Music Management and Music Players

This is not about music, per se, but about music managers.

I run Banshee on Ubuntu.  It’s great and for the most part is pretty easy to use.  I love the playlist features, and the ability to create filters for my music (like having a playlist of everything minus my holiday music) and the queuing features.

I don’t like the fact that it doesn’t exactily have a good way to edit my tags or sync them to a database (CDDB or something).

I’ve actually tried to fix things with MusicBrainz Picard.  It worked a little bit.  I guess I’ll need to work with EasyTag or something to try to get things set.

Anyway, the whole reason for this grump-fest is because I’ve been trying to get my music to show up properly on my Walkman.  I’ve been working through most of my music, tried to clean things up, and am still having issues with most of it showing up under “UNKNOWN”.  Exactly like that, all caps and all.

It’s infuriating.  I even tried iTunes *shudder* on Windows.  Foobar2000 is awesome on Windows, but it doesn’t do anything related to tags.  It’s all folder-based, which is fine, but my idiot music player goes by tags.

This whole thing is so infuriating.  I’m about ready to go buy a Sansa Clip+.  It might actually work.

Does anyone have a solution?  Serously.  I don’t know why, but this kind of thing really bothers me.

Looking at 11.04 Natty/Unity – Good or bad? « OpenBytes

Certainly more so in the past, I’ve seen a select few regarding Ubuntu for “newbies, newbs, lamers” et al.  In todays Linux world I think this elitism exists only in rare circumstances.  Its completely silly too, just because Ubuntu wants to assist in setting up your system and get you up and running as quickly as possible does not make it “for newbs” I know many very experienced Linux users who favour Ubuntu purely because they have better things to do then mess about with their OS just to become functional.  Anyone can install proprietary drivers, its simple, but if Ubuntu takes that task away by automating the process, I’m all for it.  There was a time where I enjoyed the challenge of getting one of the more “exotic” distro’s functioning on my system, but now with several projects on the go, what I want in a new distro is to be up and running as quickly as possible.  I’ve deployed (and used off and on) Ubuntu since 8.04 and can happily say that this has always been the experience I’ve had.

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This is one of the reasons why I use Ubuntu. Granted, there are always going to be issues with software ($deity knows that I have plenty of issues with Windows), but that’s not always the underlying issue with the OS.

I guess I just want my blankity-blank stuff to work. Ubuntu “just works” and I don’t have to mess with goofy drivers, or strange software, or anything else. Especially now, since I’m running hardware that was designed for Ubuntu in mind.

Anyway, I just want stuff to be decently configured so I don’t have to spend a ton of time getting everything the way I like it. I used to spend lots of time “tweaking” my desktop, but now I’m more than happy with the default configuration of Ubuntu and Unity. Ambiance and Radiance are both beautiful and come with Ubuntu.

(Slight) Ubuntu Woes, and CONKY!

So.  I was having loads of issues with my Ubuntu install.  It was acting up; slowing down, crashing on reboot (which I don’t understand), and some other randomness.  I did a reinstall, went through my software, and decided that I didn’t really need to run the daily of Gwibber, the beta of firefox, or the newest Banshee.

So, I stopped using those PPAs.  I still love PPAs, don’t get me wrong, but I guess I wanted stuff to just work and not crash.  Gwibber is finally at the point where it does what I need it to without being a huge memory suck.  I’m using a bunch of PPAs, but the software is not provided in Ubuntu (like the weather indicator I’m using).

I thought maybe some of my issues were related to the alpha/beta software I was running, but I guess it was from the holdover from the cruft I was carrying around from Maverick.  I grabbed all of my files (NOT my hidden files) from my /home, copied them to my external drive, then reinstalled.  I blew away my /home too, and then restored all my files and reinstalled all my software.

Well it seems like it’s fixed now.  No crashing, no slowdowns, and no unexpected shutdowns when I’m doing something else.

How about a screenshot?  Don’t mind if I do:

As you can see, I have conky running on the right.  Pretty sweet.

The conky file, if anyone wants it can be found here.  You’ll have to change the names of your drives and all that, but it’s pretty simple.  For the record, I grabbed the original from ebupof from deviantart here.  I did some modification, but it’s not all that different.

Back to two monitors, because I can’t seem to live with only one.  I’m spoiled.

The netbook got a conky setup too:

You can find the conkyrc here.  I’ve already done some changes; I moved it over to the left, but that’s easy enough to change.

Conky is fun to play around with.  Give it a shot.  I like messing with it, and since Ubuntu doesn’t have panel applets anymore, this seems to be the way to go.

Does this mean I’m a professional blogger?

I’m now officially contributing to Gene Kelly Fans.

Pretty cool, if you ask me.  I was asked to contribute awhile ago, but didn’t really start posting til recently.  I’m having fun.

See my stuff here.

I’m even official on the contributors page!

I look forward to contributing more articles.