Well not exactly the laptop but the screen died on me, after being able to re energize my screen by pressing in certain areas since yesterday that little trick doesn’t work anymore. So I’m writing this from my windows box instead of my Linux laptop. Read the rest of this entry »

After I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10 I thought I would try the Compiz-Fusion settings. I ran the Emerald theme OrangeGlow from the start and was wowed by what my desktop looked like. So why did I dump it you ask.
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I really only keep MP3 files, I have flacs as well, but usually convert them to mp3. In my humble opinion there’s only one tagger you should use on Linux, EasyTAG.
I love the layout and the amount of tags you can edit but if you ask me which tagger is the best I would answer Tag&Rename.
The fact you can download album info from Amazon.(com|co.uk|de|co.jp|ca) makes this tagger. I haven’t stumbled up on an album yet which gave me the wrong information using the Amazon lookup. Let me clarify that, yes I have had lists of possibilties for one album and some of them were incorrect but their always has been a correct one as well. Recently I found an album that I couldn’t find on Amazon.com and it turned out it was a UK release and amazon.co.uk gave me the right info. The other very good part is the album cover download through Amazon. Unfortunately this only runs on Windows and I don’t won’t to run it under Wine.

Hopefully the people at Tag&Rename will create a Linux port, I sure hope so.

For a while now, actually ever since I started using Linux as my choice of operating system on my desktop, I’m struggling to find the right way to manage my music.

I found my perfect way to organize it on the drive but I have yet to find the perfect program to manage my library.I organize my music on my drive as /Artist/ Year - Album/Track# - Song title and for compilations, like sound tracks, it’s /OST/Year - Album/Track# - Artist - Song title. I have some other directories structures as well but you get the picture.

Before I made my move to Linux, I never used a music organizer. I just open Windows Explorer, browse though my directory structure and add songs to QMP, my player of choice. For some reason I can’t seem to do this on Linux, technically you can of course but something is stopping me from using this method in Linux. I have a bookmark straight to my music library but I don’t use it. One reason is the lack of a missing “Open with <player>” when I right click on a directory, you have to go into the directory before you can add songs to a player.

I have tried to find a library organizer and the best thing I’ve found is Amarok. Now I use Gnome as my desktop environment and when I installed Amarok I kept getting error messages in my syslog, it wasn’t effecting my desktop, no crashes or such but some of the KDE libraries tried to start or search for something in the background and I don’t like that. All other’s that I’ve tried just don’t do it for me, I’ve tried several Banshee, Aqualung, Rhythmbox and some others. Some are slow, some don’t have full support of all ID tags.

I still need to find an organizer to my liking but I’m not giving up, until I find one I’ll just have to do it the hard way, browsing and adding songs.

If you have been reading this blog for a while you know I have recently switched over from Thunderbird to Claws Mail. After all the fuss at Mozilla concerning Thunderbird I thought I would look for a replacement, not for immediate use, but for the future in case Thunderbird was shot down from it’s email flight.
Now that I have been using Claws Mail for a while I thought I would write up a comparison between Claws Mail and Thunderbird and maybe this way I can help some people making a decision.

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