Funk Babblings

I spent most of the first half of this week upgrading my desktop computers at home and work from a two-year-old Debian installation to a seven-month-old Kubuntu installation.

When this goes well, it's really cool because it just requires one reboot, at the end. (It's also cool because the home machine started as a 2003 Libranet installation, so it's now run three different distributions without a reinstall. All hail apt-get dist-upgrade.) Unfortunately the home machine had some quirks that I had to work through before it would boot up properly, but that's done now, and I spent all day yesterday upgrading the work machine.

One of the big reasons for this upgrade was to get a more recent version of the KDE desktop environment, complete with lots of software, such as the Konqueror web browser, which has had many many improvements in the past two years.

But I'm discovering that the best part of this upgrade is a working (non-crashing) Amarok music player. It gives me a unified interface to play my MP3s, CDs, Internet radio streams, Last.fm streams, and almost anything else. It gives quick access to artist information, cover art, lyrics, links to related artists, and includes a rating capability (actually two, one manual and one automatic/guessing).

Unfortunately it doesn't integrate with Pandora, but its Last.fm integration beats anything I've used before. Oh, and if I had an iPod it would work with that. (I'll have to try my non-iPod portable MP3 player, but it should work as well.)

Yeah, you Windows and Mac people are probably thinking that you have all this (or similar) with iTunes or Windows Media Player, but there's one thing I know those don't have -- Amarok is extensible with user-written or downloaded scripts. So, for example, with one script I'll be able to play and control the SlimServer at home (which will, with some firewall fiddling, let me pipe my entire home music collection to work). Another one automatically pauses the music when I lock my screen (useful at work, probably not so much at home).

It's a strange feeling for my music player to make me feel like exploring all its obscure capabilities.