musings

You know, I’ve been remiss in giving Binary Goddess a plug here for her business, GR8-EFX Studios. She does really good work – check out what she did for my company, Electron Jump.

Audio Lunchbox is a new iTunes-store-alike, but unlike iTunes they offer platform agnostic files that have NO DRM (digital rights management) crap in them. They offer mp3 and ogg format downloads, with similar pricing to the iTunes store, and their selection seems pretty good. I’m still really happy with EMusic, but this looks like a good alternative.

So I’ve been looking for an mp3 player for Linux because I really hate XMMS. I wanted something that had nice database management in it, like iTunes. So I tried Rhythmbox. Rhythmbox is really nice – it looks very nice and has the same basic interface as iTunes, and if Sound Juicer is installed will even rip cds for you (but you can’t set the encoding quality yet). But with a playlist of several thousand songs, rhythmbox is painfully slow. We’re talking about minutes spent with the CPU redlined when you start it up. Typing something into the incremental search box would bog the system way down (and this is a 2GHz Athlon with 512M of RAM!). I did a bit of searching around and found some alternatives like Juk, Muine and Jamboree. Juk was out because it’s KDE/Qt (which has nothing to do with philosphy – I just don’t like KDE). Muine is written in GTK#/Mono, which I don’t have installed either (again, nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with the fact that Mono is still unstable and, thus, not installed on my machine), so it was out too. Jamboree looked interesting, but I was put off by the fact that the goal of Jamboree was to determine, empirically, the speed of the GTK+ treeview widget. Given that it looked like a fork of Rhythmbox, I wasn’t expecting much from the database either. Then I stumbled upon, IMO, the Holy Grail of mp3 players: wxMusik.

wxMusik does everything I want and nothing I don’t want – it has no visualisations, nor does it have cd ripping capabilities. What it does have is a nice player (with a 16 band EQ and a crossfader), amazingly powerful tag editing features, and a blazingly fast database. The database is stored as an SQLite database. This gets you a couple of things – speed and really customisable searches. With a little SQL you can get really dynamic playlists that are ordered by whatever criteria you want. wxMusik is available for both Linux and Windows – check it out, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

(Jed’s site is fixed now.)

Well, I figured it was about bloody time this page got a face lift. I was truly sick of the nasty pea green theme I had going on. Now I’ve got a nasty glowy orange color scheme!

Huzzah! Jed’s site is no longer white!

It’s now very black. With a tiny bit o’green.

Added a link (over there, on the right) to my good friend Jed Adams‘ site. He’s got a cool url, so go visit.

Er. Wait. Maybe not.

Right now it seems to be really really white. Yup. White. Lots and lots of white. It’s like Northern Ontario in the middle of winter kind of white. Eh. Go visit anyway. Maybe by the time you get there it’ll be, well, less white.

Very cool:
Magnatune offers free streaming music and mp3 downloads (under differing licenses based on your desired use of the music). You can also buy albums (which are then available as downloads in many formats, including uncompressed .wav files) and the cost is split 50-50 with the artists. Progressive!

Now this is just too funny.

Oh, BTW BG, I love you too! (K)