04.16.06

amarok…after a year of ignoring it, it turns out it rocks.

Posted in Linux/FOSS, Music, programming, qkslvrwolf.com, web at 9:42 pm by qkslvrwolf

This has been a day of computing discoveries on a small but satisfying scale.

I don’t even know why I started playing with amarok today. It probably had something to do with my human computer interfaces class, where we’ve been talking about attention spans of people and how some people like to work with classical on. So I was trying that today. Don’t think I’ll go back to it, its still too distracting. I mentioned my sister’s and ex-roommates old prediliction for working with the tv on, and how it drove me nuts and was too distracting for me.*
Of course, since I was playing with amarok to get some classical tunes up, I endup up trying to figure out some of the options in amarok. See, I like dynamic playlists. I like to be able to define the mood I’m in, or the genre of music I want, and then play a random list that fits that characteristic. The dynamic playlists were what made me so beloved of my old favorite music player, wxmusik. Wxmusik is a good player, but its only being developed by one guy, and as it turns out, it doesn’t have nearly the useful feature set of amarok. Although, if any amarok devels ever read this, I found wxmusik much easier to figure out. Just FYI.

So anyway, I finally discovered the way to do a dynamic playlist on amarok. Its under the smart playlists type in the playlists widget. Maybe it was cognitive dissonance that stopped me from figuring this out…I had tried the “dynamic playlist” feature of amarok, which allows you to have a rotating, “auto-dj’d” playlist which, thankfully, won’t repeat songs. (Repeating songs was always a complaint of mine about winamp and xmms, both of which had an utterlly mind-boggling capability of repeating songs inside of a 3000 song playlist.)

So I’m enjoying that. The other thing that is absolutely outstanding its the automatic integration of amarok with last.fm. This allows you to put your most played music up on a website that does collaborative filtering and recommendations…so you can learn about new music, etc, based on the music that you have in common with other people. Which is sweet, and I love integration (when its based on an open API or standard, of course. ;-)

Anyway, this is also going to precipiate a little more work to re-integrate music with my life. First, I’m going to probably finally download and install foxy tunes…ok, thats done. I’ll play with that when I’m done posting here.

Second, there is a wordpress plugin (oh, you sweet, sweet plugins!) that allows you to show your recent played songs on your website. So when I get a little bit of freetime, I plan to hook that up too.

One interesting difference between wxmusik and amarok is the different way they rate songs. Wxmusik allows you to rate each song your self, whereas amarok simply rates the music by a combination of how often you listen to it and how much of the song you listen to.

I think both solutions are good, and really wish both were avaiable within the same player. See, sometimes you’re in a normal mood, and its good to be able to rate your songs just based on how often you play them. This solution gets jacked up when you’re in a strange or abnormal mood. Especially if you’re in a strange or abnormal mood fairly often. Then, you end up skipping songs that you think are good just because they don’t match your mood, which causes the rating based on listens and length of play to get jacked up.

Hence it would be nice to choose which system you’d like to use at any given moment.

Other than that one small complaint, I have to say, amarok rocks. Oh. did I mention that amarok will also go grab the lyrics for you. There is just no end to how much that rocks. Maybe if I go real crazy, I’ll modify foxytunes so that you can have it scroll lyrics across the bottom…how sweet would that be?

Hmm…it would have a bunch of problems too…for instance, there is no good way to make sure that the lyrics you’re looking at would match the part of the song you’re at. Better would just be a button that would pull up the lyrics on a new tab if you clicked a button. That would work.

Anyway…back to studies.

*Funny story. Ed (the roommate) and I used to bicker bitterly about a lot of things. We weren’t exactly suited to be roommates. He’s kind of an asshole, and I’m a different sort of asshole (its not a character flaw, in my case), and I have a low tolerance for stupidity. So, when we got into a months long argument about whether or not the tv could be functioning when I was doing homework, I eventually won by stashing the tv in someone elses room (locked away, of course), until he decided to negotiate. I don’t remember what we worked out, but I’m pretty sure I agreed to work during proscribed hours or go up to the computer lab that was nearby as long as he kept the bloody thing off when I was in the room working. I can still hear him…”Dude! You just don’t do that! Heh heh heh.

[edit 16 April 2006 2149] Foxy tunes is really sweet. Me likey, now I’ve got amarok going.

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