Moving to Rhythmbox

Been pretty busy lately and without any real desire to dig out what the hell its going on with Thor, and since I used use that box for iTunes listening, been listening to my music collection with Lucid Lynx's default player, Rhythmbox for the last week or so.

Basically I'm listening to all my music files practically from scratch, re-tagging, sorting out, there are a lot of files that either I or iTunes had left aside, and that I'm actually listening for the first time.
Compared to iTunes, Rhythmbox seems less polished, but nothing to write home about it, everything you need, or at least, I need, its there and it works.

Play Count (35)

Its been a while... But I'm just about to finish my little stupid project...

Transfer iTunes data from newer to older version

(Or Apple's obsession to never allow a rollback...)
I have two Apple boxes, a MBP Intel (running Snow Leopard and its ugly GUI), and an old & trusty PPC Quicksilver, running Tiger, that I love, I'm a fucking freak when it comes to iTunes Play Counts, so I was looking a way to keep the info synced between boxes.

I've done something similar in the past, and it is almost the same, but simpler.

Every copy operation has to be done with the iTunes (on both boxes) closed.
The path to all the iTunes info on both boxes has to be equal (username, paths, etc, etc)
First off, the most important thing is to make backups.
After that, the next most important thing is trasnfering the music files from the box with the newer iTunes to the other box, the best way of doing this is via Rsync.

After you done that, you are done with the iTunes on the newer box.

Now, if you try to open the old iTunes with the newer iTunes Library transfered you'll get a warning message: "iTunes Library cannot be read because it was created with a newer version on iTunes".

No problem there.

Close iTunes on the old box, and blank the file 'iTunes Library':

cat /dev/null > 'iTunes Library'

Then, open iTunes once agian, you'll see a pretty nice Aqua Progress Bar, on my Quicksilver (with a 10 MB "iTunes Music Library.xml" file) the process took about 10 minutes. When it finishes, it issues a warning, but I haven't found any problem so far.

You're not through yet, there are two more steps, that iTunes does automagically, the generation of album covers; and then the gapless playback.



On my Quicksilver (DP 800 MHz with 1.5 GB RAM) the whole thing took about 25 minutes to do everything.

Su Mystery Theater (22)

Installed these two today, things seem to be pretty much ok.
The new releases of iTunes looks like they have fixed the sluggishness of prior version 9, at least on my Quicksilver.

iPod erotser

The day was coming, no doubt about that... The little iPod started to belch and cough while playing some songs... Sometimes for minutes... So, in the end, I had to put it to sleep and restart it from scratch...

It was sad, it worked flawlessly since February 2006, but the day was coming.
By far the worst part of Restoring had been to pass all the music, 20 GB, to the newly restored and shiny iPod, all thru the palsy USB 1 of my Quicksilver beauty... 8 hours of grueling Progress Bar nightmare...

Let's see if the whole Restore Thing helps the little iPod a bit... Hopefully it will, because for what I've seen, a regular iPod around here costs 570 U$S for fuck's sake.

SU Mystery Theater (19)

Turned on Thor today, and installed updates... So far, so good.
The huge monitor is a blessing, but the thing is slooooooow, even compared with the Thinkpad T43, which it is not a speed demon herself...

Crud removal machine

There is one thing I love more than upgrading (when everything goes smooth, of course) and that is deleting crud after the install.