tbradshaw.net

For the longest time I’ve been pining for iTunes on Linux.  The reason?  I’ve been fighting linux media players time and time again to just be stable with my large music collection, while iTunes takes it without so much as a studder.

The music players that I’ve messed with the most are Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Muine, soI figured I would give a small review of them while I’m whining, and to be fair, I’m not reviewing them on two fronts.  First as a user, and now as a young developer looking to get involved.

The first was Muine.  After moving from XMMS and XMMS-like programs I hit the ground running with Muine due to it’s simple smooth interface.  I loved the “add album to playlist” feature and was lulled into a happy place by the auto-downloading of album art making that particular window as exciting as a shelf full of “real” CD’s (without the RIAA guilt).  Unfortunately that feature which had lulled me into happiness stopped working when some business with the Amazon developer key thingie got in the way of downloading album covers.  What at first looking like a really busy project that was going to be making my dreams come true in short order, turned out to go a bit stale almost right away.  I was saddened.

After a while I started to long for the library functionality that I enjoyed on my PowerBook.  This was entirely thanks to a recent set of downloads that brought me the collection of Billboard Top 100 songs from 1950 something until 2004.  Suddenly my signal to noise ratio when looking for something to listen to shot through the roof and I needed help finding my songs.  So I decided to give Rhythmbox a shot.  This is the “default” gnome go at an iTunes clone, and it has a lot of things going for it.  The Artist-Album browser at the top fo the window is devine and the over all experience seemed to be snappy.  That is… when it doesn’t crash.  What turned out to be a long standing theme with any media player I use in linux, is frequent crashes when trying to import my library.  For whatever reason there isn’t an open source music player/organizer on the planet that can load 15,000+ songs without crashing.

For a while I could build the library in short bursts with the Rhythmbox in the “stable” branch and then when completed go back to the “~x86″ branch for the increased functionality.  But there were a number of “small” behavioral things that were driving me nuts.  Two examples:

1. I’m feeling a little “80’s” today, so I flip to the “Billboard Top 100 of 1984″ in the browse album and see what there is to see.  Oh yeah!  Right there at number 44 is Huey Lewis & The News singing “The Heart of Rock & Roll”.  That was a good year for Huey if I remember, so I click on Huey Lewis & The News in the browse artist selection box to “drill down” and get the Huey Lewis hits from 1984.  But I can’t… because for some reason selecting something in the browse artist selection box “resets” the browse album selection box to “all” instead of keeping the setting.  Weird.
2. Most importantly, when adding new songs to the library, no progress meter is shown.  When a media player has a strong propensity to crash when loading songs… it really stinks to have no idea when/where/why it crashed.
3. This application is coded in GObject C… and I’m just not sure that I want to learn GObject C.  From a guy that adores Python, C feels like digging the chunnel with a spoon instead of a tunnel boring machine.

So I kept looking and came across Banshee.  First points for Banshee, it looks good.  Really good, sharp and clean with a more modern feel.  It wows me out of the gates with a slick progress meter for importing songs and the ability to asynchronously add songs to the queue to be imported at will.  Super work.   It still has it’s warts, however… it’s written in C# on Mono, which is something that I want to learn anyway… hmmm.  Anyway, the big bugs:

1. When importing new music, CPU usage shoots up to like 100% and lags anything that tries to say otherwise.  Totally impolite, like totally.
2. Still crashes frequently when importing music.
3. Filling my window with songs takes long time.  Say I’m on a playlist and then move back to the unfiltered main window… I can expect several seconds of hardcore “omg run!” from Banshee as it fills the window.
4. Typing “1984″ in the search box will get me the Billboard Top 100 of 1984, but typing “1984 huey” won’t give me anything.

The verdict?  I really need to stop being the needy quiet guy and start being a needy contributer.  I’ve joined the Banshee mailing list and I’m going to lurk for a little while and start to soak up the atmosphere.  Hopefully I can also get in contact with a Banshee developer with some experience for a touch of mentoring to get me started.  We shall see, I don’t know if anything will come of this.  But I do know that the best way to make sure the features that I care about most get attention is to be willing to put some of the work in myself, and I think I’m willing to do that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 12:30 pm and is filed under , Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.