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Okay, so I decided to stop using my crappy headphones at work (where I
listen to them just about all day) and get a decent pair of 'phones and
an external amp. Well, headroom.com has this great external amp
available that's USB, which is great because I get to use their great
DAC instead of whoever the hell's crappy DAC comes in my PC.
I got the box last night, tried it out on my Mac, and everything worked
fine. It didn't "just work", in that I had to muck with my audio
settings, but it did work pretty easily, and even though I'd get annoyed
at doing that very often, it was acceptable.
Well, then comes the morning and I try it with my linux box, for which I
bought the thing (my linux box has an especially bad sound card at the
moment -- what do you want? it's built into a dual opteron box; not
exactly optimized for consumer audio). Unfortunately, I'm running
Gentoo, which means that everything has to be not just configured
correctly, but compiled correctly, and I've already had my tribulations
with that fact. Even worse, I'm using XMMS, the only mp3 player I've
consistently gotten to work on linux.
I probably shouldn't blame Gentoo, but it _is_ very annoying to install
a complete system and not have everything "just work". Hell, even my
debian box at home does that. I had to set all of my USE flags a couple
different ways and then recompile a significant portion of everything
to get to the point where I could both play music and get audio
notifications from Gaim. The default was to only receive the
notifications between songs on XMMS, which was really retarded. I
partially blame XMMS for that.
So, I got esound working, and after changing the settings in XMMS, Gaim,
Esound, and Gnome itself, (in addition, of course, to whatever
system-wide mixer settings were necessary in the first place), I finally
got music in XMMS and could receive Gaim notifications while the music
was playing. Of course, if the music were paused, they would queue up
and I'd get them all the next time I hit play. It must be noted that
I'm using one of the latest 2.6 kernels (2.6.9-r6), and ALSA, which if
you've forgotten stands for 'Advanced Linux Sound Architecture'. That's
right folks, it used to be worse than this. But I digress.
I came here to talk about what a piece of crap XMMS is. To start with,
one must despise the interface. I really don't care how good of an
interface designer you think you are, the fact is that I have an
interface, it already has windows, and your windows don't freaking match
them at all. Yes, XMMS is skinnable, but there's no way I can just make
it look like it actually belongs on my computer, which is retarded.
And in addition to the interface being totally unique (and that's
_always_ bad in an interface), it also basically sucks. It's got the
gimp-style right-click to get a menu crap, except the clicking has to
happen in certain places in the window. It's got its own weird snap to
edge behaviour that's not configurable as part of the general interface.
It's got a stinkload of preferences available in a menu, and then
another list in a Preferences pane. Why? No idea.
And then you get to using it. Well, you might, assuming everything is
set up correctly. Mine is currently dying whenever I hit 'Play',
because I mucked with my settings to get my amp working. Oh, they're
all back to the way they were, but XMMS still dies. Why? Well, see,
that's why I'm writing this email: I've no idea.
It worked for a while, after I got it to the point where it and Gaim
could mostly work together. Crap.
Yeah, I've tried other mp3 players. Someone on IRC even told me to
write my own when I bitched about XMMS. They all crash even more than
XMMS does, and usually the interface is even worse. Yay.
It's sad when Linux and its apps can't even get something as simple as
audio right. I mean, this shit has been done for a decade. Really.
--
Really? He might do it just for fun. I know I would. If I were God,
I'd get together with all my other God friends and have a big party.
We'd all get drunk and create unliftable rocks, then try to lift them.
It would be loads of fun! Then I'd probably just destroy the rocks
with a lightning bolt. Then I'd probably pass out. :^)
-- toMM, in rec.puzzles
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Luke Kanies | http://abstractive.org | http://www.bladelogic.com
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