Symphony of Science – The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)

Beautiful, gorgeous, poetry brought to life, this video shows that science can be magical.

In one of my last updates on this blog (Am I really going to sell out and use iTunes?), I pondered switching to iTunes:

So, when you add things up,that means that I have to use iTunes for a lot of the functionality that I want from my iPhone. Which probably means I’ll end up using iTunes as my default media player from now on.

On further reflection – and after trying to use iTunes as a media player – I have gone running away from it. iTunes sucks ass (no offense to my friends and family who have to use iTunes). It’s a CPU and memory hog, it’s counter-intuitive, not user friendly, and seems to be written specifically so users cannot configure it to their liking. (Actually, since it is an Apple product, it almost definitely is.)

So now I gladly move back to my media player of choice: Amarok 1.4! (Screenshot above) There are very few things I dislike (really, it’s hard to think of anything I dislike), but plenty of things to love. Easy playlist generation, separate views of the Library from the playlist that one has running, very flexible sorting of the files shown in the library, logical groupings for playlists and podcasts.

Other features that I love:

• Amarok has one huge, huge feature that iTunes is lacking: dynamic library tracking. Delete a file on the disk, Amarok automatically removes it from its library. Rename the file, and Amarok updates its library with the new location (without losing ratings information!).
• More flexible ratings system. Amarok is one of the few media library packages that allows rating a track with half-stars. I use 3.5 stars as the baseline for most of my smart playlists. In iTunes (and most other media managers), you can only use half-stars. This is *huge* for me!

That leave the issue of iPod/iPhone syncing. As I mentioned in my previous entry, there just aren’t any Linux apps that can sync everything I want to sync on my iPhone (Apps, ringtones, video podcasts, playlists, etc.) Which means I have to keep a virtual Windows XP machine with iTunes at the ready. I create playlists in Amarok, then export them into an iTunes-compatible format, then use iTunes to transfer them to the iPhone. *voila*!

(As an aside, I put together a short bash script to make the playlist conversion. it is:

#!/bin/bash
sed 's/\/music/M\:/' "$1" | sed 's/\//\\/g' - > win_"$1"


Simple, but I loves me some sed.

iTunes thumbnail

In one of my most recent entries, I wrote about how I was able to get my iPhone 3g syncing in Ubuntu. That works very well, with a couple of issues that are quickly turning into show stoppers. My major issues are:

• Playlist support. I am not a random/shuffle guy, nor really an album guy. I like to make my own playlists, or create smart playlists.  Rhythmbox can’t do iPod/iPhone playlists, which pretty much rules it out. That leaves me with the too simplistic GTK Pod.
• Syncing ringtones: GTK Pod can’t do that.
• Backing up apps: I am fairly certain that GTK Pod can’t do that.
• Video podcasts: As silly as the idea is, I’ve gotten pretty hooked on watching video podcasts on my iPhone. GTK Pod can’t handle that.

So, when you add things up,that means that I have  to use iTunes for a lot of the functionality that I want from my iPhone. Which probably means I’ll end up using iTunes as my default media player from now on. Which annoys me to no end. And really does make me feel like a sell-out. But at the current time, there’s no open source alternative that does even half of what I need.

This makes two apps that I can’t find equivalents for. Good thing that VirtualBox is pretty damned good at what it does. And VirtualBox’s seamless mode makes the app look like they are running natively in XFCE.

• Blip.fm | biffster | Listen to Neutral Milk Hotel – Tuesday Moon
  Listen to Neutral Milk Hotel – Tuesday Moon online for free. Posted on Feb 23, 2010 at 7:27 am by biffster: '<3 this song, perfect to get a Tuesday off to a good start.'.
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I got an iPhone 3g recently, and was really, really bummed out that I was having to fire up iTunes in a virtual machine so I could manage music, playlists and podcasts on it. Since I have my music library set up with a samba share for my wife’s laptop access, I just mounted the music directories there and added them to the iTunes library. But so much just isn’t cool about iTunes, and I have so many songs and playlists and ratings and such in Amarok, I just really didn’t want to switch.

So, like any good Linux user, I went bumping around Google to find a way to get the iPhone working in Ubuntu. I started out with a good article from FatButtLarry. I followed the HOWTO to the letter, but I could not get a successful sync. I could copy files to the iPhone, but the actual iPod software on the iPhone would not see it. So I went off on another search.

Fortunately, I stumbled on this excellent tutorial by StoneCut via WebUp8:

I am now quite happily using Rhythmbox to manage music and podcasts on my iPhone. I reckon eventually I’ll have to hook up to iTunes just to back up the apps I have, maybe to install some new ringtones… Or maybe not.

I have *no* idea how I missed it, but Facebook Chat is now officially XMPP-capable! Lifehacker spells it out in an excellent post titled “How to Add Facebook Chat to Your IM Client“:

If you are using a multi-protocol IM client such as Pidign, Adium, or iChat, set-up is really easy—you just add a new Jabber or XMPP account, the username being your username@chat.facebook.com, with your password being the same as your Facebook password. If you still haven’t gotten a Facebook username (the tag that appears after www.facebook.com/ for your profile page) you’ll need to go to your Settings page to enable it.

All I have to say is: ‘HUZZAH!!!!!!’

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  Listen to Oh, Streetcar! (the Musical) by The Simpsons on Songs In The Key Of Springfield
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