Big Fat Ostrich

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 Songird 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

OMFG and Double You Tee Eff, the people at Songbird announced that they’ll no longer be developing my favorite music playin’ application for Linux anymore. That’s right.

No mo.

Which kind of sucks since it’s so lightweight and basically does just what I need it to: play music. Yeah, go ahead and read about why I liked it so much over here in an earlier post.

But why? WHY INDEED. Let’s just say that the people over at Pioneers of the Inevitable have decided to focus on Songbird for Windows and Mac OS only. At least that’s what’s stated over in the Songbird Wikipedia entry. Songbird will actually still be available for Linux, just no longer supported.

But there’s a silver lining because some Songbird community members are going trying to continue developing an open source music player under the guise of Nightingale, which will basically be a branch of Songbird 1.8.

That’s all I really have to say about it. I mean, what else is there to say? I’ll still use Songbird on Ubuntu 10.04, and when Nightingale becomes available, I”ll test it out. I’m not desperate enough to go back to Amarok 2. I’m definitely never going there again. Never!

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

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.

…goodbye Amarok 2!

So maybe I’m giving up too quickly on Amarok 2 or maybe Songbird instantly saw my whole collection and started playing music with no hassles. Maybe…just maybe that’s it.

Well Amarok, maybe we’ll meet again some day, but right now I’m hanging out with Songbird.

Songbird is built by Pioneers of the Inevitable using code by Mozilla, gstreamer and others. It’s simple, yet customizable with a ton of extras and add-ons. If you’re already familiar with iTunes and Firefox, then you’ll probably love it, or at least have no trouble figuring it out. Plus, the mascot is a fat bird wearing headphones. How can you resist? Anyway, that’s the least important of things here.

The default layout is a carbon copy of iTunes. Click in to have a closer look:

Yes, I like Frank Black. Moving on…

Just like Firefox gives you the ability to install add-ons with ease, so does Songbird. If you can think about it, someone has probably created one. I added iPod support (very important), as well as LyricMaster and BirdTabs. Yep, with BirdTabs you can have in-panel Guitar or Bass tablature while you listen to that song whose chord structure has been eluding you for so long. Songird also has a plugin that will tell you what concerts are coming to town based on your music collection. Pretty cool, no?

Initially, I was wondering why the active track playing was never highlighted in my playlist. I looked around and, you guessed it, there’s an add-on for that called FocusTrack. So far, Songbird looks very promising.

You can of course change the look if you’re not happy with the default. There are hundreds of ‘feathers’ (skins) available. Explore and enjoy.

Installation is simple on a Ubuntu system. This is how you do it:

First add the source:

echo “deb http://getdeb.masio.com.mx/ jaunty/” | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/getdeb.list && sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install songbird

You’re done. I’m in the process of seeing if Songbird can sync with my 3rd generation iPod. If it can, we’ll be saying goodbye to gtk pod as well.