New Linux User » music

Rhythmbox – Useful for iPod Users

Clair Ching — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:00:01 +0000

I’ve been rediscovering Rhythmbox and its features. I know I haven’t really given it much chance before as Listen was more lightweight and it pretty much worked well with my netbook. So now that I’m using my old laptop for work more often, I decided to mainly use the default apps on Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

Rhythmbox is pretty good regarding managing your existing music collection on your own computer. And I like the views available to me when searching for music to listen to. But there are some new features that I am beginning to like.

Play videos from your iPod

If you connect your iPod to it you will see your music library and the videos you’ve got too. And the awesome thing is that I could also watch the TED talks I’ve got on my iPod on Rhythmbox. In case I have no more copies on my laptop at least I’m safe that way.

Directly copy files to the iPod

I just tried managing my music collection using Rhythmbox and it was pretty cool. Well, right now I am sure I could delete files directly and move files directly.

To add files:
Just search for the music you want to include. Then drag them and drop them into the iPod’s icon on the panel of the application. If it’s an OGG file or a FLAC file, it will convert the file for you. I think this is sooo cool. No need to use a separate converter. It’s so nifty that way. And quick to use. If you’re worried about it, you could see the status bar and the progress anyway.

I have yet to see if it could move files from the iPod to the machine where you are running Rhythmbox from. If you’ve got more Rhythmbox tips, I’d sure love to read them. : D

Post from: New Linux User

Appreciating Rhythmbox Again

Clair Ching — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:42:37 +0000

I haven’t used Rhythmbox for the longest time because Listen met my needs. Well, it was Listen, Sound Juicer and Ex Falso. I am not sure when was the last time I used Rhythmbox but I sure remember using something else to rip the files. There was Sound Juicer back then and that was it. I almost had no choice but to use it. So yeah, right now, Rhythmbox looks better.

I was able to rip my new CDs using Rhythmbox directly. I didn’t have to launch Sound Juicer or use ABCDE. I only had to go to the menu and look for the icon with the single CD. It was copy all tracks to the library. And I am pretty much used to using Nautilus to burn files on a disc. There’s also that feature on Rhythmbox apparently. It’s the icon with the 2 CDs.

Rhythmbox could copy all the tracks of a CD to your music library

For some reason though, when I tried ripping one of my CDs and it didn’t find it in the music database it connects to I entered the basic information like the album title, the artist and genre. But strangely, it didn’t automatically use the artist I specified for all the tracks. Considering this album had only one artist for all the tracks. Ah well. I could try to rip another CD next time and see how it goes. For the genre and album title, I had no problems whatsoever.

It looks like Rhythmbox is quite ok. Although Amarok and Banshee are tempting me because of the iPod synch feature. Using gtkpod is ok but I think it would be really nifty to just use one application as it’s all related to my music collection anyway. I should just really try using both Amarok and Banshee to satisfy my needs maybe?

Any other thoughts about music players on Linux are very much welcome. : ) Feel free to drop by and share your thoughts about this application.

Post from: New Linux User

Checking Out Sonata and MPD

Clair Ching — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:45:19 +0000

I’ve heard about MPD as a music player. It is a music player I’ve never really felt like checking out in the past because I was afraid that the config file might be overwhelming. Anyhow, I recently saw a guide to using Sonata and MPD as a music player.

playing a song using mpd + sonata

So why the heck do I need two things to play music?

Let me say this: MPD is basically a daemon that runs in the background to make sure that you could play music. Sonata is the graphical way for you to control it. I’ve read so many raves about how powerful it is as a command line player but at least Sonata as its graphical front-end makes me appreciate the information about the songs. Sonata’s song information section will fetch information such as

title
artist
album
date
track
genre
lyrics
album info

There are other things that people rave about in Sonata. One of them’s keyboard driven shortcuts. There’s also support for Audioscrobbler.

Anyhow, the instructions that the webupd8 blog gave are pretty much everything I needed to set it up and running. However, I hit a snag when I tried to run Sonata at first. Because it didn’t see the library of files. Annoying, right? So I tried running MPD first in a terminal. It gave me an error regarding not being able to set the user id. I ran mpd as root. Guess what happened next? It’s working perfectly fine now. Ain’t it grand?

So yeah, you could try out MPD and Sonata by following their instructions. But here are two tips I could give you for now:

Copy the mpd config file from /etc/mpd.conf to /home/your_username/.mpdconf so that mpd will look there instead of /etc. Also, it would lessen the hassle of editing mpd’s config file.
Run mpd as root first before starting Sonata. Because it’s really much easier that way.

So far, it looks good. There’s a smaller percentage of memory being consumed by a media playing application. Memory here’s at 1.2% so far. Neat huh?

Post from: New Linux User

Manage Collections with Tellico

Clair Ching — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:13:08 +0000

If you’re a collector like me then you probably have spreadsheets of these things you’ve collected in the past how many months or even years. Personally I only started becoming aware of the need to keep track of all these things. I think it’s partly because I am running out of shelf space. And some of my books ended up on my sister’s shelves. Tsk, it’s really time for me to sort things out!

Tellico is a collection manager, not limited to books.

Tell It to Tellico…

And Tellico will save just about everything you enter in the application. This is not a difficult application to use. It already has pre-set collection data entry forms. The ones that are already pre-set include the following:

book collections
video collection
music collection
coin collection
card collection
stamp collection

There are other defaults you could use. And you could even make some. If for example you want to document your collection of your figurines or maybe even other stuff. You could use custom fields for your particular collection. It’s up to you to define which fields are needed for your documentation.

You could create custom fields

There’s supposed to be a way to be able to search for particular books or music from the internet but it doesn’t seem to work with me. Internet’s flaky these days so I would have to check it again another day to be sure. But there is a form for you to fill out and then you could choose from the results which should be in your collection.

And you could even have different reports that summarize the information about your collection. You could group the entries according to the filters you want. It’s really nifty. : ) You could even save those reports in HTML so you could upload them on your website, if you want to share such information with friends, family and fellow hobbyists.

Try Tellico and see how you like it. : )

Post from: New Linux User

Friday Links: Arch Linux, Tiny Core, From Mac to Linux

Clair Ching — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 03:12:25 +0000

On Arch Linux

My co-worker now uses Arch Linux. He had problems using the RT kernel of Open SUSE. He’s had too many issues with it so he looked for something else that would answer his needs when it comes to the RT kernel and a look-and-feel that he wanted. He found out about Arch Linux, a simple and lightweight distribution. This distro is known for:

using BSD style init scripts
its binary installation
high level customization
its nice package manager: pacman
text-based installer
being more lenient, compared to something like Debian, when it comes to non-free packages

Newbies might feel that Arch Linux could be daunting because it’s more for people who would like to tinker around with stuff. I suppose that it takes some getting used to and an inclination for this.

TIny Core Linux

Yet another minimalist live distro, Tiny Core Linux is also capable of running from a CD or USB device or installed to a hard drive. Users can boot from this and then be configured so that users will have a fully functional desktop system of his/her choice. Tiny Core Linux is said to be more than just a rescue system because it’s designed to become your main system. Interestingly tiny, this distribution has an ISO which is only 11MB. I am curious so I might try it out soon too.

Kim Cascone switches from the Mac OSX to Ubuntu Linux

A lot of Mac users I know are very loyal and wouldn’t dream of switching to something else whether it’s Linux or Windows. But lo and behold! There’s a story on createddigitalmusic.com that talks about switching from Mac OSX to Ubuntu. The switching was triggered by problems with his Powerbook G4 showing signs of age and te possibility of upgrading to a MacBook Pro but at the cost of $3,000 — aiya! That is a whole lot of money and then the cost of time to tweak his set up and software to fit his needs. Read his story as he tells you about using a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu pre-installed and how it wasn’t just about the cost, but it’s also about the software he uses now.

Post from: New Linux User

Creating a Ringtone with Audacity

Clair Ching — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 04:33:53 +0000

I am sure that you might have a song or two which you’d like to make into custom ringtones for certain people who frequently call you. The boss could have a ringtone like the Star Wars’ Imperial Death March (especially if he’s always giving you impossible deadlines) or your sister could have a ringtone of her favorite song. It could be anything. Sometimes these tunes are not available or you only want certain segments to be used. In any case, you could do it yourself using Audacity.

a ringtone made using Audacity

Audacity is actually capable of a whole lot more audio editing features but as I am not really using them yet, I am not very familiar with them. For now, let me share how I made my own ringtone.

I installed Audacity. Of course it has dependencies too so it’s good if you check them first. This is especially for those of you who have a lot of mp3 files.
I loaded the song of my choice. Audacity converted that.
With the selection tool, I dragged the mouse pointer to the starting time and ending time of the song I wanted to use. If you are not too sure about the time of the song, then you could actually drag the mouse on top of the bar with the time and have it play that segment. When you have decided the part to select, put the mouse pointer over the part with the spiky lines. Take note of the timing. Drag the pointer within the area from the start time to the end time. It will be greyed out by Audacity so you know.
I selected the trim tool. It’s the one with the wave in between the sideways T-like things. This will give you only the part you selected earlier.
I used the time shift tool to move the segment to the beginning of the time.
Lastly, I converted the file to mp3 via the Export command on the File menu.

It’s the simplest way I know to make a custom ringtone. There’s probably fade in and fade out somewhere. The moment I figure out how to use it, I’d definitely let you know.

Post from: New Linux User

Rename music files through Ex Falso

Clair Ching — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 15:40:34 +0000

If you have a huge collection of music files already, sometimes you realize that you were too lazy to add tags and/or descriptive file names to them. It’s a mess! Especially when you are looking for particular artists or titles or you’re in the mood to create a ‘mix CD’/'mix tape’ But no need to worry! Ex Falso will help you organize your files.

Ex Falso screenshot by Clair Ching, 2008.

Just look for a package of this nifty application in your distro’s repository and voila~! Soon you will have this tool ready to save you from mess!

Ex Falso has three main panes. One is for viewing the directories/folders that you have on your computer. The one below it is for the songs listed down. And the last one, which is the main pane, will have various tabs that will let you manage the information on the files.

You could do the following:
1. Edit tags one by one, or by batch.
2. Give tags based on the filenames.
3. Assign track numbers.

You could assign various tags, even your own tags, if you want to. There’s an Add Tag feature, after all. Sometimes when adding tags, I mistype labels or the tag type so it looks silly when I read the tag type “artst” so I have to change that in the Tags tab of the main pane.

Note that it seems like you need to save your changes in one tab before they are reflected in the other tabs. Aside from that you need to do some other thing first before they are reflected. It seems to not immediately load the changes that a user makes. There’s a Preview button you could click so you could check out the changes anyway.

Have fun re-tagging your files!

Post from: New Linux User

Linux robot play the clarinet

Clair Ching — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:30:04 +0000

There are students from NICGA and the University of NSW who made a clarinet that could be operated by a computer. The description of the robot is that there’s an embedded computer that is connected to brass plungers with rubber nylon feet to control the keys and mouthpiece of the internet. They used Gumstix boards to make the project and those used the Open Embedded Linux distribution. It played “Flight of the Bumblebee” and “Bolero” — the judge admitted that it doesn’t seem quite as “warm” as a human musician playing .

That sounds really amazing, right? You could even view a video clip of the robot in action. For more details you could refer to the article in Computerworld.

Post from: New Linux User

Link love: How to Manage Your iPod with gtkPod

Clair Ching — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:48:43 +0000

Disclaimer: I don’t have an iPod but some of you might have one. Or you might come across fellow new Linux users who want to ask you about this topic.

HowToForge has a detailed guide on managing your iPod with gtkPod.

It tells you how to do the following:

Configure gtkPod and that you’d have to do it just once.
Load your iPod into gtkPod
Upload music into your iPod
Download music from your iPod
Manage playlists

After reading the guide, you could also read more about gtkPod.

Post from: New Linux User