Enough said

I've been using Quodlibet to play my music for more than a day now. Normally I don't care much about music players, since most of the time I just click on the "Play" button and hide it. However Rhythmbox has been crashing a bit too much for me since I upgraded to the yet-to-be-released Ubuntu Dapper. Quodlibet is also gstreamer-based, and unlike rhythmbox, is written in python. It's a little tricky to install it at a place other than /, but it can be done.

Also found out about ReplayGain, which is a mechanism that Quodlibet uses to do volume normalization a la iTunes. I've been looking for a way to do that under Linux forever, without knowing that Rhythmbox supports it. A couple minutes in #quodlibet and some googling tells me that I need to use other programs, for example metaflac, to generate the ReplayGain tags that Quodlibet and Rhythmbox use to adjust the volume.

The version of Rhythmbox in Dapper also let me find out how crappy EasyTag is when dealing with UTF-8 tags, but Quodlibet can edit tags too, so EasyTag is gone from my computer.

I do lose the nice notification bubbles that Rhythmbox shows whenever a song is played, but I can live without those.

Been playing with oprofile at work lately. Not sure if it's the fault of the EMT64 intel CPU that's on my work computer or the fact that I am using a 2.6.9 kernel, neither CPU events nor callgraph work. I am not sure if I am allowed to discuss the profile results, but let's just say the result suprised me a little. Too bad sysprof requires kernel 2.6.11 or later, and too bad that Centos 4.2 is only up to 2.6.9.

Installed oprofile on my powerbook that's running linux 2.6.15, and I am still limited to using timer interrupts. In this setup oprofile doesn't complain about callgraph though, but I am not able to decipher the result that opreport -c produces. I used it to get a profile dump of gaim starting up, but the result isn't too useful, I am guessing that's because timer-based profiling doesn't really work well for short running tasks.

Next thing I am going to do is try oprofile on my home desktop, which has a AMD 32bit CPU. Will also try sysprof on my powerbook and see if that can produce anything more useful.