XMMS2 and other Goodies

Message

ethyrdude · #1 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-23 21:52

This topic is being started to prevent trashing another thread.

Until a few minutes ago, I never heard of xmms2. But then since the last distro upgrade, I can see there are a lot of new toys and goodies available that I wasn't even aware of. I used to browse synaptic, just too see what was available but the file list has grown so large that this is starting to get very difficult to do.

rickh · #2 Post by **rickh** » 2006-11-24 01:53

A good way to keep track of new stuff upcoming is here ... http://packages.debian.org/unstable/newpkg_main

ethyrdude · #3 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-24 05:09

Ooo, Angry Drunken Dwarves! The name alone inspires visions! Of course, anything in that list that sounds cool I will try!

ethyrdude · #4 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-24 06:05

Files added during the last seven days, fortunately not all are completely new, some are upgrades, like the kernel headers. Still, it's a lot of information to try and digest. No doubt, many of these upgrades will already have happened on my computer.

That kde theme - nifty, looks kinda cool, you can go to kde-look to view it, see the link in synaptic.

thamarok · #5 Post by **thamarok** » 2006-11-24 13:30

I think xmms2 sounds good (because of GTK2.0 usage), but there are no many clients out there yet

Also, I use XMMS because it has a wide selection of plugins and it even has a MPlayer plugin, which for example Audacious doesn't. But I think I might as well look into Beep Media Player, because it seems to have a MPlayer plugin too.

Grifter · #6 Post by **Grifter** » 2006-11-24 14:30

There _are_ lots of clients for it, but they haven't been packaged - frankly I was surprised to see xmms2 in etch at all, last time I checked their homepage it was still a development version, but there you go

http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Clients

There, lots of clients, although I'm gonna wait until someone packages them to use them

ethyrdude · #7 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-24 15:52

If xmms2 came with an applet, allowing it to be used from the panel, that might be useful but I really wasn't impressed. And setting up the playlists isn't very easy. I don't see any improvements over xmms. The playlist set up in mpd isn't easy either. I prefer to point and click, done.

thamarok · #8 Post by **thamarok** » 2006-11-24 20:07

Grifter wrote:There _are_ lots of clients for it, but they haven't been packaged - frankly I was surprised to see xmms2 in etch at all, last time I checked their homepage it was still a development version, but there you go

http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Clients

There, lots of clients, although I'm gonna wait until someone packages them to use them

Oh sorry, I didn't mention that I meant packaged clients. There is gxmms2 (http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/sear ... rds=gxmms2) but it doesn't seem that K()()|_

meon · #9 Post by **meon** » 2006-11-24 22:35

In unstable there is is Esperanza too. I'm using it right now.

thamarok · #10 Post by **thamarok** » 2006-11-25 08:49

I installed Esperanza and gxmms2 and first impression: Not that good.
I don't prefer this new feature of XMMS2: "It's a backend, now you need a frontend"
I like the old XMMS style which was a backfrontend

ethyrdude · #11 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-26 02:02

I prefer to use something that has an equalizer because I want to regulate my bass a bit, I have tons of it and to push the treble up a bit.

thamarok · #12 Post by **thamarok** » 2006-11-26 10:05

Do you have a 5.1 sound system?

ethyrdude · #13 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-27 00:20

No, I have 2.2, which means I have two speakers on top, part of the usual amplified speaker setup and two car speakers mounted in wooden boxes under my desk, which gives me my bass. I soldered a couple of jacks into the computer speakers so I can plug in whatever I want. Even though the speaker amp is rated at 12 watts, it still pushes all four speakers fairly decently.

My sound card is an old crystal sonic something or other, and only supports stereo. I used to have a set of speakers with subwoofer but I find my current setup sounds better.

When I want real volume, I have a couple of guitar amps that do the job nicely, but only for parties.

pigah · #14 Post by **pigah** » 2006-11-27 13:58

ethyrdude wrote:If xmms2 came with an applet, allowing it to be used from the panel, that might be useful but I really wasn't impressed. And setting up the playlists isn't very easy. I don't see any improvements over xmms. The playlist set up in mpd isn't easy either. I prefer to point and click, done.

mpd playlists can be set up with point and click in either ncmpc (packaged in etch) or qmpdclient (not packaged).

ethyrdude · #15 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-28 00:43

Okay, so I have to start console so I can start ncmpc which I assume will start mpd, or does it start automagically?

It doesn't really matter, after frigging around for half an hour, I see, no songs, no song list.

I start pygmy which is the gtk frontend along with python-mpdclient and I try to load in a bunch of songs and it's no go. I have my unsorted directory open with some songs in it and I try to drag these into the play list, no go. I click on + and bantu opens and there is that retarded "find" with Artist, Title, but no way to add my unsorted directory. What really annoys me is that I can't even get the search feature to work. It's just garbage. At least I could get xmms2 to load songs one at a time.

Frig this, I start xmms, click play directory, browse to my directory and I'm done, no searching for this, that and the other thing.

If I wanted to find an artist and only play songs from that artist then maybe this would be great but to just play a bunch of songs in a directory, no, this just sucks.

rickh · #16 Post by **rickh** » 2006-11-28 04:29

I work on Mercedes cars. Superb engineering. I have found that if something is difficult, it's because I'm trying to do it incorrectly.

There is an application there to your own difficulty. I tried xmms2 a while back, just messing around. Had no problem getting the music I wanted to play.

ethyrdude · #17 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-28 05:48

This is getting off topic again, this post wasn't supposed to be about just one app. You see that doggy in the upper left corner, he gets on an old bone every now and then and just doesn't know enough to let go, but then that old doggy isn't the only one.

If you like xmms2 and mpd and whatever, great. Glad to hear it. Somebody made the point they don't like it, I agree. That's great too. Using your Mercedes analogy, not everyone drives one, it's all a matter of taste. Not everyone likes standard transmission either, my first two cars had one, but then I decided that the automatic transmission should have been perfected by now. Some people still disagree but that's their choice. Okay, now we can put away the cars, we're talking software here.

I did manage to get xmms2 to finally find my music, but it wasn't easy. Does that mean I don't know how to use it? Yes I don't. Will I learn how to use it? Maybe, it depends. Perhaps something else will come along, that's usually the case. Okay, I think this has been kicked around enough, are there any other new apps that people are or aren't impressed with?

Grifter · #18 Post by **Grifter** » 2006-11-28 06:12

which models have you worked on rickh?

ethyr: mpd doesn't work like you described, where you feed it music, but rather for mpd you set up a directory structure, you plonk the music into that and then run an update from a client, whenever new stuff is added, and if you have your music spread out across a harddrive, the recommended way is to make a dir somewhere, in this new dir you symlink all the music dirs that you want to play from, then you simply tell mpd to look for music in the dir you made, that contains the symlinks

since you've abandoned mpd this prolly won't help, but if you ever wanna try it again, check the docs in /usr/share/doc/mpd*

the nice thing with a daemon and client interface is that you can run the daemon on your music computer, and then connect to that computer with a client, running on for example your laptop in a different room (:

ethyrdude · #19 Post by **ethyrdude** » 2006-11-28 15:30

Okay, the light has come on. I can see why you would want to use mpd. I finally figured out how to use it, but in my situation there's no advantage to using it.