The player

I’ve got this little device recently to replace my 256mb MP3 player. I was pleased that I got it pretty cheap during Black Friday from NewEgg Canada. NewEgg “leaked” their Black Friday rebates to Canada and reduced the price of that player to 85 CAN$ which is pretty cheap for a 8gb model.

At first, I must admit I was a bit sad with bugs and some missing features of the player. It is obviously an entry-level player. I’ve managed to find a satisfying way to work around all the bugs and uploaded 8gb of music to it and I’m happy since. I did not realize 8gb was that much content.

This post is a concentrate of the bugs I’ve found on the player and how I work around them. If you have better solutions, please comment on this post.

The bugs

MTP support

This is not really a bug, since this device works in UMS/MSC mode. Since I like to explore the capacities of my devices, I’ve nonetheless tried to get it to work.

For most Linux users, this player won’t work in MTP mode. I’ve only managed to make it work on very recent snapshots of libmtp. I got it to upload, but not to delete. I have not investigated that. Don’t count on MTP to work well until the next major Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope. If MTP support was good, the most important bug on this player would be alleviated, but as it is not the case, please read on.

Bad sorting

The first and by far most annoying bug I’ve found is that the player doesn’t sort the ID3 tags on the player. The music files are displayed in the order they are uploaded on the player. If the player worked well with MTP, this wouldn’t be a problem because the media player will upload the files to the player in the correct order. File manager such as Konqueror don’t do that as it’s possibly slower to get the files from the disk in any kind of order. They are also multithreaded so that multiple files are copied at the same time. So if you upload on the player using Konqueror, the order will be screwed up. With file managers, the only options would be to copy files one by one by hand. This is obviously not a scalable process.

I’m satisfied to use rsync to copy files from my MP3 directory to my player. rsync copy and write the file in order.

rsync --verbose \
        --recursive \
        --times \
        --whole-file \
        --delay-updates \
        --modify-window=1 \
        --delete-before ~/Media/mp3/* .

I’m not exactly sure how this work and I now that my music is on the player, I don’t care enough to investigate it. Of course, I this probably is not perfect. I think that if I make changes inside an album, then rsync will just sync the changed file and thus the order inside the album will be screwed up. This could be automated but order will never be quite right. The only solution is correct sorting on the firmware, but, until that is fixed by iRiver, I’ll be happy to just reformatted the player and redo the copy overnight with rsync when I want to change the content of the player.

ID3v2.3 vs ID3v2.4

Most of my MP3 were correctly tagged using ID3v2 tags, but I initially did not know there were several incompatible versions of ID3v2. Amarok, as most MP3 players, read any ID3v2 versions, but writes only ID3v2.4 tags. The device simply cannot read those tags and will put files tagged in such way in the “Unknown Artist/Unknown Album” bunch, which is a PITA.

The first solution I’ve found was to use Kid3. It has a function to convert tags back and from ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. Kid3 is a fine program despite some UI shortcomings, but it doesn’t scale to gigabytes of files.

The next best thing was to use the EyeD3 library. EyeD3 is a simple Python program and library to manage ID3 tags. It includes features to convert between ID3v2 versions. I’ve lost the small script I’ve done to mass convert my MP3 files to ID3v2.3, but it looked a bit like that (untested) snippet.

tag.link("/some/file.mp3", eyeD3.ID3_V2)
tag.update(eyeD3.ID3_V2_3)

If I ever rewrite the script, I’ll post it here.

.ogg and Vorbis tags

The device doesn’t read Vorbis tags. For some people, this would be a total let-down. Not for me. I re-encoded I had as OGG to MP3. I have not investigated this further.

Playlists

The device uses .PLA playlists. The format of .PLA playlists is detailed here. I have not yet found the time look at this as playlists are not a killer feature for me.

LPlayer for the rest of us

I don’t consider I’ve discovered anything. All that informations I list here was scattered around the net. If you want more informations, please do Google and you will eventually find some.

The most important page I’ve found for LPlayer owner is LPlayer for the rest of us, which is a blog post similar to mine. I’ve tested all the information he has posted there and managed tp update my firmware, and encode a video to play on the player. Kudos to Tim De Pauw.

I’ve recently gave a try to Awesome 3 RC5. Again, like in my last attempt, I was forced to bail out.

I decided to try it at work because it is the place where I need the less applications. I mostly use a few terminal with Emacs to edit and Opera to browse. I also still use VMware, and yes, the problem I described last time is still present. I already admitted it was just an annoyance so this time I decided this would not stop me from at least trying to use Awesome productively.

I lasted roughly 2 days and a half before I was forced to admit defeat and move back to OpenBox. I don’t believe there are any formal studies done on that, but I feel getting used to a software graphic interface needs at least two step:

1. First is getting used to the controls, and being able to find its way into the interface. This might be short or not depending on the complexity of the said interface.
2. The second step is becoming productive in the same interface.

The steps can probably overlap, ie, you can probably become productive with an interface without knowing the full feature set of the interface, but you need a basic understading of the features before
becoming productive.

I can say that after 1 day, I was well in my way into step 2 of my learning. What really helped is that Awesome defaults are well choosen and easy to learn. In fact, I quickly felt the need to rebind some controls, which is something you can’t really before thinking you might be more productive if you move some bindings around on the keyboard.

I had already done that after a day or two. In fact, I actually rebound the Caps Lock key to be my modifier key for the WM. That was pretty cool actually.

Everything went fine until I started to know the key good enough to stop thinking that I was using a WM. At this moment, I found myself continually typing in the wrong window. My brain could not at any moment, know which window had the focus. Everything I switched
window, or moved window around, I had to stop, for perhaps 1/10 of a second, and check which window was highlighted.

Before surrendering to the familiar OpenBox, I asked people of the #awesome IRC channel for their opinion on my problem. The simplest trick I’ve seen was to edit the theme so that the focused window
border was of a bright color. I did set the border to be thick and red, but to no avail. Other suggestions were either not applicable to all windows, or would have required compizmgr, something with which I have no competence.

The problem is certainly not specific to Awesome. Any tiling window manager will probably lead to me typing in the wrong windows all the time.

I’m a little annoyed by this problem. With WM dealing with overlapped window, it’s obvious that that the top-most window is the window that has the focus. My working style with WM is usually to have a few (2
or 3) windows opened inside a single virtual desktop. I toggle between them using Alt+Tab. Windows are really side-by-side each other will overlap 95% of the time. I have not stopped to see how I
work the remaining 5% of the time. Do I type in the wrong window? I honnestly can’t say yes or know. When you work day to day, very quickly, with windowing environment, its the kind of thing you may not realize happens when it doesn’t really slow you down.

I’m off Awesome for a while now. I’m not ready to make it replace my working environment any time soon. Still, Awesome is really awesome. I recommend to everyone that is curious about tiling window managers to try it before any other. It’s just a personnal problem that I find myself incapable of using it.

New year

Happy year 2008. I would like to say that blogging more often is not one of my formal resolve for the year.

I will be happy if I consider I’m still blogging by the end of the year. All my other attemps at blogging regularly have failed.

KDE 4.0 has been released

Everyone following tech blog know that KDE 4.0 has been released this friday. I’m quite happy about that since I’ve been a KDE user since I’m full time on Linux. What has changed over the years is that I’m not longer a strong KDE advocate. I will always prefer KDE over GNOME, but I can’t say I would argue strongly for KDE against GNOME. Both a 2 very complete and excellent desktop environment.

The following is my opinion on KDE 4.0. I have tested the Ubuntu Gutsy remastered LiveCD for KDE 4.0. I’ll admint it’s probably not a complete experience of KDE 4.0, but what I’ve seen is enough for me to say that I will not use KDE 4.0 until a while.

I don’t understand people saying they don’t like KDE because it looks too much like Windows. I don’t really care about how my system look if there is a good operating system under the hood.

The look of the environment for me is not a good reason to dislike a desktop environment, be it GNOME or KDE. I’ve got good reasons to dislike GNOME, and most people probably have good reasons to dislike KDE.

Both environment can be themed to change several aspects of their graphical appearance. Also, you can change components of the system until you find the look that suits you. Once that is done, you are left with what really matters in the environment: the quality of the software suite. That is, I believe, the only worthy point of comparison.

The subject has already beaten to death so I’ll keep the following short. This is not an exhaustive list of my opinions about KDE.

The good: it’s KDE 4.0

KDE 4.0 is the next step for the KDE environment. It will get all the development and all the cool apps. If I stick to KDE in general, I will eventually use KDE 4.x, but maybe not KDE 4.0.

The bad

Unstability

I expected nothing else of KDE 4.0. It’s a dot-zero release and thus as many shortcomings and bugs.

When I tried the SuSE LiveCD for KDE 4.0, I badly wrecked my system to the point I had to shutdown my virtual machine. Don’t ask me what happened, I don’t remember. It was with an older version anyway.

With the Ubuntu LiveCD, Gwenview crashed twice, one time right at the moment it was starting.

This is not unexpected. I’m used to living on the edge with very recent software so I am familiar with applications crashing. Sometimes I will even fire-up the debugger and try to fix the problem.

Lack of KMail

I’m a KMail user. I know I could use KDE 3.5 KMail in KDE 4.0 yes, but I can also run KMail in KDE 3.5.8 too if there is not more reasons to switch to KDE 4.0.

The ugly

There is one thing that keeps me from using KDE 4.0 right now. If someone instructs me how to fix that, I’m a taker.

The huge taskbar

It’s huge. Like, 5 times the size I would want it to be. To maximize screen real estate, I have configured my KDE 3 kicker to be minuscule. It’s current 630 pixel wide, and just 30 pixel high, on a 1600×1200 19 inch screen. There is no taskbar, just the system tray, a small set of shortcuts icons, the clock and the desktop switcher. I’ve become used to switching between tasks using Ctrl+Tab and other shortcuts.

I’m not gonna install KDE 4.0 packages and run a KDE 4.0 session on my system until this taskbar can be shrinked to the size I want.

I have posted a Debian bug about the problem I have had with VMWare and the Awesome window-manager.

Turns out that the shortcuts only works when the mouse is not over the VMWare virtual screen. That means it is less annoying than I first expect, but still annoying nonetheless.

JD was nice in installing VMWare to diagnose the problem. I know some developer who would not have bothered to install such a big piece of proprietary software to debug a problem which probably annoys just one person, me, in the whole world.

VMWare is a critically important tool for us at work. I’m not gonna get into details of why and how we use it. It will be better left as the subject of another post. I don’t feel I need to justify the bug I posted, but it is very important for me that I’m able to use this tool efficiently in my development environment.

awesomeness in a package

I had a overly involved articles to write about an idea for a project I have. Unfortunately, I have had no time to sit and write about it.

Instead I decided I would try Julien Danjou’s Awesome Window Manager.

First I must say that I felt weird installing awesome through apt-get (apt-get install awesome). One would expect that awesomeness would have been harder to install. It also feel strange to write about. Then I realized you could also install happy in Debian. There is no funny or sad yet though.

I have something for the potential effiency of tiling window manager. I somehow feel that if I can get used to one of them, I’ll be terribly efficient around my desktop. Whenever I try one of them, I usually come back to my sense. Getting used to that whole new key map usually take more patience than I have.

Objectively, awesome is a nice window manager. It’s sober and fast. It took a short while for me to be able to know enough keys to find my way around it.

Mod4

awesome uses the ‘Mod4′ modifier by default. Once I got awesome started, it struck me that I did not know what “Mod4″ was. Turns out that on my setup, ‘Mod4′ is bound to the Windows key. It is a nice thought from the other to get that key to some use.

Zsh job control

Zsh, my current shell, does not do job control the same way I remembered Bash did. If you fire a shell in X, start a graphical app, then logout from the shell, Zsh will tell all the application to shut themselves down. I tried Bash, and apparently it does not do that, or it is being smarter with it.

Floating windows

I knew it because I once used Ion, but I would like to point out that Awesome, just like Ion, can also deal with floating window just fine. Awesome is also pretty smart about small pop up window, and displays them as floating window instead of tiling them just like applications window. I vaguely remember not seeing that with other window manager although I could be wrong.

Thunderbird/IceDove

This ** program doesn’t like being tiled. It seems I have to run it in a full screen window.

System tray

Being a minimalist wm, Awesome doesn’t have anything that can hold system tray applications. This doesn’t mean much too me at work, but it’s a big drawback for my computer at home, on which I run several applications that feel at ease in a system tray. Pidgin is probably the best example of such application.

I know there are probably some ways to hack around it, just like there are some alternatives to Pidgin, but that means using up more of the little patience I have.

VMWare

Really annoying bug. VMware console shortcut keys don’t work when VMWare is run with Awesome. It certainly deserves a bug report as it is the reason I can’t be using Awesome. I see tiling wms as a way to free myself from the mouse by using mostly the keyboard. VMWare being one of my main work tools, I cannot afford to switch to a wm that would keep me from using it in a efficient way, even if the wm is generally efficient for everything else.

After I write this, I will logout from Awesome back in my KDE setup where VMWare shortcut keys work.