Tag: Amarok

New

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New AmarokHoly mama!

The new amaroK is coming out and the new stable of Wesnoth is out already.

Specifically, the new amaroK looks amazingly sweet. If anyone thought that it was not a killer app. before, they certainly cannot keep this belief anymore, and since it should be able to run under windows as well, this will probably blow all the competition out of the water.

I still cannot believe how cool the GUI has become 😮

Wesnoth 1.4 also brings a host of updates to the table. Although anyone who’s played the development tree (1.3) has seen them already, they are still a huge improvement over the last stable (1.2.8). If you tried out Wesnoth only about a year ago (or only with the stable) I strongly suggest you take a second look now 😉

Last.fm Beta

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Το last.fm μπήκε σε beta φάση για το καινούργιο layout και οι subscribers είναι προσκαλεσμένοι να παίξουν μαζί του. Πρέπει να πω οτι h καινούργια έκδοση είναι εντυπωσιακή.

Μερικά απο τα καινούργια πράγματα είναι ένα Recommendations Ράδιο το οποίο φέρνει νέα ακούσματα αυτόματα ανάλογα με το τι προτιμάς να ακούς, Rolling Top Artist/Album Charts για 3, 6 ή 12 μήνες, βολικότερο layout για να βλέπεις με μια ματιά τι κάνουν οι φίλοι και γείτονες σου, ρόλους για τα γκρουπ που ανήκεις (Μουσικό ή Αναγνωστικό ωστε να μην σου στέλνει μουσικές προτάσεις απο ένα φιλοσοφικό group) και άλλα πολλά.

Μέχρι τώρα ότι έχω δει μ’αρεσει, ακόμα και ο μικρός διακόπτης φωτός στο επάνω μέρος που ουσιαστικά “κλείνει τα φώτα”, κάνοντας το Theme μάυρο (Black Metal & Goth fans rejoice).

Όλα αυτά, σε συνδυασμό με την ανάπτυξη που γίνεται στο [tag]Amarok[/tag] για την καλύτερη υποστήριξη του [tag]Last.fm[/tag], με κάνει πολύ χαρούμενο.

Ορίστε και μερικά Screenshots απο την νέα έκδοση.

DashboardLast Fm user Screen

Ubuntu

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I’ve finaly brought Ubuntu where I want it. I now have [tag]amaroK[/tag]-svn, Firefox 1.5 and nothing has crashed for a few days. I seem to be on stable footing finally.

For the last few days I’ve been tweaking the Smart DJ in order to make it work as I want it to. I’ve converted all my .mp3 collection to .ogg, I’ve vorbisgained everything and had the script analyze everything.
I got it working after a few tries but it still brings some pretty stupid matches now and then. Until I know how its tempo/style slider works I don’t think I’ll be able to use it to its full potential.

However I have written a small guide for Ubuntu here that I hope may help someone.

Updates? What updates?

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In case anyone reads this blog and may be wondering why I haven’t been updating the past few days (yeah right) the reason is that after the new Last.fm site came live, I have been busy making journals over there. They are mostly of a musical nature and I have even started my own small review chapter named R@W (Reviews at Work).

I do have some thing to write here about my recent vacations at Crabholes but I’m waiting to get my hands on the pictures in order to post things right, so hold on to yer drawers.
In the meantime, go and check amaroK! The new 1.3 version is out and it kicks some serious arse.

Of Lyrics and Kiwis.

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I am sick and tired of Lyrc, which is the default lyrics database for amaroK. It has a crappy layout and search capabilities, the lyrics are many times missing, duplicated or badly submitted and the user has no power other than submitting new ones, which as a feature is badly designed as well. I want to contribute but ignoring the fact it is very tiresome to do so, their forum is in spanish or something as well which means it is very hard to communicate with someone in charge.

Disgusted I started looking for an alternative, even prepared to go as far as to found my own wiki lyrics site if I didn’t find one. Luckily I did and it exceeded my expectations. Its name is Kiwilyrics which is a smart play on the word wiki.

— Interjection —
In case you aren’t very active on the WWW (although I can’t see how you’ve got here otherwise), a [tag]wiki[/tag] is a web page who’s content is submitted and edited by its user base. The most famous example of a wiki is of course Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Here’s what it has to say about Wikis. You can find my profile there as well under Db0.
—

Back to the subject at hand then. I got so worked up with Kiwilyrics that I even created a Firefox search engine which you can find here. My goal is to make [tag]amaroK[/tag] use kiwilyrics as a lyrics database since I know they will implement wikipedia (and thus the wiki engine) in some way at version 2. Hell, I may even become a developer just to code such a feature in myself.

So to all who might be reading this, get active. Go to Kiwilyrics and submit the albums you can’t find or fix obvious errors.

Finding the Doorman

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The past tree days at work I’ve been vehemently reading this blog. It’s written by a part-time bouncer with very good writing skills and a healthy dose of humor and sarcasm. It describes the events that occur on the job as well as commenting on various parts of night life. From this blog I’ve managed to completely despise the “Guido’s” as he calls them. Apparently they are similar to our own Greek “Trendy Boys” or as I like to call the Κάγγουρες; you know the look: Jelled spiky short hair, fit stretching t-shirts, shiny necklaces but fortunately not waxed eyebrows (at least not from what I’ve seen). They have also made me completely despise the word “Yo” as Guido’s they seem to say it all the time in a strange imitation of Black lingo. It just ends up sounding stupid.
I’ve seen our kind of Guido march around Ladadika like so many peacocks while I was going from one Metal club to another. They always seem so…poseur-ish to me that I never fail to laugh at them. Truly, I now cannot bring myself to enter the places of Guido gathering only to watch chicks shake their asses and not have one in 10 chance of meeting someone I can have a nice night out with.
In any case that blog is a great reading, I just couldn’t stop and he’s written quite a lot as well. I only wish I had his gift for written speech and I had some kind of experience to write about as well.

Which reminds me; 7 fucking euros for a drink at a small Rock Bar! Who the fuck do they think we are? I was expecting a max of five and I ended up wasting more than I would for drinking 2 beers. FFS!
This was the cost for going out yesterday night with a friend of mine and, just for the hell of it, ordering a B52. And to think that she was asking to go for a beer as well…

Monday I finally had my left ear cleaned from all that…stuff that had gathered inside. The experience was almost painful but luckily not. However I didn find out that I didn’t have to wait one fucking week to clean it out. It was just that the original doctor was old school and din’t know the modern procedures. Now that sucked! I had to go a week half-deaf because the friggin’ doctor couldn’t keep up with the times!

In [tag]Linux[/tag] news: At least I managed to find the cause for the back-right speaker not working. It seems that for some reason the alsa-mixer surround was not full up on the right (how that happened, I do not know) and by simply turning it up, all was back to normal. Gkrellm2 has also stopped segfaulting when I disabled the two plugins I use (which I didn’t use anyway) and [tag]amarok[/tag] does not segfault as long as I use the xine engine…dunno why.
Problem is that my /usr mount is running out of space (only 150MB left at this time) so I don’t know how many more progs can fit/update. I have no idea how I managed to fill up 4GB of space with programs…what the hell is in there?

Feeling good

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Ever had one of those days where everything looks great? Well it’s such a day for me. I had a pretty nice night out yesterday, I’ve got a pretty nice day ahead of me, I feel like the king of the world! I am also without sleep and run on caffeine 🙂
So I’m at work, solving TNS listener problems, giving my debriefing, setting up Gentoo (which is currently stuck at emerge) and surfind the web. Nothing special.

I just found out that Anorimoi have a new web page. There are one of the greatest and funniest greek metal parody bands around. Manowar should phear these guys, what with albums like Farting the world 🙂
They are pretty decent music-wise as well so any metalheads should definitely check them out (and try to find a translation as well).

I still can’t make Gentoo at home to behave. amaroK keeps crashing for no obvious reason, when I use Alsa as well as OSS. Gkrellm also segfaulted constantly but it stopped doing it now, I think it may have been a specific plugin but I haven’t really changed anything. STFW didn’t help much 🙁

On the music note, it seems Audioscrobbler has stopped receiving submissions for some reason. It seems their server problems are harder than they make it seem but their front page wants to imply that there isn’t much to worry about. If anyone cared to check their status however it would seem that they don’t accept any submissions at all. Not much of a problem for me other than a bit annoying.

So, yeah I’m energetic!