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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.
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!
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
You really don't want to do that. Encoding from one lossy format to another will really degrade the quality.
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This sig is inoffensive.
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.