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 Banshee doesn’t seem to have the extension, and Songbird is no longer maintained and is basically dead in the water.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:

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

Ubuntu 11.04 has changed some of its default applications one being the move from Open Office to Libre Office and the other being a move from Rhythmbox music player to Banshee. I don’t really care which Office application Ubuntu uses, but to play music, the application actually needs to perform properly.  Let me list some of the issues I have with using Banshee to play and manage your mp3 collection:

1. Banshee 2.0 crashes often: If you have a large music collection (over 10000 songs) expect Banshee to freeze. I’ve never had this problem with  Rhythmbox. I’d rather use a stable Rhythmbox than wait for Banshee to figure this out.

2. Guitar Tabs: This is one of THE most important plugins for me. The Banshee music player doesn’t seem to have a guitar tab add on. Rhythmbox uses the tab-rhythmbox-plugin to query the guitar tab archive and displays them right alongside your music library, in the same window. No brainer for me.

3. iPod Support: Banshee seems to detect my old 3rd generation iPod without a problem, but so does Rhythmbox. Not enough reason for me to switch.

4. Naming your software Banshee: Have you tried using Google to search for “Banshee music player”. Yep, you’re going to get a a lot of results for “siouxsie and the banshees“, which I don’t mind all that much since they were kind of a cool band anyway. With Rhythmbox, your search results will be more precise and therefore, easier to find support. I’ll admit that this was a bit of a stretch.

In the end, all I want is a music player that just plays music. I don’t care what it looks like as long as it indexes my collection fast and efficiently.

Honorable mention goes to Clementine which would give Rhythmbox a run for its money if it also had…you guessed it…a Guitar Tab plugin. It doesn’t from what I’ve seen, but Clementine 0.7 does pretty much everything else. They’re at version 0.7, so they’re obviously very new. If you can prove me wrong and they do have a guitar tab plugin, let me know! Overall, I find using a combination of rhythmbox and mplayer works out just fine. Or you could use VLC if that’s your thing.

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