Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 4th Dec 2008 18:20 UTC
Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0. Songbird is described as a "web player"- a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer- a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.
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Member since:2005-11-10
RE[3]: never really got it
by StephenBeDoper on Thu 4th Dec 2008 22:41
in reply to "RE[2]: never really got it"
Member since:2005-07-06
My setup is in a bit of shambles at the moment, thanks to a hard drive crash last year. But I've been thinking about rebuilding it (most of the files were mirrored on other drives, thankfully) and documenting the process as a how-to guide.
The biggest limitation is that the BeOS filemanager (Tracker) has no way to natively read ID3 tags from files (as Win Explorer and, I believe, Finder do) - so separate apps need to be used to convert the tags to filesystem attributes. Though SoundPlay will do it automatically when a file is first played, and there are apps that can batch-convert the tags from multiple files.
Without going on and on, I find the biggest advantage is that it's extremely simple to customize the way files are displayed / listed. I normally use really verbose filenames (Track Num - Artist - Album - Title.mp3), but then set the filemanager to show only the track number & song title - and sort by track number. Attributes can also be set for the folders containing each individual album - so you can do stuff like sort the ablums for an individual artist by year, without having to put it in the folder name.
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 22:06 UTC
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:45 UTC
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
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Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."More News »
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Member since:
2005-07-06
I think it's largely a matter of taste / preference. FWIW, I'm in the same boat as you are - I'd much rather use small, best-of-breed applications that focus on a specific task. Most of my music is stored on a BeOS machine, using Tracker / BFS attributes for indexing/cataloguing, SoundPlay for playback, ArmyKnife for tagging, and the RipEnc script for ripping and encoding.
Although I can certainly see why someone would prefer an end-to-end solution that handles all of those tasks.