Big Fat Ostrich

Maybe they’re not officially dead, but it’s starting to feel that way.

The guitar tab plugins that I’m talking about are the add ons that you would use in applications like Rhythmbox or Amarok (that piece of crap), Songbird, Banshee, or even Exaile (which is cool, but based on Amarok, so therefore it’s a piece of crap).

Or maybe it’s all Ubuntu 11.10′s fault.

I don’t know anymore. I once wrote about guitar tabs in Rhythmbox and how they no longer work in Ubuntu 11.10. Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water. I tried Exaile which CLAIMED to have a guitar tablature plugin (in the search results), but when you go on their website, there’s absolutely no mention of it. Nada.

I think what this all points to is that developers are starting to care less and less about applications that you need to install. The focus is now leaning heavily on cloud based software, and music apps are no different with iCloud and Google Music. But what are your options if you want to play your music locally and display guitar tabs?

Maybe Canary has the answer. (Yes, another animal named software!) Canary.fm is so freaking new I don’t think anyone knows about them. And hell, they only have 4 Twitter followers. But, they’re doing something interesting which is cloud based guitar tabs. And the tabs look super slick. Now, if you can display guitar tabs WHILE I listen to my music (locally or in the cloud) I may be sold.

Here’s a vid:

Hey, remember that big Amarok vs Songbird showdown that I wrote about last year? Well you know what? It was all bullshit! There I was, trying to find THE best goddamn music player, to just PLAY MUSIC. So what happened, you ask?

2 things happened:

a) Amarok turned into Amarok 2, which was a giant digital turd. End of story
b) Songbird turned into Songbird for Windows with no more Linux support. That’s right: NO MO!
c) Songbird for Linux became Nightingale (which hasn’t really gone anywhere yet)

Fine, so that was 3 things.

Anyway, all this time something was right under my nose, and that something was Rhythmbox. And yes, Rhythmbox comes installed on Lucid Lynx by default. Also, you know what it goddamn does? It goddamn detects my iPod. And you know what else? It plays music right off my iPod! That means that I can take my iPod to any computer that has Rhythmbox installed and it will play my collection. Without me having to do any stupid synching or anything.

I know I know. Someone’s going to tell me that this existed in the 1620′s or something, but I don’t care! It’s news to me!

Also, in the last version of Songbird I couldn’t get the guitar tabs to work in 64-bit Lucid Lynx. If you want to use them in Rhythmbox, do this:

1. $ sudo apt-get install python-lxml
2. $ tar -xvzf tabsearch-0.1.tar.gz
3. $ cp -r tabsearch/ $HOME/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/<—create the folder if it doesn’t exist!
4. Launch Rhythmbox and activate the plugin

Months ago I did a couple of posts about Amarok 2 and Songbird and had come to this non-commital conclusion: Amarok 2 sucked, Songbird was excellent, but I was willing to give Amarok 2 a chance. Well, no more chances Amarok 2. You had your day in the sun, but you forgot the sunscreen (fine, worst metaphor/analogy ever). You get the point.

Songbird has been trouble free on my Ubuntu system. Updates, no updates, no problems. No crashing, a multitude of add-ons, no clutter, etc, etc, etc.

Amarok 2…such a disappointment. Clunky, non-intuitive, a complete redesign that tries to be something it’s not. Actually, it succeeded in that department: It went from being a music player/organizer, to a lumbering animal that no one had ever seen before. Amarok 2 is that thing that stumbled out of the woods, injured, waiting to be shot.

The final decision for me came with the beta release of Amarok 2.2 aka Crystal Clear. It doesn’t feel like an improvement at all. It just feels extremely overpackaged.

Thankfully, I found the all encompassing solution to all of Amarok 2′s woes in one simple command:

sudo apt-get remove amarok –purge

To be fair, I had a great day today. The truth is, Amarok 2 actually ruined an afternoon of mine earlier this week.

As a brief introduction, Amarok is (was?) a wonderful media player with plenty of potential. I know many who absolutely swore by Amarok 1.4 along with its limitations. After all, version 2 held promise that it would be able to do everything that 1.4 could do and more.

The main problem for me right now is with playlists. Creating and playing a playlist is not an obvious thing to do.  It’s just not intuitive, but I get what the Amarok people are trying to accomplish. It’s actually quite simple to do once you figure it out, and in some way I’m blaming myself for overthinking things. I initially wanted to make a playlist of my whole collection, which I would just randomize and let play for hours on end.

When you click on the playlist tab, there are three sections: Dynamic Playlists, My Playlists, and Podcasts.

When you expand My Playlists, you have an Add Folder button, which you’d think would browse to a place on your machine. In fact, clicking on Add Folder just allows you to create a folder name for your playlists. You’ll see what it’s for in a second. There’s actually nothing wrong with that, except “Add Folder” is very misleading.

So, let’s create a playlist in Amarok 2.0:

1. Click on the Collection tab
2. Drag the tracks you want into the right-side column (I selected them all)
3. If you’re satisfied with your playlist, save it by clicking on the diskette icon on the bottom of the playlist column.
4. Behold, on the left side, in the Playlist tab under My Playlists, you can name this new playlist as you wish.
5. Optional: Click on Add Folder to make a folder and drag and drop your new playlist in there (I said there was a purpose for it)

Pretty easy, huh? Yep. But only after poking around for way too long. And, the fatal flaw was that I had Dynamic Playlists ON. Big mistake. Dynamic Playlists will modify your current playlist to include songs based on length, genre, artist, etc. It’s a nice feature, but it fails for one reason: when Dynamic Playlists is on, the On button is indented. When it’s not ON, it’s simply not indented but still says On. It really should say OFF, no?

I know, I know, I could have RTFM first but I’ll argue that no one wants to have to read a manual. You’ll hit Google before you read a manual, and if you’re reading this, then I rest my case

There are a few things that I like about the new Amarok:

Widgets: The whole GUI can be overwhelming at first but it’s actually fully customizable with widgets. If you’re an iGoogle user, then you’re already familiar with widgets. Widgets are little applets that you can add, remove and move around. Amarok has a few that you can use, like Lyrics, Wikipedia, and more detailed Track Info. I think a Guitar Tab widget would be pretty sweet.

iPod Detection: Amarok 1.4 used to detect my 3rd gen iPod when it felt like it. So far, my device has been visible every time I launched Amarok. You can also drag and drop files to your device on the fly.

Well you know what? I atually feel a little better about Amarok now. There’s definitely some work to do, but I have faith that future releases will only get better. Version 2 is a complete re-working of 1.4, and as an open-source product, they tend to listen to their users and the fixes will come quickly. At this writing, Amarok 2.1 Beta 2 has been released.

But you know, who has time to wait for it to get better? If you want to try a great music player right NOW, check out my post on Songbird here.