Recommendation

[Charlie Kester]

On Tue 02 Feb 2010 at 16:04:51 PST Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>On Tue, 2 Feb 2010 15:18:41 -0800, Charlie Kester <corky1951 at comcast.net> wrote:
>>On Tue 02 Feb 2010 at 14:34:42 PST Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>>> I've been trying Rhythmbox too lately.  It also recognizes IDv3 tags,
>>> has playlist support, podcast download and archive support, last.fm
>>> integration and online streaming radio support.  Some bits of the UI
>>> are, to put it mildly, "dumped down".  This is a common problem of many
>>> Gnome applications these days, it seems.  I've only used it for about a
>>> week or two now, so I can't really say if I _like_ it yet.
>>
>> I've been trying Exaile and Rhythmbox too. I think I prefer Rhythmbox,
>> because it handles my .m3u playlists in the way I like. It immediately
>> lists them in the sidebar under Playlists, and they persist there from
>> session to session.
>
>Yes, that's a really _nice_ feature of Rhythmbox :-)
>
>When I am trying to 'enter the zone' and code for 3-4 hours without jumps
>from one context to another, I often load a large m3u playlist to Rhythmbox
>and let it repeat itself forever.  Then I start writing and lose myself in
>the process of creating things instead of going back and forth between my
>terminal and the player in an effort to "keep the playlist filled with nice
>music".
>
>The context switch from the work I am going to the player is always hurtful
>for my concentration, so persistent playlists help me avoid it as much
>as possible.

OTOH, if I want continuous random playback of a playlist without the
overhead of a graphical music manager, I go with

    mpg123 -C -Z -@ playlist.m3u

in a terminal window.  To make it easier to launch this by clicking the
m3u file in a file manager like Thunar, I have a desktop settings file
for it.  ~/.local/share/applications/mpg123-random-usercreated.desktop:

	[Desktop Entry]
	Encoding=UTF-8
	Type=Application
	Terminal=true
	Name=mpg123-random
	Exec=mpg123 -C -Z -@ %F
	MimeType=audio/mpeg

Then either I associate this with the .m3u file type in the usual way,
or I leave .m3u associated with something else and use "Open with other
Application" to select mpg123-random. 

When I'm deeply immersed in my work, I don't need to see the album cover
and other info the graphical music managers show me about the currently
playing song.  mpg123 gives more than enough such info, but I almost
never look at it.  (The only reason I run it in a terminal window is to
make it easy to shutdown and to be able to skip past a song I've decided
I no longer like -- hence the use of the -C option.)