Re: [tlug] Amarok 2 sucks

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

2009/5/29 David J Iannucci <jlinux@example.com>:

> I used to use XMMS, but it was removed from Gentoo's portage
> so I had to find something else[.]

Why? Have you ever tried writing an ebuild? It is quite easy, once you
spend about an hour getting the hang of it, and then you can keep a
private Portage overlay (see PORTDIR_OVERLAY in "man make.conf") of
all the software you love that is not in Portage.

I do this with XEmacs--since Gentoo won't put 21.5.x in the official
tree (I committed it to the Portage CVS myself last year, but got
yelled at by the Emacs herd, who took it back out)--and newer versions
of Sakura than exist in Portage, mainly because I add features to
Sakura as they occur to me. ;)

Also, do you know about Project Sunrise?

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/sunrise/


> But I, and many other ex-MMS-ers *like* to have [...]
> convenient buttons to play/pause/etc without having RSI-inducing
> keyboard shortcuts to remember.

Are you kidding me? The mouse is the wrist-killer, the little-death
that brings total digital paralysis. You must face the mouse, then let
it pass over you and through you, and when it has gone past, you must
turn your inner eye to see that its trajectory terminates in the
rubbish bin, and when the mouse has gone, there will be nothing, and
only you (and your Happy Hacker keyboard) will remain.

Seriously, though: Amarok allows you to change those global
keybindings, which I have done, and I quite enjoy hitting C-S-Space
anywhere, any time to pause or resume playback. It makes bathroom and
coffee breaks less annoying. ;)

I also use C-S-s to stop, C-S-b and C-S-f to go back and forward a
track, respectively, in the playlist, and C-S-1 through 5 to rate a
track.

> Sorry for the diatribe... this was really just to back up Josh's point
> about the developers :-)

And to make a point about how you prefer the mouse to the keyboard,
probably in order to troll-bait Josh. ;-P

> And apparently Amarok and KDE provide
> appropriate hooks to allow one to write one's own player window
> app(let?) without too much(?) trouble, so maybe I'll try that some
> day in my copious free time.  Sigh.

They do. I've been meaning to fix a few things with Amarok, but that
requires a bit of spin-up on my side that is relatively unpleasant, so
I've not gotten around to it in the two years I've been using (and
loving) Amarok.

Anyway, just got a new Lenovo IdeaPad S10e--which is compiling mplayer
as we speak--so I think I'll try out Mozilla SongBird there. If it is
anything like the other Mozilla stuff, it will be much easier to make
user modifications than Amarok, so if it does everything that I like
about Amarok, I may well switch.

-- 
Cheers,
Josh