Posts Tagged ‘audio’

Media Management Misery

Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

I’m sure I’ll get some heat for this, but here goes…

Why is managing media so painful under Linux?

I have a significant amount of audio on my laptop, and a phone that is a fairly capable music player. However if I want to copy some of that audio to my phone, I have to resort to manually copying and arranging the files, as well as ensuring the tags are right (as the N95 relies on these). It’s an awkward, but manageable process that I don’t do so often.

Podcasts are a different story though. My phone is capable of downloading podcasts itself, but they are slow to download and awkward to manage. Copying podcasts from the laptop to the phone can be fraught with peril.

By contrast I had to reset my daughter’s iPod today after I tried to manage it under Linux.  The reset and re-population through iTunes was painless. I know it is because Apple control the software and hardware, but it can’t be that hard to get right can it?

Don’t even get me started on photos and movies…

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Posted in Linux, Listening, Viewing | 13 Comments »

Musical Reset

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

A post from Ryan Singer of 37signals about how to take control of a massive iTunes library got me thinking about my own music collection. Obviously I’m not using iTunes, but according to Rhythmbox my music collection isn’t small. Right now it claims I have 2,884 songs taking up 14.3GB of space which would provide me with 7 days, 19 hours and 14 minutes of non-stop, non-repetitive (barring duplicates) music. I’m sure there are lots of people who can (and will) boast of larger music collections, but as far as I’m concerned that’s a lot of music. This, coupled with the fact that my Top Rated and Recently Played automatic playlists encompass only a fraction of my collection inspires me to do something about it.

Initially I was going to follow Ryan’s approach – archive off all the music and only add it back into my collection when I had a real desire to listen to it – but after mulling the idea over for a few days I’ve decided to take an additional step: instead of simply rebuilding my collection from, er, my collection, I’m going to actively seek out new music.

My collection is wide and varied, but I do tend to listen to the same stuff over and over again. Now I’m going to enlist the likes of , Last.fm, Jamendo, and Magnatune to discover something new. I’m also going to try and tune into a few more musical podcasts like Podrunner and Groovelectric to add some variety.

Any suggestions of artists/bands or podcasts for me?

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Posted in Linux, Listening | 8 Comments »