I’m thinking it would be great to be able to assign arbitrary tags to my music, like I do to my photos. For instance, I might tag the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony like this:
symphony beethoven loud choir german
I can’t figure out how to Google for this sort of feature because, well, the word “tag” is already taken for something else in the context of music.
I believe Amarok offers it, a bit, but Amarok has too many other serious flaws for me to be able to consider it.
Any ideas?
So a few days ago, I wrote about my failure to find a good music player. Since then, I’ve made some discoveries.
Amarok
So just as I was about to post about how nicely Amarok’s playlist saving works with Firefly, here I’m instead posting how I can’t use Amarok because it can’t even do what Rhythmbox does with an iPod anymore.
Banshee
Listen
Rhythmbox
Conclusions
I’ve renamed some of the directories on my iPod so they work with Banshee and Rhythmbox. I’m going to try Banshee for awhile and see how I like it.
So I have an iPod, and I have several PCs. I have the 60GB iPod, which is enough to hold my entire music collection. I want to have my music there, and on the PCs, and sync it all together: if I rate something 4 stars one place, rate it 4 stars everywhere. If I add music to my PCs, add it to the iPod, and in the same playlists.
Nothing like that appears to exist.
So here are my reviews of some of the Linux-based music playing systems. I am not all that happy with any of them. Actually, these aren’t reviews so much as they are wishlist (or more serious) bug lists.
Amarok
Last looked at it just before KDE 4.
Banshee 1.4.x
Listen
Exaile
Rhythmbox
gtkpod
Other
I have had brief experiences with the popular proprietary software such as iTunes. The one time I tried iTunes, it ironically scrambled most of the metadata on my iPod, especially the playcounts and the data that said whether or not I had listened to the podcasts. I am none too enamored with other Windows software either, and of course all this stuff is proprietary.
So, I guess music players are like mail readers. They all suck. Some just suck a little less.
A day or two ago, I asked for suggestions for a tabletop MP3 player. I got lots of good ideas — thanks! The two most common were the Roku SoundBridge Radio and the Nokia N800.
I’ve ordered the SoundBridgeRadio. I spent some time looking over its website, and it really impressed me for several reasons:
The N800 is also a good suggestion. It has an FM tuner built-in, and of course is capable of streaming media files. I have an N810, and I just don’t think a device this size would be capable of playing loudly enough for a kitchen. So I’d have to get external speakers, and then we’re into a mess of wires and stuff — making it less portable to other rooms in the house.
One person also suggested a Chumby. It sounds like an awesome gadget, but I couldn’t find anything on their site that indicated that it could stream music from my own server. From the Internet or an iPod, yes, but not from my server.
Thanks to everyone for your ideas. I’ll post a review of the SoundBridge Radio when I get it.
We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too.
I’ve tried searching, and found things such as the Squeezebox. But ones that are decent at this task seem to be in the $200-$300 range. That’s trange, because TV devices that do this are actually cheaper!
I’ve tried Googling, and can’t seem to craft good search terms.
Any ideas?
So I just recently switched to KDE 4 (still using it with xmonad, of course) and I just now ran into my first really big annoyance.
I just downloaded a PDF, and tried to copy and paste a bit of text from it. I used the selection tool, and Okular (KDE’s document viewer) offered to speak it to me, but said “Copy forbidden by DRM.”
pdftotext was able to convert the entire file to text format in an instant.
Why are people intentionally adding code to KDE to remove my freedom? This is crazy and nuts. Nobody should be doing this, least of all in Free Software!
A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement.
– Neal Stephenson, “In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line”
What a fun read. It’s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line.
He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn’t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university’s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn’t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You’d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at “high speed”.
Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, “bits” in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor.
Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today — and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago.
He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase — like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:
Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”
Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”
Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”
Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”
Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”
Buyer: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”
Bullhorn: “But…”
Buyer: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”
That doesn’t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don’t want control — in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional.
He speaks to running Linux at times:
Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.
Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.
Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:
This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . .
Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer–i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed–emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.
I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a “corpus of typesetting lore” rather than a program. Or how about this one: “Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.” Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch.
The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can’t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.
Because Linux is not commercial–because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate–it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.
what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.
It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.
That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: “Debian’s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.”
Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.
I’ve been THERE countless times.
Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.
It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.
The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone–the original command-line interface
Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it’s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.
Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.
Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.
Flowers
I’ve written a lot lately about my Grandma Klassen, who passed away this week. But I’m going to start this post about my Grandma Goerzen.
She died when I was just an infant. I never knew her, but as the years pass, it seems that I remember her better and better.
After we moved out to the farm where she and Grandpa Goerzen lived for decades, we noticed some flowers she had planted 30 years ago were still coming up, having withstood hail, hot summers, frost, construction equipment, and neglect all that time. Terah said, “It’s like your grandma left us a housewarming gift.”
Some of these flowers had never bloomed. Until this week.
One bloomed for the first time the day Grandma Klassen died.
A second bloom appeared the day of her funeral.
Music #1
My jr. high and high school band teacher loves music (and old engines, but that’s another story). You couldn’t sign up for “band” at my high school; you’d sign up for the class called LIFE. To him, music and life are indistinguishable. He says that anybody can speak to somebody, but music is the best way to speak to the heart.
My Grandpa Klassen died when I was 11. Grandma Klassen, before her health declined, loved to tell me the story of the music at his funeral. At his funeral, my mom and I played a piano duet of Nearer, My God to Thee which we had already learned for a different event. When we were done, Rev. Epp went to the pulpit and said something along the lines of, “If the music in heaven is as good as that, it’ll be a great place indeed.”
I was just 11, and though music did speak to me at that age already, I don’t think I understood how it moved people, such as my grandma, until many years later.
Music #2
Grandma Klassen loved music, too, and that’s reflected in each of her children — all of them play trumpet, for instance. So it’s no surprise that there was a lot of music this week.
She died as two of her children were singing hymns to her at her room in the nursing home.
Two of her grandchildren played trumpet for her at her burial.
And my brother and his wife played trumpet and piano at her funeral.
It was all beautiful, and like my band teacher said, it spoke to my heart.
Music #3
I knew about gradma’s love of music for quite awhile. When she was in better health, I took her to concerts sometimes. One of her favorite hymns was Joyful, Joyful, but she hadn’t known it was based on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I learned that the Wichita Symphony Orchestra was performing the 9th, and took her to the performance. She loved it, and I seem to recall that she kept talking about it for a few years afterwards. It certainly didn’t hurt that the singing on the 4th movement was in German. I burned her a “new-fangled” CD of it, which I frequently saw in or near her CD player.
The Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus is an all-volunteer choir with about 300 members. They give a couple of concerts a year, and occasionally tour throughout North America and Europe. Their motto is “we sing that others may live” because 100% of money collected at their concerts goes directly to charity.
Attending one of their concerts is a powerful experience not easily forgotten. I think the only time I’ve heard a choir come close to being as amazing as that was when I had the opportunity to attend a Robert Shaw concert a few years ago.
I went with grandma to one of the Kansas Mennonite Men’s Chorus performances a few years ago. As you might expect, she loved it — I think she called it “powerfully good.”
This year, I finally joined the choir. I still remember that first practice. We “warmed up” by singing Holy God, We Praise Thy Name — a song that has opened every KMMC concert for years. These people hadn’t sung together for almost a year, and there were plenty of new people like me there too. But it only took a few bars of singing before I realized just what it was I had joined. The choir started out with the quietest, but most powerful singing you can imagine: “Holy God, we praise thy name.” By the time we got to the end of the page, the building was ringing from 300 men singing “Infinite thy vast domain, everlasting is thy reign!” at the top of their voices, in perfect harmony. We got to the end. The director said. . . “Wow.”
I don’t think a first practice ever spoke to my heart before that day.
Music #4
Nearly 20 years ago, Grandma Klassen bought me a new bible. After she gave it to me, I asked her what some of her favorite passages were. She took me straight to the blessing in Numbers 6, and made sure I underlined it and bookmarked it. It goes like this:
“The Lord bless you,
The Lord keep you,
Make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you,
The Lord life up his countenance upon you and give you peace.”
My uncle had read this blessing to her the last time he talked to her. And the KMMC for years has ended their concerts with a beautiful benediction based on this passage. Grandma heard it at the concert I attended with her. It has been a favorite of my mom for years, too.
So I had the thought: we really ought to sing it as a benediction at her funeral. It was hard to find the right mix of people on short notice, but we wound up with me singing baritone, my brother singing 2nd tenor (we both normally sing bass), and his wife both playing piano and singing 1st tenor, and relying on the piano to fill in the bass part.
We had a little chance to practice before the funeral, but not a lot. The two of them have done a lot musically, but I haven’t nearly as much, so I got in some extra practice at home, too.
When it came time to sing, it was an emotional moment for sure — more than a bit hard to focus, knowing the history and meaning of these words. When we got to “and give you peace”, and moved into the chorus of “amen” that finishes the song, I almost broke down right there, but didn’t quite.
We didn’t give a perfect performance, for sure, on such short notice. (And they had me singing with them, so we wouldn’t have been perfect even with plenty of notice!)
But it didn’t have to be perfect. After we ended the last, quiet “amen”, I think I heard about a half-dozen noses blowing all at once. My band teacher was right about music speaking to the heart.
Later, during lunch, my aunt said to me, “Wow, John, I’ve never heard you sing before!” “That’s right, and this may be the last time you hear me sing, too! I don’t normally sing in a small group like this.”
A few minutes later, my uncle that gave the message came over and talked to the three of us. “John, today you three brainwashed me.” “Oh?” “Yes. For years, I thought that there was no music as beautiful as the trumpet. After hearing you three sing, I have to reconsider.”
And so my band teacher was also right: music is life. My grandma was a person that could hardly speak without touching the heart. That beautiful melody of her life didn’t stop when she died Tuesday afternoon. I’ve been hearing it all week.
Yesterday was my grandma Klassen’s funeral at Alexanderwohl Mennonite Church, where she had been a member for decades.
My uncle, a pastor, gave the meditation. He had been a missionary in Vietnam during the war, and he remained there after the United States withdrawal. During that time, things were very dangerous for him, and all means of communicating with the family back home were completely cut off. My grandparents had no way of knowing if he was OK.
He later heard of a conversation my grandma had with a neighbor one day during this time:
Neighbor: “You must be so worried about your son in Vietnam!”
Grandma: “Not really. I gave him back to the Lord the day he graduated high school.”
Neighbor: “If you’re not worried, then I’m REALLY worried!”
Grandma: “Why worry? Heaven is just as close to Vietnam as it is to Kansas.”
That exchange sums her up pretty well, I think. She was so deeply religious that it gave her a great sense of peace about life.
We heard so many stories about her this week. We heard how, when she was already in her upper 80s, she helped a farmer get his equipment out of the mud and ran some heavy farm machinery. She was in charge of my cousin’s schoolwork for a little while (she lived with them back then, and his parents were taking a trip). She apparently made sure he did every little assignment left for him in exacting detail, even the ones that his mother had said were “extra”, just in case he needed something else to do. Apparently when his parents got back, he said he loved his time with grandma, but begged them to never put her in charge of his schoolwork again!
I told the story of learning to play chess when I was a child. My grandpa was teaching me the game. I was having some trouble learning some of the rules, and was frustrated because he was also beating me (like usual). After a little while of me getting more and more frustrated, grandma said something to him in German and all of a sudden I started winning.
Yesterday evening was the community Good Friday church, with the combined choirs of our church and Alexanderwohl singing. That wasn’t the easiest thing to do after the funeral in the morning, but I’m glad I did. Tomorrow I’ll be singing again for Easter.
Jacob has lately been telling us “gate gamma kassen so sick” (Great Grandma Klassen is so sick), after his visit to the hospital, and it’s true.
Today started normal enough, but by 2:45 I got an email from my mom, saying that grandma had taken yet another turn for the worse; her pulse was racing, her temperature feverish, and her breathing shallow and difficult. The last grandchild that was going to be there made it, and got the last flicker of recognition from grandma. I wrapped some things up at work.
Then I made the short drive from work to the nursing home, and got there just after 4. I went in to her room there, and it was full of family. Two of her children were singing her favorite hymns. I can never forget my uncle’s deep bass voice as he stood at her bedside, holding her arm, while my aunt patted her head, both of them singing. Grandma’s only remaining sibling, her younger brother Melvin, sat on the other side of the bed, looking on.
Grandma’s white table and chairs, which were in grandma and grandpa’s house as long as I can remember, and followed grandma through all of the four other places she lived in the last years of her life, were in her room at the nursing home too. It always felt like home to be with grandma and those familiar things that she always took with her. Despite what was happening, I was glad she was back at home.
My uncle motioned me over to her bedside, and I took her hand for a few minutes. It felt cold and weak; for the first time, she didn’t grab my hand at all.
A nurse came in to check oxygen saturation, but the machine wasn’t able to get a reading due to poor circulation to her hand. She wasn’t able to get a heart rate either because the heart was racing so fast. She discussed briefly whether the family wanted them to continue giving her oxygen, and they decided that they would, for her comfort.
My uncle and aunt kept singing. I blew my nose and dabbed at my eyes, and there were hugs all around. And just a few minutes later, grandma peacefully stopped breathing, maybe 20 minutes after I had arrived.
They went to get the nurse, who came back to listen to grandma’s heart again, though we knew what she would find. She took the stethoscope off, and she almost lost her composure, but managed to say “you can turn the oxygen off now.” Several people gave grandma a last hug.
After a few minutes with just the family, they told the nurses to go ahead and call the funeral home. That set off a lot of activity making arrangements for the next few days, funeral plans, and the like. I stepped back into grandma’s room a few times, while the family was in the sitting area right outside it discussing. I looked around at the family photos on the wall, the old table and chairs, the recliner. Now, these are the things that were grandma’s. It didn’t feel like home anymore.
Terah and Jacob were stuck at home — Terah’s car was at the mechanic for repair today. I called to give her the news. She wanted to come to be with the family, but I didn’t really want to leave. She tried calling some friends to see if they could give her a lift to the mechanic, but not one of them was available. I talked to her again and suggested she just call the mechanic. She wasn’t even halfway through describing the situation when he interrupted with, “We’ll have it at your place right away!” “Well, I don’t expect you to have to do that, or you could certainly wait until you close.” “Nope, this isn’t your average community, we’ll bring it right over. You should be there.”
Grandma has enjoyed a simple life and had requested a simple death: no extraordinary measures at the end of life, no embalming either. So, by law, the burial must happen within 24 hours of death, and will be tomorrow.
After all the arrangements, people realized nobody had supper yet. We went to the quickest available option — pizza — and ate there. It was paid for out of grandma’s remaining money — the last meal of so many that she provided for her family over the years. It was a happy meal.
As I drove home, NPR news was on the radio. There were the same stories we hear all the time: the economy, the mideast, the president. Normally I’m interested, but today I shut it off. Today is different.
Tomorrow, for the second time in four years, I will help carry a grandparent’s casket a few days before Easter.
I’ll end tonight with this photo. It was taken soon after Jacob was born. Grandma came to the hospital and held him. That smile sums her up perfectly.
