Crossing Over

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?

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.

So it turns out that Rhthmbox will recognize and read files from my 2nd gen iPod Nano, but it won’t do the automatic sync of playlists like iTunes or Songbird.

Also disappointing is the lack of crossfading support.  It’s kind of lame to listen to a cd that you know shouldn’t have any gaps between the songs and get that harsh break in the middle - it’s especially bad for live stuff.

So as it stands, it seems like Songbird still provides the best overall music experience, though I still haven’t been able to get Amarok to work properly on GNOME.

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.

Another attempt to get Amarok running ended in futility this morning.  This time the “Install MP3 Support” box didn’t even completely come up.  It could have something to do with the fact that Amarok is designed for the KDE interface, and Ubuntu makes use of the GNOME interface by default (though you can download a KDE version here - Kubuntu).

The All About Ubuntu blog had a couple of posts about using Rhythmbox but didn’t make any mention about using the MP3 file format for his music.  But now that I’ve had a litte bit of a more in-depth look at the Rhythmbox website, I’ve now realized that the Gstreamer extra plugins I installed yesterday would actually make Rhythmbox work with the MP3’s instead of Amarok.  Paying a little more attention to the Rhythmbox website would have been helpful there as it says right on it “based on the powerful Gstreamer media framework.”

I found another helpful blog called The Daily Ubuntu which features a new application every day that works on Ubuntu.  Their latest post actually has comments relevant to getting the MP3 codecs working on Amarok - maybe I’ll give those a try tonight.

So maybe I need to start looking in more obvious places for things.  At first I had the impression of Ubuntu that I had of my previous exposure to linux in that there was only some pain-in-the-arse way of solving a problem.

Installing MP3 support on my Ubuntu desktop was as easy as clicking Applications -> Add/Remove and then searching for “MP3″

The MP3 codecs popped right up.  I clicked on the checkbox beside “Gstreamer extra plugins”

I launched Amarok and my music library popped up on the left hand side so I hunted down an MP3 song and double clicked.  The “Install MP3 Support” box popped back up again so I clicked OK and waited patiently.

And am still waiting patiently.

Looks like Amarok crashed again.

Okay, so I may have come across a second minor issue when it comes to the whole “listening to music” thing.  It seems that every time I re-sync my iPod that the iPod’s software will crash the first time I try to listen to music.  Thankfully, this is easily resolvable.  For anyone who may need to look this up (like I did) just follow these steps to reset your iPod:

• Flip the Hold switch on and off
• Press and hold the menu and select buttons
• Wait patiently until the apple logo appears

I’m not 100% sure of the reason for this, but I do know that before I started syncing the iPod with Songbird it never crashed.  I had a look at the folder structure on the iPod (by double clicking on the little iPod icon on my desktop) and noticed that Songbird does create a folder on it.  I’m guessing either they can’t read the iTunes specific files or maybe they just don’t want to.  I also have to bear in mind that Songbird is currenly in the “Developer Preview” stage of it’s life cycle.

The good news is that after the initial crash and reset of the iPod, it doesn’t happen again until the next time I sync - so in my case, it’s every three days.