Archive for October, 2008
Efficiency of emerge depclean
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 | Technology | No Comments
So, I spent the weekend emerging all sorts of unfortunate things onto my laptop trying out all sort of music management software. These things included weird gtk, gnome, kde, mono and other stuff libraries. It was a mess everywhere and left me with an uneasy feeling in my stomach; I didn’t know what was on my system. Fortunately, emerge has it’s depclean feature which removes all unused dependencies and extraneous files from your machine. But I’ve always wondered how well it works…
It turns out that it works quite well.
I used a combination of qlist, find, cat, sort and uniq to determine which files were orphans on my system.
For all files which are supposed to be there: qlist -IC | xargs -n 1 qlist
Apart from some cache files, tmp files, a few configuration files and some portage related stuff, nothing was out of place.
So it’s a very clean management system. Hooray.
My Linux iPod management options
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Technology | 2 Comments
So, it turns out there aren’t many options for me under Linux. In total it came out to zero. This is really due to the fact that my iPod Class version was released oh.. 35 days ago and the software versions are too new for the open-source Linux support. Have a look here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1353#iPod_classic_120GB
If you mount your iPod under linux, you’ll notice straight away that they have some funny database system for storing the songs. This database version and format actually changes between revisions of the iPod software release. The open-source solutions are all capable of reading and writing the older versions because they’ve reverse engineered the format. But they need some more time to get the new ones working. Unlucky for me.
As a result, most of the open-source solutions would actually copy the songs to the iPod but failed to update the iPod database. Oddly enough they didn’t complain about this. So I would just assume that it worked but the music didn’t show up in the iPod menu.
In the end, I tried the following solutions:
- Amarok – failed to install ‘cos I don’t have KDE installed and it was looking for something called kbuildsycoca on startup. Apparently it will wipe out your cover art on some iPods if you’re not careful.
- Banshee – I tried the stable 0.12.1 release in the portage tree. It’s okay. It’s the only open-source solution which actually downloaded cover art for my library. The next unstable release is 1.2.1-rc2 which was brilliant compared to the previous release. Unfortunately it didn’t work with my iPod version.
- gtkpod – Nice, convenient and small. Not too feature-full at all. I would have preferred to install and use this one because everything else required hundreds of other dependencies. Pity it didn’t work.
- Rhythmbox – Similar to banshee, smaller. Would have been nice if it had worked. I think this is the default manager on Ubuntu so it’s probably well supported and has a future.
- Songbird – Now this is my ideal manager. It’s very similar to iTunes and it didn’t require hundreds of dependencies. You can just download the binaries from their site and run it. Fantastic. It’s a professional product as well. All shiny. When they support my iPod, I’m switching to this.
My conclusions and next steps:
- I’m going to use iTunes as a stop-gap until Songbird supports the new iPod Classic on Linux.
- I need to convert my entire FLAC library to ALAC so that I can import my songs losslessly into iTunes until I get a linux client. (They all support my FLAC ‘cos I compiled it in everywhere.)
- I polluted my nice clean gentoo install with hundreds of new dependencies and applications which didn’t work. I’m now spending the day cleaning up all orphaned files which don’t belong. It gives me something to do.
Drinking the Apple Kool-Aid
Monday, October 13th, 2008 | Technology | No Comments
Well, I’m now the owner of one of those new, darn-fangled iPod Classics with 120 GB. I must say, it’s a fine looking piece of machinery and I have a beautiful dark-brown and orange leather pouch for it as well. It looks great. Haven’t been able to use it yet, though. And there’s a reason why: I can’t easily get my music onto it. 
The tricky part is the extreme lock-in by Apple which you only tend to discover afterwards and especially if you happen to be running Linux! Here are some poor actions and decisions on Apple’s part designed to lock you in, as well as some of the obstacles an awesome Linux user like me has encountered:
- An iPod registers itself as external USB storage when I plug it into the machine. Great. However, you can’t just copy your music files over. I have all my CDs saved in FLAC format on a file server with ID3 tags embedded. I was really just assuming that I could convert them to something more supported (MP3 or AAC or Apple’s Lossless aka ALAC) and copy them across. However, the iPod keeps all the music within a proprietary database format and you need specialized open-source applications which have reverse engineered the format to copy them in.
- I like my open-source applications lean and mean. (I run Gentoo. I’m weird that way). The open-source applications available aren’t too lean and mean at all. I’m still trying them all out, one at a time, until I find one that a) works and b) is easy to use.
- iTunes only runs on Windows and Mac. This is a huge problem, as far as I’m concerned because the authority on Apple formats and their own proprietary stuff is Apple themselves. Because they don’t support Linux, the support you can find on a Linux platform is all reverse engineered and not up to date. So, to do an iPod justice and get it working out the box, you kinda need iTunes here. Unless you’re willing to experiment with the open-source software mentioned above.
- The iTunes store for South Africa doesn’t have any music! What the heck?
- I imported several common CDs of mine into iTunes and the cover art wasn’t loaded even though I asked nicely. Bah humbug. What’s the point of the pretty screen without cover art? I think this may have to do with the fact that iTunes SA doesn’t have the music in the first place.
Uh.. and that’s all. It’s a very pretty device. It would have been amazing if they didn’t lock it down the way they have. I’ll let you know what I find out about the open-source products.