Big Fat Ostrich

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!

Two Words: Quake Live

I only recently discovered it since I haven’t been in a gaming mood at all for months. Truth be told, I’m not much of a gamer, but I get an itchy trigger finger every so often. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe it’s because I played paintball for the first time in my life 2 weeks ago.

Quake Live is based on Quake III Arena and essentially grew out of the Quake family of First Person Shooters. The thing about Quake Live is that it runs entirely within a web browser. No small feat, but the guys at Id are practically immortal in that thing that they do. After all, this is the company that brought us Commander Keen and Doom (which scared the crap out of me when I first played the demo off of a diskette on my old i386). Coming from someone who doesn’t know a lot about the gaming industry (Me), I think they’re pretty well respected all around.

Quake Live is also entirely free and would be so much fun to play if my computer could actually support it. It’s my video card which is really the problem. I just can’t render anything fast enough so I have to live vicariously through my friends who can actually play it. And the recommended system requirements are not all that far fetched either:

Intel CPU- Pentium 4 1.4GHz
AMD CPU- Athlon XP 1800+
Nvidia Graphics Card- Geforce 6500
ATI & Intel Graphics Card- Radeon X1270
RAM- 256M
Hard Disk Space- 1G
Direct X- 9

Needless to say, I meet all the requirements except the graphics card and I’m not even going to divulge what I have since it’s just too embarrassing and painful to talk about.

But trust me when I say that Quake Live looks awesome. My friends were having such a great time playing while I watched and longed for the day when I too could get in on that sweet, sweet frag action on the 25 or so maps that Quake Live offers. On a Core 2 Duo with a respectable graphics card, the game play is snappy. Stats for your character are also maintained online, which is pretty cool. Sadly, I don’t have any stats yet but when I do, they’ll be attached to ‘pwnz0rze’. The ‘o’ is actually a zero!

Oh yeah, one last thing. Quake Live can be played on Linux, Windows and yes, on a Mac. That’s the beauty of in-browser game play. I have yet to see it played on a Mac (if you have, let me know how it went), but Windows and Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora 11) were flawless.

Lata

M.

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.