Re: MP3 players? Linux? I'm not sure, but I know there's hate

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From: Luke Kanies
Subject: Re: MP3 players? Linux? I'm not sure, but I know there's hate
Date: 16:02 on 22 Apr 2005
On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 16:17 -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> It's because audio cards aren't just dumb buffered D/A converters, they've
> got half a dozen legacy interfaces from the old days when you had to shove
> everything in through a 16-64k window, plus MIDI players from the old days
> when PCs were singletasking and games took over the machine and the serial
> port MIDI player connection was the only thing they could depend on, plus
> thirty dozen plain and fancy incompatible equalizer interfaces, and a joystick
> port, and now half these things are implemented in the Windows driver in a
> different way for each card.

I would agree with you except that it's never really the drivers or
whatever that appears to be the problem; it's the audio stream in the
OS.  Stupid computers.

> And MP3 players are hard because the skinnable interface is more important
> than actually making it work well. XMMS used to drive me insane on a regular
> basis just for existing.

The only thing that drives me more insane than XMMS's existence is that
it's the only stable GUI mp3 player on Linux.

> > All OSes, because they basically all lack this feature?
> 
> CoreAudio seems pretty solid, but it doesn't have to deal with any of the
> Wintel legacy audio crap listed above.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> You are SO ready for a Mac.

Frankly, Apple is going in the exact opposite direction from what I want
-- they're building these functional silos, which might be available via
AppleScript or something but generally aren't actually open.

Look at iTunes -- it's walled off, and expects to be the only one ever
touching its stuff.  It's difficult to do syncs between machines, it's
difficult to generate playlists through other mechanisms, it's difficult
to switch back and forth between different mp3 players, etc.

I think OS X is a great OS, but I fucking hate how much Steve Jobs
believes in developer control.  BeOS was much more interested in user
control, which is why they did things like develop Translators for
graphical formats.

I want all of my applications to be turned inside out; rather than there
being a hard shell around all of the functionality, with some limited
exposure to that functionality from the outside, I want the whole app to
be available from the outside, including the ability to swap pieces in
and out according to whim.

I do know why this isn't possible, though:  because it gives _me_
control of the app, instead of Steve-o, which doesn't fit with his
megalomaniacal world model.  Thank God Apple is still a niche player --
if they ever got to be as big as Microsoft, I'm convinced they would be
10x worse.

-- 
We either are networking, or we areNT networking...
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://config.sage.org


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