Luke Plant's home page (Posts about Music)

player_do – control multiple media players from a single (command line) interface

2010-07-15T16:23:05+01:00

I tend to use several music/media players, such as shell-fm, moc and Clementine. And I often try out new ones. In order to be able to use the media buttons on my keyboard for pausing/skipping, I wrote this player_do Python script to automatically route the commands to the right one.

Quick start:

sudo easy_install playerdo

Or, if you prefer this way like me, and have $HOME/.local/bin on your $PATH:

easy_install --prefix=$HOME/.local playerdo
player_do help

Then use your window manager/desktop to setup keyboard shortcuts to player_do playpause, player_do next etc.

mpris-remote does a similar job, but only for MPRIS players, and I needed others. My script also has an MPRIS backend, so it will support XMMS2, Amarok, Clementine, Exaile, Dragon Player and various others out of the box. It also has support for shell-fm, moc, and rhythmbox.

If you have more than one running at a time, it tries to be intelligent about which one to talk to, although of course it is not always possible to read your mind correctly!

For other players that don't support MPRIS it should be quite easy to add a backend – please fork the GitHub repository, have a look at the existing backends and send me your patches!

Amarok 2 can corrupt MP3 files

2009-04-23T01:18:10+01:00

I've found that Amarok 2 is really not ready to be used...

In terms of interface, it's not that bad, and I'm much happier than most people with the changes from Amarok 1.4, and I've been giving it a fair try.

I was annoyed that it provides a UI for putting albums into 'Various Artists', or removing then, but then forgets everything you've done next time you open the program when it rescans the collection. But I could live with that for the time being.

The fact that it clips the beginning off some tracks for some unknown reason is also really annoying (it clips 1.2 seconds off the beginning of one of my favourite tracks; Dragon Player, another KDE4 apps, also does it, but no other media players do so).

But it has started doing things that mean I just don't trust it with my MP3s any more:

Certain tracks start appearing with seemingly random album and artist names in the playlist (picked from other tracks in my collect), though they have the correct song title and play the correct song. If I right-click and select 'Edit track details', the same wrong details appear (so if I were to press save, the wrong details would be saved back to the file). If, in the collection pane, I go to the album the track ought to be in, it is missing. I don't know how to find it again, except in the file browser. However, if I look at the same file in any other player or ID3 tag editor, the correct info appears. Somehow Amarok is not reading the info from the file itself, but from some other source which is corrupt.

This means that editing any track details in Amarok is now dodgy, since if I go to edit one detail, I can't be sure that other details will be supplied correctly, and when I save I could save Amarok's corrupt data to the file.

Perhaps purging the collection completely might help, but I'm not sure how to do it, and I don't really want to lose all the album covers etc.

I guess I should file a bug, but I've filed so many recently, and this is one I don't know how to reproduce, and it's fairly pointless filing it – as a developer myself, I know that, with the best will in the world, this kind of bug will eventually just get WORKSFORME.

Before, I couldn't trust Amarok to actually play tracks correctly, and now can't trust Amarok to show my collection so that I can find songs and albums, and I certainly can't trust it to manage the MP3 files.

Fairly damning I'm afraid. I'm posting this as a warning to others, Amarok could be corrupting the metadata in your MP3s...

Should I try upgrading to Amarok 2.1? Or do I just give up now and go back to mocp?

MOC and last.fm

2008-06-26T22:26:11+01:00

Update: people are having trouble with this now, I am unable to debug what is wrong, it seems like a problem with mocp.

When not using Amarok (e.g. if I'm low on memory due to using VMs or something), moc is very nice music player (Debian/Ubuntu package 'moc', but command 'mocp'). Here is how to get it to submit tracks to last.fm in a well behaved manner (that doesn't submit tracks if you are just skipping through a playlist):

Install lastfmsubmitd: sudo aptitude install lastfmsubmitd
Add yourself to lastfm group: sudo adduser [yourusername] lastfm
Download and save my MOC - last.fm script, and make it executable.
Alter your ~/.moc/config to set OnSongChange as per the instructions at the top of the script.
Completely quit moc and restart it.

The advantage of the script I wrote over just using OnSongChange is that my script will wait for half the length of the song before submitting to last.fm. Every 5 seconds it will check you are still listening to that song, and if not, it will quit. This way it will behave much more like Amarok and other well behaved last.fm clients.

Last.fm, Konqueror, Amarok

2007-08-16T17:19:21+01:00

I like to play last.fm streams in Amarok, rather than the last.fm player. I also sometimes browse the last.fm website (using Konqueror) and I would like the 'Play in software' links to use Amarok instead of the last.fm client. To do this, save this file as $HOME/.kde/share/services/lastfm.protocol. Contents below in case the download won't work:

[Protocol]
exec=/usr/bin/amarok "%u"
protocol=lastfm
input=none
output=none
helper=true
listing=
reading=false
writing=false
makedir=false
deleting=false

Last.fm taster

2005-12-19T20:26:54Z

I've somehow managed to get subscriber level on Last.fm's “social music revolution” site, and I'm really enjoying it. Apparently they lost some of my tags (which I had really used before, so it didn't affect me), and to make up for it gave me some time at subscriber level.

What this means is I get access to tons of different radio stations, including:

“tag radio”, which plays musics based on user tagging (normally along genre lines)
“personal radio” and “favorites” – both your own and other people's
“similar artist radio” (pick an artist and listen to similar music)

...and more. The radio stations are streamed individually though, so you can skip or even ban tracks that you don't like, or add them to your favorites list, or set it to only play music you've never heard before.

The result was that last week I listed to over 150 different artists (mainly from 'blues radio', 'vocal jazz radio' and 'motown radio', but others as well). The whole site is very well put together and is full of 'Web 2.0' feel and features. I'm gonna make the most of this while it lasts!

I did discover some incredibly sad people though. There is a group of self declared Introverted, Lonely and Over-Sensitive users. Their discussion of their love lives is the most pathetic thing I have come across in a good while – it's quite good for a giggle, but I have to admit I got bored fairly quickly. Maybe the last.fm service just attracts that kind of person, but it's possible there is actually a causal link, so I better be careful :-).

iTunes for Linux

2005-05-07T14:09:26+01:00

It really bugged me that there was no iTunes for Linux, and despite searching high and low, there is no decent alternative that works on Linux - a simple way of buying a single track online. Until now.

I've just found and installed PyMusique. Thankfully, it has Ubuntu packages, which work perfectly. The app is very simple, but very effective. It allows you to sign up, add credit card details etc, search, preview and purchase tracks all very easily. I believe this is due to the iTunes DRM being cracked earlier this year, but I didn't realise it was now available in such an easy package. I'm now listening to "I'll stand by you" by The Pretenders, one of my all time favourite tracks which annoyingly wasn't in my music collection, and I wasn't going to fork out for an entire album, or download it illegally using the P2P networks. Kudos and thanks to the PyMusique team, and particularly Jon Lech Johansen, to whom I also owe the ability to play DVDs on my Linux PC.

Update: I found a script to convert the iTunes m4a (mp4) format in Ogg (with the help of faad and oggenc), and now I can play them in my favorite music player Amarok (which doesn't seem to be able to play them with decent quality). I did have some issues with the debs from PyMusique - in particular I ended up installing gstreamer0.8-faad and libfaad2-0 from marillat's Debian repositories, instead of using the PyMusique ones. But now it's perfect - I've got a nice frontend for buying from iTunes, and Amarok is a great player for organising and playing music.

Linux friendly radio

2005-01-22T23:58:34Z

I would like to congratulate Virgin Radio on their very Linux friendly web site. Their listen online page autodetects a Linux browser and gives options for streaming audio that are more Linux friendly (Ogg Vorbis listed first, and then MP3). They even apologise at the bottom of the page for one of their streams which is only available as a WMA stream (which is usually Windows only).

They better not keep this up, or I'll get positively spoilt!

On top of this, they actually seem to have a policy of playing quite good songs a lot of the time. For a fairly mainstream popular music station, this is a bold and unorthodox move, but one I'm surprised that other stations haven't thought of. This evening I've been treated to some absolute classics including "Every breath you take" by The Police and, one of my all time favorites, "I'll stand by you" by The Pretenders. It can't last long...

(I have to add -- this is not a blanket endorsement of Virgin Radio! I believe that the music we listen to can have a massive influence on us, and pop music especially so, as it very often brings a non-Christian culture and morality with it, either implicitly or explicitly. That topic deserves some proper attention in another post, I just wanted to quickly say here that I believe Christians need to be very careful about anything they listen to, and I don't want to cause anyone to stumble. Most of what I've been listening to on Virgin Radio tonight has been passing my tests, but if you think my judgement is off please do leave a comment!).