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I don't know why MP3 players and audio are so hard; I really don't. Getting MP3s to work on Gentoo was hours and hours of work, and it only got worse when I wanted to use my external USB headphone amp. But I'm doing something theoretically simple here: I want to play music on my computer, in the least obtrusive and most efficient manner, I want hotkeys to control the playing, and I want simple mechanisms to manage what music I'm playing. So, I've been using XMMS for years, even though its usability is about, oh, 1992. But recently its complete uselessness when it comes to playlists became too much for me. So, I tried rhythmbox again, for about the ninth time. It only lasted about 2 weeks (it just periodically stopped playing with some kind of weird error, it has about 1/10 the prefs it needs, it does absolutely rediculous things with refresh while it's loading the MP3 library, and it finally just played static constantly), but it highlighted another annoying-ass aspect of using mp3 players: I always set up hotkeys for forward, reverse, and pause, because I do them often and I hate having to switch around finding the stupid mp3 player. Well, obviously, I have to switch the hotkeys when I switch mp3 players. So, today, I finally wrote an abstraction for the two players in question, so I can just modify the script (basically just switching default players) and the hotkeys will automatically work, because they're just pointing to my script. Yes, I could have just had the script search through the process table to see which one was running, but I didn't feel like it. This just seems bloody stupid, but I'm not sure who's to blame. Me, for demanding too much? (Nope.) The mp3 players for sucking so much? Metacity, for having such absolutely retarded mechanisms for setting hotkeys (2 years and it _still_ requires me to set the key and command separately, within GConf)? Gnome, for not having a good, integrated mp3 player, or even better, a good mechanism for integrating any mp3 player, or any app? Linux, for not having an even lower-level good mechanism for integrating mp3 players, or any other apps? All OSes, because they basically all lack this feature? I mean, come on; classes of applications (like mp3 players) are members of a class because they share similar features. In some cases those features are not exposed externally (e.g., one might not generally refer to an internal feature of both Gimp and Photoshop in the same way, although it seems like it'd be great to be able to call a filter in either one through an external interface), but in many cases each member of the class has similar features that you want to call from outside the app, say, through hotkeys. Why the hell don't OSes recognize this and make it simple to register applications as members of a class, with the same interface? Then allow the user to pick which member to use, and then send most/all actions through that interface, and the stupid interface is responsible for finding the correct command on the correct app? Why do the damn operating systems expect me to know how everything works? I want music played through my computer, and I want hotkeys that allow me to quickly pause or fast-forward, and I want some mechanism for managing my music. I frankly don't care how this is done, but I categorically don't want to spend 5 hours a month just making sure it all fucking works. Stupid computers. -- 'Fire them. Fire every single person who ever worked on [Microsoft] Word. If they're no longer in Redmond, find out where they work and make their boss fire them. TP their houses. Take away their stock options and hack into their 401(k) accounts, changing all their long-range holdings into Overseas Tech Investments.' --Wired online --------------------------------------------------------------------- Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config.sage.org
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