Clementine and Guayadeque, Close, but not Quite

I continue to have issues with Rhythmbox 2.96 on Ubuntu and Mint (Mate in both cases) and I will give up on it if I find something better, or maybe they'll finally get around to addressing some of these bugs. It doesn't see new songs added to the library reliably, if I force it to rescan the library it crashes, and it often stops between songs for no explicable reason. A lot of these problems have been around for awhile, which makes me wonder if development or support for Rhythmbox is weak. The last straw was that it seemed to be missing three songs from the Roxy Music "Street Life" album, both on my desktop at home and at work, and the files were there and fine--at least so far as Totem was concerned.

I just tried out Clementine, and with lots of features disabled it looks clean and seems to work well. However, I don't see how to display songs in order of least recently played to most recently played. However, Clementine did show the songs that Rhythmbox was "missing," and I now suspect the issue was that Rhythmbox was categorizing them as Bryan Ferry songs, not Roxy Music. Clementine was smart enough to include them in the Roxy Music search.

Double-checking with Rhythmbox, they are indeed under Bryan Ferry and not missing. So this is not a new Rhythmbox bug.

Guayadeque is promising, but it forces a listening model on the user. Also, I can't get it to use the screen efficiently. If one doesn't keep a bunch of useless crap on-screen, instead there's a big blank area. If there is discussion of layout, saving layouts, restoring layouts, etc., why isn't the layout configurable? I might have another look in the future.

Please don't mention Banshee. It's got too many features I don't need, takes forever to load, takes forever to search a large library, and so far as I can tell does nothing well.

Upshot: I'll keep using Rhythmbox since I don't have time to mess with Guayadeque right now. I'll uninstall Clementine. I'll keep Guayadeque to mess with in the future.

2.96 might be an oldish version of Rhythmbox, but it's what's in the Mint 13 repositories, and there's no sense in wasting much time tweaking a media player--it works or it doesn't  In the next OS upgrade (later this month for me), it'll either work or it won't.

Sarah Donner

An e-mail from EFF led me to The Oatmeal (http://theoatmeal.com) which offers much thoughtful humor and content from Sarah Donner, a video and free song download called "The *otherf*ing Pterydactyl." Anyhow, Sarah Donner has music, including several other free downloads, at her web page. It's good stuff, and mostly not just 128 kb/s sample rate.

As an example of the humor (please note the word 'extremist') I'll present this:

Sound Juicer on Ubuntu Broken

Sound Juicer now has trouble interacting with MusicBrainz to download CD names, track listings, etc. Googling led to J.P. Stacey's blog: http://www.jpstacey.info/blog/2011/06/13/sound-juicer-no-longer-retrieves-track-names-when-you-extract-audio-cds
Apparently CD Juicer has been using a deprecated feature at MusicBrainz and, as could be expected, MusicBrainz dropped support for the feature. Fortunately they still offer such a service, but CD Juicer has to be fixed to do it right.

My experience fixing this (Ubuntu 10.04) was to issue the add-apt-repository that Stacey suggests, but that gave me a 404 not found. I thought about editing config files, but decided to instead follow a link at Stacey's page to launchpad.net, or, specifically, to Philipp Wolfer: https://launchpad.net/~phw/+archive/musicbrainz
Wolfer has it right.

Baltimore Independent Music and Arts Festival

This looks like a series of events worth attending. It's August 26-28 2010 here in Baltimore.

Stand By Your Band