On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 10:40:49AM +1100, Jason White wrote:
Is there a music-organizing tool available for Linux that can properly take account of the structure of a musical work? According to a reliable source who has investigated the issue, most such tools only store metadata at the individual track/file level. Thus, for example, you can't select an entire symphony without selecting each of the movements individually, or specify that you want, say, the second movement, or choose a specific act/scene in an opera.
i've ripped large (300+MB) flac files that contain an entire album with pointers/indexes to particular tracks within the album. when you load them into a player[1] it shows up as multiple titles in your collection, not just one. the advantage over ripping to one track/file is that it doesn't introduce pauses between tracks....you can play the whole file just like a CD. presumably, it's possible to create flac files with arbitrary index points if the individual movements of your CD don't correspond to tracks but i've never bothered finding out how to rip to a flac file manually. [1] i use exaile and clementine - i prefer exaile because it's gtk, but the qt-based clementine has better features, it's a clone of the old amarok 1.x. it wouldn't take much for exaile to match clementine's features (all it really needs is better playlist management, and a "stop after this track" button). They're both pretty light-weight, start up very quickly, and have sane collection management and browsing (i've tried banshee and rhythmbox and find their collection management to be seriously brain-damaged - maybe it's something i'm missing but i find them to be clumsy to the point of unusable). I used to like amarok until the 2.x release which (IMO) buggered up a nearly perfect user-interface and made it unusable...both exaile and clementine are quite similar to the old amarok 1.x UI. Just to check it out again, i started Amarok 2.5 almost 20 mins ago and it's STILL displaying the amarok splash screen (which must be flagged always-on-top because it's obscuring the windows i want to use)....i have no idea what it's doing, but the disks are thrashing away. i think i'll have to just kill it.
2. Download music legally within Linux
You'll need to obtain the music from a site that doesn't employ DRM ("Digital Restrictions Management", as the FSF rightly call it). There are sites that sell DRM-free music files (for example, in MP3 format) with proper copyright licencing. Amazon.com is the largest, but as far as I know, their music collection isn't offered in Australia yet.
several of the linux music players have built-in support for some alternative music stores like magnatune (none of which have the range of itunes). personally, i'd rather download them separately from a web browser and then move/copy them into my player's collection directories. IMO, purchasing should be completely separate from collection management and playing. more importantly, there should only ever be a limited number of programs which ever have access to my credit card / paypal / banking details. e.g. i only ever use one browser (galeon - old, minimalist, no plugins and hasn't really been maintained/updated for years) on a separate login account (with gdm configured to start up two login screens on two VTs so i can login to the other account without having to logout from my main account) for my internet banking, and that's ALL i ever use it for so there's no chance of some javascript malware stealing information from my browser. I do credit-card online purchases with iceape (aka seamonkey) on this account, which only gets used for that. generic browsing i do with chromium and iceweasel (firefox). i'll do small paypal transactions with these sometimes - my paypal account does *NOT* have access to my bank account, it only has access to a debit card with a few hundred dollars in it at most. i transfer money into it when i need to buy something.
3. Load my music player from within the music program
I think that's a standard feature these days.
4. Convert the music from iTunes/Apple format and have it available to the Linux music program.
Apple's DRM might prevent you from doing so. That's one reason why I don't have Apple media hardware - it's too restrictive.
it might be possible to install rockbox on Kathy's ipod shuffle. http://www.rockbox.org/ "Rockbox is a free replacement firmware for digital music players. It runs on a wide range of players: Stable ports Rockbox runs well on these players, has a complete manual and is supported by the installer: Apple: iPod 1g through 5.5g, iPod Mini, iPod Nano 1g and iPod Nano 2g Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio Cowon: iAudio X5, X5V, X5L, M5, M5L, M3 and M3L iriver: iHP100 series, H100 series, H300 series and H10 series Olympus: M:Robe 100 Packard Bell: Vibe 500 SanDisk: Sansa c200 (not v2), e200 and e200R series, Fuze, Clip and Clip+ Toshiba: Gigabeat X and F series ...." Otherwise, there are numerous mp3 players that support non-DRM files and a wider range of codes (like ogg and flac), and let you just copy files to/from them as a USB storage device. As do generic Android devices. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>