New Yorke not shitty, despite tempting pun

A few days ago, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood performed a song called "Arpeggi" at something called the Ether Festival. The song has a simple melody sung by Thom, and it's backed by a sequence of repeated tones played by Jonny on the ondes martenot. At the end, they're joined by an orchestra, which sounds great. There's a very ethereal feeling to the whole thing. The song is probably in the early stages of development, so it might not even end up being a song, but as an idea, it's very promising. Apparently, the band have been spending some time in the studio recently, working on some new music. I look forward to hearing more.

MP3 of Arpeggi

(By the way, I wish I could claim credit for the joke in the heading, but I actually saw it on some website back when the Hail to the Thief stuff was first being revealed. I'm not that clever.)

Homage

I saw this site today. I thought it was pretty funny. Therefore, I decided to make a post about it. Having done this, I got back to work.

Battle of the audio players, conclusion

As promised, I did a bit of research to find out what it would take to get LongPlayer to work together with amaroK. It turns out that amaroK supports a DCOP interface. DCOP is a protocol shared by KDE applications that allows you to control them via the command line. For example, you can add songs to the amaroK playlist by executing the following shell command:


dcop amarok playlist addMedia <path-to-media-file>


It's definitely possible to modify LongPlayer to use these DCOP commands to control amaroK, instead of performing the equivalent operations with XMMS. And it's probably not even difficult.

Unfortunately (or fortunately), while I was looking into this, I realized that everything I liked about amaroK were just gimmicks (e.g. lyrics lookup, album cover images). After initially being impressed with all these bells and whistles, I came to see that there's ultimately no real usefulness to any of it. On the other hand, LongPlayer really does perform a useful function, and changes the user's experience.

Therefore, I declare the LongPlayer/XMMS combination to be the winner of this little competition. Somewhat anti-climactic, but I'm glad it turned out this way... saves me the trouble of actually going through with modifying LongPlayer code.

(Aside: I think I learned a bit about myself through this little "ordeal." I may at first be impressed by superficial things, but I eventually tend to gravitate towards a more practical ideal. In general, this probably does describe my general outlook on things. So, there you go: self-discovery through software.)

God agrees with my review of The Da Vinci Code

Looks like Dan Brown, with his book The Da Vinci Code, has incurred the wrath of God. Apparently, the Vatican is very displeased with the novel, and has sent a Cardinal on a mission to urge Catholics to shun it. Choice quote from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone: "Don't buy this. Don't read this because this is rotten food... A lot of novels do good but this book is rotten food ... it does harm, not good."

Nice to know I have the Vatican on my side.

(All kidding aside though, I actually found the theories about Christ, as presented in The Da Vinci Code, pretty interesting... I just thought it was poorly written and poorly plotted.)

Battle of the audio players

I've arrived at a bit of a crossroads concerning audio player software, and which one to use. I have a moderately large collection of music on my computer, and dumping everything onto a playlist and shuffling isn't quite good enough for me.

I've narrowed it down to two candidates:

XMMS + LongPlayer

XMMS is pretty much the standard audio player on Linux (it's basically a clone of Winamp). However, its shuffle functionality (as with most audio players) is pretty rudimentary. In particular, it is susceptible to the so-called birthday paradox. I have no desire to start explaining probability theory here, but essentially, this means that it does not take long for the same song to be played twice, which quickly becomes annoying.

LongPlayer is a program that runs alongside XMMS (it also works with Winamp on Windows, and iTunes on MacOS), which basically continually populates your playlist queue with "random" songs. It is not completely random, because that would lead to the birthday paradox; instead, it tries to play the songs in such a way as to maximize the average time between playing the same song twice. Also, it supports a rating system which causes the higher-rated songs to be played more often.

The combination of XMMS and LongPlayer does a very good job of randomizing my playlist. On average, it takes about 4 weeks for a song to be played again (according to LongPlayer's statistics).

amaroK

amaroK takes a completely different approach. This is the most full-featured music player I've seen. It places a strong emphasis on organizing a collection of music, and can group your tracks based on genre, artist, year, etc. It also uses this information to make suggestions as you're playing something; for example, it gives you a list of albums by the same artist, and other artists of a similar genre.

I also like the fact that amaroK downloads album covers from Amazon.com and displays them as you're playing tracks. It even displays lyrics for the currently playing song. (How this works, I don't know--I should take a look at the source code.) Yes, I know that these are kind of frivolous features, but it gives the app a professional, polished feel.

So, here's the dilemma. I really like the full-featuredness of amaroK, but its shuffling mechanism is pretty basic. There is a rating mechanism, but it doesn't seem to obviously affect the selection of tracks. Now, amaroK is a larger project than LongPlayer, so it is likely that future updates will have an improved shuffling function. In fact, many people have requested a smarter shuffle on the amaroK forums.

The "best-of-both-worlds" solution would be if LongPlayer could interface with amaroK and feed songs into the amaroK playlist. I believe that this should be possible, because both apps are open-source. If I have time, I'll try to find out more about this... (to be continued...)

Weekend Wishes

This is one of my favourite passages from George Carlin's newest book, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?:

If someone says, "Have a nice weekend," I never say, "You too." Because I never know if, perhaps, by the time the weekend rolls around, I will have other plans for that person. Come Friday, I may wish to have then slain.

A lot of Carlin's humour has to do with language, and in particular, the stuff that people say so much that it becomes automatic and loses meaning. I know I've had the "Have a nice weekend"/"You too" exchange many times, and every time it happens, I kick myself for being so conformist. The next time someone says to me, "Have a nice weekend," I will reply, "Fuck that, I plan to wallow in misery and self-loathing all weekend." Thank you, George Carlin.

Everything minty is good, part II

So there's this new "flavour" of Tylenol called Tylenol "Cool Burst". You know what it is? It's minty Tylenol. Minty! Tylenol!!

Why is this even necessary? The ideas of pills is that you swallow them. Do they really want people to pop in a couple of Tylenols and start sucking on them like candy? "Mmm... minty... refreshing... maybe I'll have 10 more."

I'm getting pretty tired of this notion that everything has to be minty. The only things that should be minty are mouthwash, breath drops, toothpaste and other oral hygiene products. I don't want to eat it, I don't want to drink it, I don't want to wash my hair with it. Just take your mint and keep it to yourself, thank you.

(This is a sequel to another post)