But neither application lets you search/filter on tags.² Of course the main point of a flexible non-hierarchical non-exclusive categorisation system would seem to be … looking things up in the categories? Apparently some folk think otherwise.

Notes:

1. Amarok calls them “labels” because the word “tag” is generally used for MP3 metadata annotations, so by extension to all music metadata.
2. Afaik. I just started using Thunderbird, so I might be missing something, although a quick google suggests not. The Amarok I’m using is 2.3.0 packaged for Ubuntu Lucid, and I can imagine that a bleeding-edge version might have this added.

This, on the other hand, is.

I’ve used GNU screen for ages to keep my working environment set up the way I like it, wherever I am. I have a screen session permanently running on my office linux box, which I ssh to from wherever I happen to be.

That all changed this week, when my branch of our research institute moved to a new building. My linux box was taken offline and loaded into a truck; when it arrived at its new home, due to various cock-ups among the administration, it had no network access. (Word is they’re not going to let us ssh in anyway, sigh.)

So I’ve been playing around trying to set up my eee pc as a useful working environment. Step 1 was just copying all my configs from the desktop over to the netbook, and running everything from there instead. Imagine my surprise when some applications did not work the same way as they used to!

Specifically, screen has gained a purely awesome addition: screen-profiles provides something like the mode bar in emacs, configurable to add all sorts of goodies (battery monitor, wifi strength, lots of bits and pieces).

My other new discovery, which rather overshadows the first, is StumpWM. If screen and emacs had a baby, and brought it up to be a window manager, that would be stumpwm.

It’s a window manager written in lisp, like emacs,¹ and like emacs it’s configurable on-the-fly by lisp hacking.² Also like emacs it’s highly keyboard-driven, but more along the lines of screen: there’s a prefix key that diverts input to the stumpwm keymaps. (Actually I never realised before how similar the emacs and screen models are here; the only real difference is that screen gets away with only one keymap, hence only one prefix command. Stumpwm lets you define more if you need to, naturally.) Like screen, and unlike most window managers, you only see whatever you’re using at the moment (although you can tile windows the same way you can split emacs frames).³

I started messing around with stumpwm because the display of the eee is so tiny, and I was frustrated with the amount of space being wasted on menu bars and panels and whatever.⁴ I didn’t get very far at first, because I was trying to do everything by hand: shut down the Gnome display manager and restart X, pointing it at stumpwm. Of course all sorts of things stopped working, most importantly audio. But then I followed XSteve’s instructions for adding stumpwm as a session type under ubuntu, and magically everything worked.⁵

By “everything”, I mean everything. Audio works (I’m listening to Bettye Lavette in Amarok right now). Two-finger touch-pad scrolling works. I can split a stumpwm screen into two panes, pull firefox into one pane and emacs into the other, mouse-select text in firefox and drag and drop it into emacs. It not only works, it shows the text being dragged (otherwise I never would have tried the experiment). Global shortcut keys defined in Gnome work (so I can control the volume Amarok plays at).

I am a complete convert: stumpwm is fantastic.

I have two complaints.

The first is that I want better ways to switch windows: a list across all groups, that works like ido in emacs: filter the list of possible targets by any sort of match, rather than just prefix-matching and tab-completion.⁶

My second complaint is that both stumpwm and ido are written in (dialects of) lisp. Meaning that it’s conceivable that someone could hack bits of one into the other. Meaning that I’m awfully tempted to give it a try, instead of working on my dissertation. Shame on you, developers, for not protecting me from my instincts.

Notes:

1. Well, stumpwm is written in what emacs would call an inferior brand of lisp…
2. Yes, you can change the source code of your window manager while it’s running. And yes, once you can do this you’ll discover all sorts of reasons why you might want to.
3. And just like screen, now that screen-profiles exists, there’s a configurable mode line.
4. Emacs with no scrollbars and the font set to 8pt fits 80 characters twice, in a two-column split, which is magical for LaTeX. Viewing the pdf in Okular is less pleasant.
5. XSteve is the author of the psvn package (which adds excellent subversion support to emacs), among many other software projects. His config tips are worth checking out too.
6. Ido (‘interactively do things’) is another recent discovery; I’m completely sold on buffer-switching, and the fact that it lets me prefer .tex over .aux when opening files might be enough of a draw card to force me to get used to the way it treats backspace and tab.

The new design has three columns: on the left is your collection, on the right the playlist, and in the middle a customisable area for widgets. I hated the widget area on sight. Since I don’t really care about the details it shows, it’s a space-waster.¹ It separates the collection from the playlist, for no apparent reason. So the first thing I did was remove all the widgets and drag its borders as close together as I could (and complain mentally that I couldn’t just remove the damn thing).

Seems I missed a trick. Reading through one of those blog posts I found the phrase “When you start dragging a track from the collection or the files browser, the PopupDropper’s top item is Append To Playlist.” Can you guess?

Drag from the collection and that central space turns into a menu; you can drop the file onto an option like “Append to Playlist”, and it happens. That’s pretty cool — like someone in that thread pointed out, great party behaviour. I’d still like the option to switch off that panel completely, but maybe we’ll get that too somewhere down the track. At least I’m humbly realising that I should check out what features are in the new release, before panning it for the ones that are missing.

Notes:

1. This is partly my ideosyncratic setup: I have the screen of my desktop tipped on its edge because a 3:4 aspect ratio makes reading a4-format pdfs more comfortable. So horizontal space is at a premium for me, unlike most folk.

A few days ago I upgraded my work machine and laptop to the latest Ubuntu version. A bunch of things didn’t go so smoothly. I’m considering switching my work machine from KDE to Gnome, but the one that really makes me angry is Amarok. [Edit: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen from the Amarok team comments below, pointing out that some of the things I thought were missing are still there, just in places I wasn't looking. My bad -- 2.0.2 still isn't a dream but it's less broken than I thought. And apparently 2.1 is on the way, which is good news.]

Forget all the user interface changes. (I think some of them are dumb, but that’s something to argue about.) Forget the simple features from the previous version that aren’t there (yet?) in Amarok 2. (I don’t want the year to show in my collection listing… well, I can put up with it, since there doesn’t seem to be any way to change it.) Amarok 2 forgets everything Amarok 1 knew.

Let me repeat that. Amarok 2 forgets everything that Amarok 1 knew about your collection. It forgets which albums are supposed to be listed under “Various Artists”.² I presume it forgets all the statistics it should have built up about which tracks you listen to most often. (This isn’t a problem for me, since I don’t use the features that would depend on those statistics.)³ I suspect it forgets the covers you’ve downloaded, although that’s just a deja-vu-based suspicion –I’m pretty sure I already downloaded this cover?– rather than something I’ve checked.⁴

[Edit: Well, here's egg on my face. Yes, Amarok 2 doesn't use the 1.4 database... but there's an import function to transfer your old data to the new format/location/whatever-it-is. Under Settings->Collection, there's an "Import Collection" button which does the job. (At first this didn't work, but googling the error told me I had to install the package libqt4-sql-sqlite which fixed things.)]

If this is a bug, then I forgive everything. Bugs happen. But if this is a deliberate decision, then I’m disgusted. Strike that. Of course it isn’t a deliberate decision: nobody writing software decides “I want my users to have to tell my software again something that it already knows.” But software that doesn’t carry user data over an upgrade must be designed by someone who isn’t designing for the user. Nobody did this “deliberately”, but somebody managed to avoid noticing that it would cause problems. That’s … impressive, in the wrong way.

[Edit: well, apparently not. The only slip-up is the developers not imagining that somebody --like me-- might not realise the option exists. A first-run wizard might be handy for this, but that's a much more minor issue.]

One of the wonderful things about the-Amarok-that-is-no-more is how it handled pluggable media. I carry my music on an external usb drive. Before the upgrade, if I fired up Amarok without the drive being plugged in my library would appear just like normal, but with the files that weren’t accessible greyed-out. Plug in the drive, and like magic the grey turns to black; very elegant, I must say. And of course Amarok 2 doesn’t work that way.

Now I appreciate that setting this up is no trivial matter. I presume that KDE 4 changes all sorts of things, at fundamental levels conceivably to do with auto-detection of USB drives and scanning and so on and so forth. I understand that the Amarok that comes with KDE 4 might have to do this a little differently. What I don’t understand is how Amarok 2 can be considered an upgrade.

Consider. This putative “upgrade” disables the following functionality (that I have noticed):

• Collection responding to attachment of pluggable media without slow rescan
• User-controlled sort order for collection (artist/album, year/artist, genre/year/album, etc.)
• Various interesting ‘smart playlist’ features⁵

A user nonetheless wishing to continue will have to re-enter certain data: I think covers, certainly ‘Various Artists’ tags. The statistics from previous listening would seem to be completely lost (unless the database is intact, and someone clever can pull out the data — here’s hoping).

What kind of an ‘upgrade’ is this?

As I understand it, what to do with Amarok 2 and the Ubuntu Jaunty release must have been quite a difficult question. Jaunty had to go, and Amarok wasn’t ready… But the new Amarok has all sorts of great features that the public has to see! (The interface has some stylish new elements. I can imagine that the code making them possible is a much more significant change that how they end up looking.) But the Amarok crew made the wrong decision.

They decided to ship incomplete software, and the decision was taken so late that the transition from old to new version (database update and so on) didn’t get any attention. Wrong decision. [Edit: the transition bit isn't true. I still don't like the decision to ship 2.0.2 with Jaunty, but it's not the wreck I thought it was.]

I’ll stick to Amarok for a while. The design still rocks (despite some backsliding).⁶ And of course it’s free.⁷ But I hope the authors will get their act together reasonably soon…

Notes:

1. A couple of weeks of playing and it hit home that I would have to pay for updates… and so I went back to Linux, and got Amarok back.
2. And if you start going through your collection putting them back in, you find pretty quickly that after adding an album to ‘various artists’ the collection recalculates its display. And resets to the top. Which is a pain if you were somewhere in the B section, especially given that the collection no longer marks letters (it’s just a long list in alphabetical order).
3. And Amarok 2 doesn’t appear to have the features that would depend on those features, anyway.
4. I guess it just doesn’t look at the old database, or expects a different database format, or something. Frustrating that all those album covers are somewhere, locked in a database rather than accessible as files…
5. Here’s the only genuinely constructive suggestion in this entire post (as opposed to “the old way was better” or “whatever you just did, don’t do it”): smart playlist algorithms are the sort of thing that a community can write. With an API making the data reasonably available, and an enthusiastic community, I would expect great things here. It doesn’t need to be (indeed, it shouldn’t be) built into the app.
6. Letter indicators in the collection were a good idea. (They can be placed left of the artist name, to avoid taking up an extra line.) Why give every artist a head-shaped logo, if every artist has the same logo? I’d like to be able to close the central panel, rather than just leaving it empty and reasonably small.
7. Which makes all the complaints sound like unreasonable whinging. Of course, since I didn’t pay for Amarok, I don’t have the leverage a disappointed customer at say Starbucks would have: the makers of Amarok have no reason to have to pay attention to me. On the other hand they should, since I’m (a) exactly in their target audience (Amarok-lovers) and (b) dissatisfied. But, it’s true, you get what you pay for. All I can say is, I had expected Amarok to be better than that.