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.

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.

When you install Ubuntu 7.04 an Instant Messaging program called GAIM gets installed on your computer as well.  It’s a pretty handy multi-protocol application that will let you connect to various IM programs (MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ).  The only problem for me is that there is no built-in support for GoogleTalk.

A little bit of research led me to find that GAIM has been renamed to Pidgin for various legal reasons and Pidgin now has support for Googletalk’s protocol.  The down side is that Pidgin does not currently exist in the Add/Remove programs library.  A quick google search led me to jhcore.com’s article about installing Pidgin on your Ubuntu machine.  The instructions do use command line, but are actually very easy to use.

The only issue I found is that they’re slightly out of date, referring to a slightly outdated version of pidgin.  The good news is that by swapping the version number that is shown in jhcore’s instructions for the current version, you get the most up to date install of the application.

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.

The other day it had occurred to me that I forgot to fill out my timesheet for work so that I can get paid.

The timesheets at my office are done in Microsoft Excel. I was worried at first that I was going to have to reboot my computer into windows for the first time in several weeks.

Thankfully when I installed Ubuntu onto my home computer, it came ready to go with a spreadsheet application from OpenOffice.org. I downloaded my timesheet template, updated and saved it and emailed it to my boss. No compatibility issues whatsoever. I haven’t put the OpenOffice programs to a full on business related test yet, but it definitely seems to take care of the regular day-to-day type tasks you may require of it.

And at absolutely no cost. Pretty awesome if I do say so myself.