Big Fat Ostrich

Back in the day, I used to listen to The Who – Who’s Next over and over. It was one of those ‘perfect’ albums. Not too long, but epic, with a variety of tunes differing in scope and feel. The album (as I remembered it) was bookended by two equally massive and powerful songs, i.e., Baba O’Reilly and Won’t Get Fooled Again.

But that crappy show CSI ruined that for everybody! And they ruined BOTH songs for two separate shows! I hate you, David Caruso with your sunglasses and obvious one-liners like: No…this man didn’t just drown…he was murdered!

*OPENING CREDITS*

So onward we go.

I ended up downloading (yes I did) Who’s Next, because I lent my original copy, which I had on tape cassette (old skool, dude), to some girl, some summer, a long long time ago. She never gave it back, and I’ve never forgiven her. Yes, I hate you too along with David Caruso. I hope you two have a nice life together!

Anyhow, I put the whole album on my Ipod and listened to it from beginning to end, just like old times, huh? Except somehow, it didn’t feel right anymore.  I’m not trashing it, because songs like Bargain, Love Ain’t for Keeping and Going Mobile still do it for me, just in a campy sort of way. The production value is still amazing, and there’s just no point in throwing any more accolades on Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. It’s all been said.

But I just can’t enjoy the full album anymore! And I know I’m not the first to say it. It’s CSI’s fault! When Roger Daltry screams in Won’t Get Fooled Again, I see stylized bullets and ridiculous crimes scene techniques followed by David Caruso’s sunglasses peering over the whole thing. Ruined forever.

Yes, just another once great album reduced to a television association. Bah.

I’m going to break with tradition here and do a short review of a Windows-only application. I know, shocking, huh? Well last month I practically imploded with excitement while installing Songbird (on Ubuntu 9.04) and simultaneously drooled, laughed, and cried as I discovered its features and flexibility. You can read about that momentous occasion here. I’m still a fan, and continue to use Songbird, but the iPod support add-on is still not able to sync with my clunky 3rd generation iPod. I’m waiting it out and still using gtkpod for my syncing, but I’m trying out yet another media player which is supposed to kick-butt in the iPod syncing department. That application is MediaMonkey.

What is it these days with suffixing application names with an animal species? Songbird, Ether Ape, MediaMonkey, and uh…Big Fat Ostrich? Monkeys and apes in particular conjure up images of randomness and disorganization. Let’s see if  that’s the case.

Installation was a breeze but this is Windows after all. I should note that I’m doing this on my Windows XP VBox VM, and my first trial didn’t detect my iPod because I forgot to enable USB support. Call me a n00b if you will, but it happens to the best of us

Take 2.

After enabling USB support on my VM, MediaMonkey can see my iPod, but synching is slow. And I mean really, really, butt slow. It’ll take days to sync just 2000+ songs, but hey, I’m doing this in a virtual machine, so what can you expect?

The overall interface looks like…iTunes! Nothing wrong with that since the layout is a logical tree that we’re all accustomed to in the modern age of computing. But yeah, there’s really not alot to say about MediaMonkey. It’s a media player. It plays music. It’s only available for Windows. Nothing here that blows my mind.

And of course, being a Windows application, you get basic features for free but have to buy the “Gold” version for extra features. There’s an integrated CD burning application, but it only burns at 4x. You can pay for the full version if you want 48x burning. Why not just use Windows Media Player? I suppose it’s because Windows Media Player is hideous, but really, this is about listening, not looking. Here are a list of MediaMonkey’s features in case you’re curious.

I’ll stick to Songbird since it’s open-source and you really can’t beat the features and customizability. Running Ubuntu and using a Windows VM just to use MediaMonkey seems silly.  I might reconsider if they make a version for Jaunty, or at least for Karmic Koala which is coming in the fall.

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.