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Algorithmic Music Composition With Linux, Part 2

Dave Phillips — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 13:03:19 +0000

In this part of the series we complete our tour of the Grace algorithmic composition environment. more>>

How-To: Enable Last.fm Song Submission in CMus in Debian and Ubuntu

Craciun Dan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:20:00 +0000

CMus is a very powerful audio player for the console with a ncurses-based interface, support for themes and highly configurable.

Although (at least in Debian) CMus does not come with Last.fm song submission support by default, there is a script available here as a patch, which you can apply to the source, compile CMus again and enable Last.fm support.

Here's what you have to do:

1. Enable sources repositories
Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file as root with your favourite text editor (e.g. nano /etc/apt/sources.list or kdesu /etc/apt/sources.list) and make sure you have a line which starts with deb-src, as in the example below:

deb-src ftp://ftp.ro.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

You can replace the TLD with the one of your country (e.g. instead of ro use fi for Finland, de for Germany etc.) Next, update the packages list as root:

apt-get update

2. Get the CMus source code
Type, as normal user:

apt-get install git-core

Now issue the command:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/cmus.git

3. Get the Last.fm patch
Go here and download the patch (direct link here). Save it inside the cmus directory. The file is called as.patch

4. Apply the patch
To apply the patch, make sure the current working directory is cmus and type:

patch < as.patch

5. Install CMus dependencies
To install the needed libraries for the compilation, type as root:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev
apt-get build-dep cmus

6. Compile and install CMus
Just type the usual:

./configure
make
make install

The last one as root.

7. Enable the Last.fm song submission script
You can either copy the following three lines inside the ~/.cmus/rc file:

set as_enable=true
set as_user=Lastfm_USER
set as_pass=Lastfm_PASS

Or run the same commands in CMUS like this:

:set as_enable=true
:set as_user=Lastfm_USER
:set as_pass=Lastfm_PASS

Just make sure to replace Lastfm_USER and Lastfm_PASS with the appropiate values.

Banshee 1.2 – 1.x Series Getting to Maturity

Craciun Dan — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:32:00 +0000

The new Banshee 1.2 includes several new features over the last stable release, like the equaliser or the music recommendations panel. The full list of new or improved features is here. For those who didn't hear about Banshee yet, it's a pretty powerful audio player for GNOME which received more and more attention lately, featuring things like a media library, support for Last.fm, podcasts, cover fetching, plugins and many more.

Banshee 1.2.0 playing

I was enchanted to try the so-called 'Amarok Migration' feature, which, according to the official website, lets you import ratings, play counts and podcasts from Amarok. Well, I have Amarok 1.4.9.1 using SQLite but Banshee crashed when I tried to import those using the Media -> Import Media dialogue, already having a media library in Banshee. I tried deleting the file ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db and this time the import feature worked flawlessly, and Banshee didn't crash anymore.

Importing the Amarok media library

The equaliser works very well, except that there are no default presets. I think several default presets like 'Rock', or 'Full Bass' would be nice instead of letting the user setting those.

The new equaliser

I was still disappointed to see that the cover fetching plugin doesn't look inside the song's directory for local files like cover.jpg or front.png, but the retrieval of covers from the Internet works pretty well. All of the covers for albums which don't have additions like [2004 Remaster] or [Limited Edition] were correctly fetched.

Plugins

Banshee looks more improved with every version and it's definitely a very promising player. Compared to 1.0.0, this new release it's much more stable (no more crashes when clicking on the Last.fm tab for example), but I think it still needs some work at cover fetching, and the Last.fm integration won't show all the images for recently played tracks. Last.fm changed the layout recently so I'm not sure whether this is Banshee's fault at all.

Last.fm integration - Banshee features song submission too

Although the 1.0 release was also accompanied by a new, professionally designed website, work at the Wiki seems to be still in progress.

Although I'm not a GNOME or GTK fan, I can warmly recommend Banshee to any audiophile using this desktop environment. It's almost full-featured, and stable enough now, the 1.x series showing real signs of maturity now.

About

Listen 0.5 – Yet Another Good GTK Audio Player

Craciun Dan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:07:00 +0000

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

Playing Metallica and visualisation

The interface is divided into several sections for the currently selected action. For example, if you select Current from the actions list, Listen will display all the albums by the currently playing artist, favourite songs and recently played songs by the same artist.

Context tab

I really missed the option to sort the playlist by song location, but otherwise, it includes mostly all other criterias. You can sort by artist, title, album, bitrate, play count, date, year, genre, track number and so on. I'm not sure what the 'Feeds' sorting option does, since it has no visible column in the playlist.

I liked the Wikipedia integration, the browser offers several basic functionality options, like searching for album, artist or song, opening in an external web browser, but it doesn't include an option to specify what browser you want to use. It also has back and forward buttons.

Wikipedia information

The Context tab will show favourite albums, songs and last played songs. Listen automatically detects cover images in the currently playing song directory and shows them whenever possible: in the context tab, in the library at the albums section or in the now playing area. It also allows you to search for default or specific names on Amazon.com and Google Images, but the Amazon search currently doesn't work. It works fine for Google Images though. Allowing you to enter a custom search term is useful in case you don't find what you want but you want to put any other cover or image instead of it.

Cover fetching from Google Images

Listen can be customised different ways using the Preferences window. To mention a few settings you can change: splash screen, start minimized, visualisations, OSD (on-screen display).

Preferences

Last.fm integration

Populating playlists doesn't seem to be very intuitive. For example, after creating a new playlist and going to Music -> Import Folder, the playlist remains empty. However I could do it by selecting all the songs from the Media Library with CTRL+A and dragging them over the playlist name.

Overall, I found Listen to be pretty nice and rich enough in features, but I missed statistics and the option to sort the playlist by location. Otherwise, it's very nice, with a clean layout, and offers a very good audio experience.

About

Official website

Exaile Music Player Review – A Good Choice for the GTK Fans

Craciun Dan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:06:00 +0000

Introduction
Exaile is an audio player built in GTK, and although it's not as popular as Banshee, Rhythmbox or Audacious, it's feature-complete and offers a unique concept by using multiple tabs for showing several playlists, each one in its own tab, and other dozens of good features which an audiophile will definitely find useful.

Exaile 0.2.13 playing

Interface
The common interface is similar to the interfaces of other GTK players, with the tabs for collection, playlists, radio and file browser to the left, and the playlist itself occupying the space left. The thing I liked best about Exaile is the ability to open multiple playlists in the same time in different tabs (see screenshot below) and even song information will be displayed in a new tab instead of a new window secondary window. You can populate playlists directly by dragging and dropping files from the file browser or search for music using the common syntax.

Exaile opens several playlists and song information in separate tabs

Features
I'll start with a minus here, not necessary related to the features, but usability. The big problem with Exaile is that it becomes extremely slow, unresponsive and practically unusable when used with large collections. For example, searching for a file in my over 3000 tracks collections makes Exaile unresponsive for several seconds, and that's with 1 GB DDRAM2 and Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz. For this, I can't recommend Exaile to audiophiles who listen to a large quantity of music very often, since it just won't keep up, the speed being very low.

Last.fm song submission

That being said, Exaile has its strong points too. It's true, there is nothing unseen before, but it supports plugins, Last.fm song submission, it can sort the playlist by any information available (like bitrate, location, play count, year and so on), it fetches covers from Amazon (but doesn't offer close results when the exact album was not found). And the beautiful thing is that not only it looks for covers in the song's directory, but you can also specify the names for which to look (default ones are cover.jpg, folder.jpg, .folder.jpg, album.jpg, art.jpg) so I only had to add my cover.png format to the list and voila! It works very well, and you can also use wildcards (tested for * only), so if you put *.png it will fetch any PNG image that it finds first.

File browser - you can drag and drop files to playlist

Scanning 1500 Ogg Vorbis files took around 35 seconds on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, which is not bad at all. There are players who just hang in there forever even if you feed them with less than 1000 audio files, so Exaile performs OK at this chapter.

Preferences - you can add custom names for local covers

You can burn tracks to audio CDs with the possibility to choose which application to use, edit audio tags, set ratings. Exaile also includes visualizations and equalizer, with pre-defined sets.

About

Conclusion
Overall, Exaile is a very good alternative to the more popular Banshee or Rhythmbox players. Except for the search slowness, this player is full-featured, includes enough configuration options, has Last.fm song submission, equalizer, multiple playlists available in different tabs. Really nice and useful features which make Exaile definitely a good audio player, at least for the GTK fans.

Official website
Download
Forum

Short guide for installing on Debian Lenny