Zero_Dogg’s blog

Since some people seemed a bit interested in my opinions on the various music players and music managers I’ll go through a few of them – beginning with quod libet.

The initial interface looks like this:

In my opinion its interface is less than elegant. It devotes almost the entire interface to the list of tracks available and a tiny portion to a playlist-lookalike thing called the queue. Searching the library requires a pop-up window which has to be dug out of the menu.
I could not immedietly find any way to have it submit my tracks to my last.fm profile, nor did I find any way to make the player harvest album covers – not a requirement ofcourse, but it does look nice. Lyrics browser was also a bit too hidden.

Here is one screenshot of amaroK using a GTK/GNOME lookalike theme:

Information about the currently playing album easily within reach and the lyrics are just a tab away. Here is the amaroK collection browser, it takes up alot less space than that of Quod Libet and is imho much more elegant and easier to use:

Now I know quod libet is suppose to be customizeable, but I couldn’t find a way to make it look this good, if you know one, don’t hesitate to comment (link a screenshot too perhaps?)

Note also that I’m a GNOME follower, which is why I want to look at the GTK and GNOME alternatives for something better or at least as good.

I’m currently using amaroK. Now that’s a great player, and software HAS to be great for me to use a KDE program. Now, I have a music player, sure. The problem I have with amaroK is that it’s a KDE app. It brings along kded and dcop. That’s the bad part, kded crashes, dcop brings along alot of junk during startup that I don’t want, and it’s QT – so it doesn’t look as good as my GTK apps. KDE software is fine for KDE users, but KDE software is too bloated and such for other users. I’m still using amaroK, but I’d wish I could get something more. Now flame me, kick me, punch me – I’m still not going to say KDE sucks. I don’t like KDE, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. But it shouldn’t mean that I can’t be allowed to prefer GTK/GNOME apps over KDE/QT.

I’ve tried quodlibet, it might be good, but it isn’t what I want, doesn’t have the features of amaroK that I like, nor an interface as easy to use as amaroK. I like the amaroK interface.

Rhythmbox doesn’t provide the same as amaroK, it gets too much in my way.

Okay, this rant is over, don’t take it too seriously. I’m happy with amaroK, but I’d really wish there’d be a good GTK/GNOME replacement for it, but, there isn’t – at least not for me, there might be for you.

I’m tired of mozilla stuff (wow, you didn’t know that now did you). So I’ve tried the last month to get rid of Thunderbird the last few months, I tried Evolution, but evolution was way too bloated for me, and now I tried Sylpheed Claws.

It turns out, I like Sylpheed claws (all parts except the spam filter, I’ll get to that). For instance the filtering is better, I like the GNOME/GTK integration better. It can autodetect ways to create a filter from a message. Now, spam filter, that’s tricky. It has a spamassassin plugin. That’s all fine ofcourse, the problem is that spamassassin is S L O W. It takes ages to process one mail. If you’ve got any hints on how to get this horribly slow thing to work faster PLEASE comment :P.

Anyway, right now I’ve got rid of Mozilla completely. I’ve dropped Firefox and I’ve dropped Thunderbird. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are both good and solid apps, and I don’t hesitate to recommend either one of them to other people – but they are just not right for me.

I used the tools/tbird2syl.py script from the Sylpheed Claws CVS to convert my thunderbird mails to sylpheed claws in case anyone else wants to too.

As usual the scary boy in black got stopped and searched by airport security. I’m getting used to this, I get this almost every time I fly. I go through the metal detector, the metal detector doesn’t beep, nothing wrong with my luggage… But still they tell me to “come over here” and then proceed to search me. Mmm – the joys of flying.

Well, at least I got there… over one hour too late, after they in addition to the first delay also had a little “technical diffcuilty” that lasted a few minutes. Well well…I’m here now – let’s hope the return trip goes better, perhaps I’ll only get searched that time… *sigh*

After reading AdamW’s blog post about Last.fm I decided to try it out and turns out I rather like the thing.
So now all of you big brothers…erm…I mean music lovers out there can spy on my music taste at http://www.last.fm/user/Zero_Dogg/ :o

…not officially this time either though.
Tomorrow we have a «study day», which is just my schools excuse of giving us a day off without actually calling it a day off. then on Wed-Thu I’m going to be in Oslo for the OOo meeting. I’m suppose to go to school on Friday but I’m going to take a «study day» (ie. a day off) that day :), since there is absolutely no point at all in going. Then on Monday we’re suppose to be there 2-4 hours, hopefully it won’t be long. So in practice school is over for now. I really need this vacation, and I’m probably going to get to do a bit of Mandriva packaging this summer too in addition to the OOo work. I just got developer (read not write) access to beep-media-players CVS too :)

Right now I’ve got a really cute cat lying on my lap, it’s a young one, so it’s quite tiny, currently sleeping but it’s been most playful all day, it’s an orphan so a friend of mine is «raising» her (to put it like that). Nice kitty :)