Technology Tales

Trying out Songbird

2^nd March 2009

It's remarkable what can be done with a code base: the Gecko core of Firefox has been morphed into a music player called Songbird. On my Ubuntu machine, Rhythmbox has been my audio player of choice, yet the newcomer could be set to replace it. There might have been other things going on my system, but Rhythmbox playback was becoming jumpy and that allowed me a free hand to look at an alternative.

A trip to the Ubuntu repositories using Synaptic was all that was required to get Songbird installed. I suspect that I could have gone for an independent installation, but the one that was available through the official channel sufficed for me. It found every piece of music in the relevant folder, even those that it was unable to play because of iTunes DRM, and it was easy to set it such that it simply moved on when it met such a file rather than issuing a dialogue box to complain. That means that I weed out the incompatible entries in the course of time, rather than having to do it straight away. I cannot claim to be an audiophile, but the quality of the playback seems more than acceptable to me and there seem to be no jumps so long as a file hasn't been corrupted in any way. All in all, Rhythmbox could get usurped.

iPod, identified

9^th December 2007

Plug in an iPod to a PC running Ubuntu, and it will recognise what it has got. That act mounts the player as a hard drive and fires up the Rhythmbox Music Player. The usual file transfer capabilities are available, and it does something that was thwarted partially by iTunes when I last tried it: transferring files from your iPod to your PC. Only music bought from the iTunes store can be copied from the player back to the PC. Unsurprisingly, you cannot update the iPod's firmware or anything like that. To do such things, you need the iTunes player and that means having either Windows or OS X. While I do wonder if it can't be that difficult to port the OS X version to Linux since they both share UNIX roots, it's over to the Windows VM for me on this one for now.

However, while VMware on Windows will happily pick up USB devices as they are connected so long as the VM is in focus, the behaviour on Linux seems to be different. As shown above, you have to go to the VM menu and potter down the chain (Removable Devices > USB Devices) to make the device of interest accessible. Dialogue boxes asking you if you wish to disconnect the device from the host operating system will appear, and the process may be unsubtle as you progress with it. In fact, Ubuntu was delivering warning messages about how its iPod connection got lost; it would have been wise to unmount the thing in the first place. Accessing USB devices like this opens up other possibilities: using Windows for scanning and for printing digital images.

Returning to the iPod story, Windows will see it once it has been made available and iTunes can access it accordingly. Then, you are free to update the gadget's firmware or manage the music stored on it if you prefer.