iTire of iTunes

I've really become tired of iTunes.

I started out sync'ing to my iPod using Amarok. It managed my collections well and even was able to perform transcoding on the fly, turning my FLAC and OGG collection into easily-digestible MP3 transmogrifications. However with my sixth-generation iPod I started noticing clipping artifacts and had problems with video cover art, so I decided to give iTunes proper a whirl.

First off, all my music is stored on a central file server downstairs. My upstairs LAN is connected to the downstairs LAN using a 10Mbs HPNA 2.0 bridge, so file transfers aren't exactly fast between the two. Still, with Amarok this wasn't an immense problem as I could transcode once during synchronization and just be done forever until I wanted to sync another album with the iPod. With iTunes however a choice few tracks (say 200-some out of 10,000) were always synchronized, so I was saddled with 30 minute synchronizations every time I plugged in the iPod. It was ridiculous.

On top of that the interface isn't exactly great. I'd like to list things by album and then by track as a tree-like hierarchy, which iTunes doesn't do very well. While browsing by artist was fine browsing by album was not, taking multiple-artist albums and littering them around. Plus album art was choppy at best; sometimes it would apply the album art, sometimes not.

I'm reverting back to Amarok now. Not only should synchronizations (especially podcast synchronizations) be more efficient, I now am not tied to the iPod as my music vehicle of choice. Should I decide to sync instead with a FAT32 thumb drive, or a smartphone, or a wax cylinder, it doesn't matter as long as I can mount it as a filesystem.

I still have transcoding problems... without a doubt; but now I know iTunes isn't a solution.

Christmas Software Shenannigans

Is that how you spell "shenannigans?" Oh well.

Received a nifty lil iPod nano this Christmas. An obvious conundrum hit right away... my entire music library is formatted & encoded using Ogg Vorbis. iPods use AAC or MP3's.

Amarok - KDE's killer app - has great iPod support. Of course, the gold standard for iPod support on Linux remains gtkpod - an app that allows your little fingers to get into every facet of your iPod's filesystem layout. But Amarok makes me so tingly inside it's hard to express.

For example, Amarok can transcode your files on-the-fly. Are all your files in Speex but need them in MP3 format for your digital player? Just queue your files in Amarok's media device browser and it will automagically convert your files. Everything in Vorbis but you need AAC? TransKode will take care of it for you.

Not to mention Amarok now has an in-browser music store: Magnatune. I freakin' love Magnatune. The fact that it's now tightly integrated with Amarok makes me giddy.

But there are a few problems. I was up until 1:30 AM this morning trying to get transKode and Amarok to play nicely... there were so many uninstalled dependencies it wasn't even funny. And were there error messages? Nooooooooooooooooo.... I had to go and track down faac, vorbis-tools, gdkpixbuf, blah blah blah. After I made sure every possible package was installed, I was finally able to get Amarok to convert files automagically. I can't blame SuSE for not installing those dependencies... transKode is a plug-in to Amarok after all, and installing every possible dependency for Amarok would suddenly make it heftier than GnuCash.

Even with these limitations, Amarok is suiting my needs much, much better than iTunes. I don't think I'd be able to do jack nor squat with iTunes, considering it can't transcode my library. Next stop is trying to get contacts, calendar, to-do lists and notes to sync. But I've only filled up 10% of my 4GB so far. w00t!

Speaking of software, I'll stop my openSUSE 10.2 after this post. Several may have noticed Hubert Mantel is coming back to SuSE, which I hope is a good omen of things to come. The distribution has slipped since he left, so I'm hoping he can bring things back on course. I must say however - the bug reports I've filed so far have been resolved promptly. They're triaging bugs well. There are some pretty stale ones, like Evolution not running correctly in KDE. But by comparison Ubuntu has had an outstanding bug for what seems like an eternity that's stopping me from switching over: not mounting encrypted partitions at boot time.

openSUSE is going well now... dual-monitor support is working flawlessly now, SCPM is helping me effortlessly switch between home and office, and Amarok is allowing my expansive music collection to survive on my iPod. Hard to complain at this moment.