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Rhythmbox Gets iPod Support
Bhondai writes "The latest release of the popular GNOME based iTunes clone, Rhythmbox has, amongst new features, initial support for the iPod. Things are still a little unpolished at this moment (requiring manual mounting of the iPod to /mnt/ipod), but this does look promising. A list of changes and new features in Rhythmbox 0.7.1 is available at Footnotes."
I remember speaking to one of the developers in the IRC channel specifically about this. Their response was "write a gnome-vfs module for it."
Granted they had a point, but that isn't as seamless as a solution if you ask me. It's about time gnome had a good ipod solution.
- tristan
As in automatic mounting and unmounting, syncing with multiple devices and so on, rather than remain unpolished like so many Linux projects. I remember trying to sync a USB Clie with Linux and, although programs like kpilot were out for a while, they still required manual commands in a terminal window to work.
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO. Just buy the CD at the store, and rip it onto your hard drive. You get a disk with all the music, uncompressed. Plus, you get the case and all the artwork/essays that the artists include with each album. The artists still get paid, and everyone wins.
Rhythmbox integrates the wonderful Sound Juicer as a ripper. It is the most simple, straight-forward ripper available for the linux desktop. Rhythmbox may not be itunes yet, but it's making improvements constantly.
Life is offtopic.
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO. Just buy the CD at the store, and rip it onto your hard drive. You get a disk with all the music, uncompressed. Plus, you get the case and all the artwork/essays that the artists include with each album. The artists still get paid, and everyone wins.
Yeah, especially the oil companies. For many of us, "just buy the CD at the store" translates to "just drive to the store", while "just buy the song online" translates to "just double-click on that icon while slashdotting at leisure".
The idea of an iTunes clone makes me sort of nervous. If Apple made such a blatant clone of a flagship OSS project, and made it closed-source, wouldn't they be torn to shreds by angry Slashdotters? I thought were were supposed to be innovating here, not copying. And yes, I'm aware that in a sense Apple has done exactly that with BSD, but that's allowed under the license, and they've been goo about giving back (so far). (Same with KHTML.) Just imagine that RhythmBox came -first-, and -then- Steve Jobs announced iTunes. I bet there would be some fuss.
Uh huh. And re-ripping 40gb of music on the fly would take...how much processor?
Hell, if you want it to be that slow, why don't you just get one of the players that only supports the slow flavor of USB. (As opposed to the slightly-less-slow USB2)
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Firefox and its extensions?
Please, please, please can you change the slashdot GNOME logo? The one currently being used on Slashdot was phased out years ago.
But like you say, there is always the lingering hope that it will get better. One is content with what one has when one is running Linux because, well, it's not Microsoft and some stuff (e.g. GNOME 2.6) is really rather beautiful. But, as I have pointed out before and as you rightly say here, there's very little innovation - GNOME 2.6's much-needed replacement for the file dialogue boxes are straight from Apple and the spatial file browser is another old Apple trick. And of course the Start button (you can write whatever you like on it; it's always gonna be a Start button) is hardly an open source original.
I suppose the root of the problem is that most open source development is done by nerds, whose C or asm prowess is indubitable but whose understanding of the average user is minimal to non-existent. I am not wishing to berate these types, because the work they do is often superb, but I think we can easily conclude that:
- Nerds cannot think like users and expect that every user should either work hard to understand the system or quite simply fuck off and not use their software;
- Users' expectations are far too high from a bunch of tech-types who have no understanding of users' needs.
We keep talking about Linux on the desktop. GNOME is now ready for the desktop, but what does that actually mean? OK, so now Linux is as usable as Windows, but somebody whit here the other day, Windows is not exactly good enough for most users. Why else would it need such a big tech support team in every organisation?Aside from the feuding and pettiness that detracts from the quality of some projects (I cite xMule vs. aMule and mplayer as current or past examples), there is some great work being done. Why do we keep settling for good enough?
iqu
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
.to be original.
.unread and un-understood, and unimplemented so that no one can even claim they have made a valid comparison with a working product. There's a good OSS project for someone. A project that can go where no man has gone before. A deeply useful project.
--George Santayana
Sophmoric: The itch to be original
--Pete Seeger
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9
I shall, I suppose, counter the orginal posters "troll" with one of my own. I too like software that just works. There are really only so many good ways to go about implementing most software tasks, and once those ways are discovered one is most apt to apply one's energies into refinement, not innovation.
While there is some real, solid work going on in software these days, most of it is fashion and barbarous. Most of the solid work really is going on in OSS, but a bit under the radar of the fashion concious, but OSS is not exempt from fashion.
Indeed, I'd say, contrary to the opinion of most involved in it, OSS is currently the bastion of fashion driven software, because it is written by "the people" who have little really deep understanding of what they are doing. They learned Java from the web. They never bothered to learn mathmatics or theory, indeed tend to deride mathmatics and theory.
While they may expend a good deal of mental energy on their code, they do not expend much mental energy at all on what they are doing.
Like, why they are even doing it in the first place, other than their itch. .
Which they accomplish by following the trends. Go figure.
Like the Bible, Knuth is revered in passing, but largely unread. Codd is nearly vilified in some corners, or simply dismissed with a wave of the hand as "just theory". .
Who, in the internet "trained" generation, is even capable of it?
For that matter, who, in the modern trade school that even the universities have become, is capable of it?
The majority of coders are so busy "innovating" that they haven't even bothered to finish building the foundations. Software that just works. On known best principles. Even though it's just an evolutionary extension of someone else's work and not something that will get you a Slashdot headline.
That's what OSS is really all about. Otherwise we really are just better off spending our time making money to buy commercial "products."
KFG
You really don't want to do that. Encoding from one lossy format to another will really degrade the quality.
--
This sig is inoffensive.
Rhythmbox has a lot of promise, but they need to slow down for a second and fix the bugs which are preventing people to use what could be a really killer app.
transmission_err
It's because nobody earn any money on it.
Simple economics: Creating is what Apple does best. They innovate and get rewarded for that in the form of money, which gives the developers even more urge to earn more money in form of creating more and better products.
That's why in our society we have a thing called copyrights and patents. Tell me how many medications would be researched and created if we didn't have patents? Not many. When we're talking about software patents here on Slashdot, on how I look it I'm not thinking wether there should be or should not be patents, I'm thinking of how long those individual companies or persons should be allowed to hold on to those patents. In the open source market a lot of people work for free hence they're not rewarded for creating new things ("Why do it then?"). So instead of having innovation we're having a bunch of copycats doing their thing.
The conclusion is that with copyrights and patents, creation is rewarded.
I didn't want to make this comparison because it's so "tabu", but it really is communism (open source) versus capitalism (closed source).
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
I used to use SoundJam before iTunes was available, that app was just an mp3 engine with a playlist (and plugin support for visuals, etc). Comparable to mpg123, I'd say.
That's not really what iTunes is about, iTunes is a music management app, which happens to be able to play them, too.
same reason you might use gnu/linux even if it isn't, or certainly wasn't, a standard.
ogg really is better, however. the same sound quality and the files are considerable (i'd say 20+%) smaller. When you have a lot of audio or very little space to put it it matters.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
Are you overlooking the fact that you'd be converting from one lossy format to another lossy format? Both use different algorithms for determining what's discardable, and you're likely going to end up with a file the sounds pretty bad in the end.
What you're suggesting, however, wouldn't be too hard if your player supported Vorbis. It's my understanding that Vorbis is designed in a manner where you can 'strip' it down to a lower bitrate without totally reencoding - I may have misunderstood, however. Anyone know for sure?
There is seriously no reason to buy music online IMHO.
Well, IMHO there is a reason:
Singles.
While I agree with you that if you want an album, purchasing it in its physical form and getting the uncompressed audio is the best way to go.
However, if you don't want an entire album of filler to get one or two good songs, buying individual tracks online is really the only option. I've purhased over 130 songs from iTunes so far and absolutely 0 complete albums.
Of course, you could have meant piracy is a good substitute for online music stores... While I don't really give a rat's ass if the RIAA doesn't get my $0.99 per track, the quality of singles on P2P networks is really questionable as of late. I'd rather pay $0.99 for a song I know is a good quality encoding that will download quickly, than download several copies of the same song (usually with incorrect/misspelled or nonexistant ID3 metadata) to later listen to each copy and determine which isn't fucked up in some way.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
My understanding of the speed difference is that FireWire is a smarter technology that has more processing power built in. As such, it can maintain a higher transfer rate more consistently. Whereas USB is dumb and needs to talk with the processor to work, as such, if there are other processes running while transferring, USB will slow down. Of course, I just read that on /., so it's probably wrong ;-)
Robert Love frequently blogs about his progress on Project Utopia - which aims to bring all these udev, HAL, dbus and gnome-volume-manager components together in one integrated, device-plugin-happy whole.
See his various weblog entries on Project Utopia from januari for a sneak preview.
Tunes and the iPod will likely never support anything but AAC, since apple wants to lock you to their music store, software and hardware. Any CD Ripper will encode to ogg these days, and the Rio karma (which plays ogg and flac natively) beats the iPod in every single category except advertising budget.
Wong. The iPod supports AAC (protected and unprotected), AIFF, and MP3.
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Don't forget Hastings's Law:
Before you can advance the state of the art, you have to reach the state of the art.
Rhythmbox is shaping up nicely, but don't forget that it really hasn't been aroud all that long. The Rhythmbox developers might do amazing, crazy things with it, but that will have to wait until they lay the foundation by adding the features people need, first. iPod owners need iPod support.
Consider the GNOME desktop itself. At the time it was started, KDE was already working and useful, and Windows already had years of evolution. GNOME has been playing catch-up for years!
I'd say the GNOME desktop is now in many ways state-of-the-art, the major exception being the File Open and File Save dialogs. I personally also think it is essential to have some kind of "device manager" that lets you browse your hardware (see what IRQs are in use, see whether the system thinks you have USB 1.1 ports or 2.0, etc.); that's coming very soon (HAL plus DBUS plus an application and boom, you have it). So GNOME is a few short steps away from the state of the art, and will soon be able to push it forward. GNOME Storage looks interesting, for example.
Despite the efforts of Microsoft and Apple, the desktop really isn't a swiftly moving target. Most innovations (e.g. ActiveDesktop) weren't useful or popular, and have been dropped; the ones that were kept are all easy to do. Within a short time, both GNOME and KDE will be caught up to the state of the art. And that is when advances become possible.
Note, however, that sometimes the state of the art is adequate, and there is no reason to push beyond it. Cars still have a steering wheel, a gas pedal, and a brake pedal, after how many years? Why not a gamepad interface with little thumb joysticks? Answer: people are used to what we have; people like what we have; it ain't broken, so don't fix it. The current desktop model, multiple overlapping windows with some sort of panel where you can see what you have running, is well-established and popular.
Still, if you want to do something completely different, it's easier than ever now. You don't have to build a whole desktop, you can focus on just changing the behavior of one piece of an already-built desktop. You want something shockingly new? Build it and see if anyone likes it. If it really is cool, people will help you. Even if you aren't a coder, mock up some screenshots and show them around.
I won't be helping you though, sorry. I'm pretty pleased with GNOME and the way it's going already.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely