, it’s still got a ways to go before I’d deem myself completely happy with it.  I’m going to be sticking to my “keeping it easy” mentality though.  I’ll see what sort of upgrades can be done with the least amount of effort.

Apparently there’s even a Windows build for this application, which would be handy for people who want a media player alternative but don’t want the bloat involved with Windows Media Player, iTunes or the horrendous contraption called Winamp 5.

Okay, so getting Amarok to work in Ubuntu via the advise of others has proved to be nothing but a royal pain in the arse, so i got back to basics.  One of the original purposes of me doing this whole Ubuntu thing was that I wanted to make sure that I was doing things as lazily and simply as possible.

Clicking on the “Install MP3 Support” dialog box that pops up generally resulted in nothing, so I decided to go back to the easiest way to install things in Ubuntu.

Add/Remove programs, search for Amarok:

This brought up an option called “Xine extra plugins.”

This is your nukular bomb folks.  This is the mp3 support I’ve been hunting for over the last couple of weeks.  No command line, no funky tricks, just back to keeping it simple, stupid.

Click on the check box, click on Apply and wait patiently for about 20 seconds while your Amarok MP3 support gets installed.

Then open Amarok and enjoy your best 90’s revival of a washed up 80’s band you can think of:

Didn’t I say a couple of days ago that I was going to keep this easy?  Why the hell didn’t I listen to myself before?

It turns out my attempt earlier in trying to make Amarok work properly was actually the step I needed to do in order to get Rhythmbox to play my mp3 files.  Behold my success:

So far I’ve managed to load the entire 115 GB library and successfully play a few tracks.  I haven’t yet figured out how to import MP3s from my CDs yet or configure the bitrate at which to import the files.

The next step will be syncing my playlists automatically.  So far I’ve noticed a few very cool things about Rhythmbox as a media player:

• It is MUCH faster than Songbird.  Adding my library took minutes instead of hours, searching for files is borderline instant where Songbird takes several seconds to hunt through the library before it decides it’s going to do something.
• Rhythmbox automatically hunts down the album art for me.  This is cool because most of the stuff i imported previously didn’t have the album art associated with it and my iPod Nano will display thumbnails of the album covers.
• The interface is similar to iTunes.  And by similar I mean “somewhat resembles” - it’s kind of like if iTunes had no emphasis on being visually pretty, but still functional.  If you’ve used that media player, you’ll be able to stumble your way through this one.

So the basics of it all - Rhythmbox came already installed with my Ubuntu Linux installation, the only thing I needed to do was go to the Applications menu -> Add/Remove.. and check under the Sound & Video section for the “Gstreamer extra plugins”, check it and click apply.  Bingo it worked.  And best of all, NO COMMAND LINE crap.  Although the command line stuff is surely going to work it’s way into my life sooner or later, I’m going to do what I can to make this a functional home computer running Ubuntu Linux while using as little command line crap as possible.