Harsh J

Memoirs of a QWERTY Keyboard

Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Am over Amarok. Say hello to Listen.

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Listen Player is much like Rhythmbox but with more management, functionality and looks thrown in. But that doesn’t make it any complex to use at all!

Amarok’s library manager is what had me attracted to it for a full year, but it being a KDE application and Exaile being far from its best features as a GNOME replacement, made me look for other alternatives.

From Listen’s Website page:

Listen is an audio player written in Python. Thanks to it, you can easily organize your music collections.

It supports many features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory.

It provides a direct access to lyrics, last.fm and Wikipedia info.

It intuitively creates play-lists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to.

So you see, its very intelligent at what it is, and also being Python-ic, its easy to add things to it as well.

Install Listen and give it a try atleast! :D

Here’s a screen-shot from my Listen player:

To install on UbuntuClick this or run: sudo apt-get install listen

Written by Harsh

November 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 pm

Posted in Music

Random

4 comments

The reason am not posting much these days (weeks? months?) is of course, due to my being busy. I usually never am so busy to neglect my own blog but this second year is pretty hectic. Keeping pace with it hardly gives me any spare time, and thanks to my early morning bus timings, I can’t be alive online at the night much either. Anyway, I’ll try to post at least once per two days from now on.

Now on to the random part, I got a lot of new music, which are: Bjork, Beck, Depeche Mode, Chemical Brothers, The Cardigans, The Cranberries, Deftones, Groove Armada and Lenny Kravitz. Chemical Brothers and Beck are very cool stuff with their sound. I didn’t quite like Bjork, cause its electronic sound is totally weird! Lenny Kravitz and Deftones are great rock stuff and Groove Armada and Depeche Mode are normal electronic music, I didn’t find them so impressive.

In movies, I’ve seen ‘Zodiac‘ and two animated features ‘The Invincible Iron Man‘ and ‘Doctor Strange‘ in the last week. Along with that old ‘Bad Boys‘ movie (The first part) and ‘Oceans 13‘ and ‘Wild Hogs‘. I’ll blog about each of these along the week :)

Onto Academics, I always end up sleeping during my Data Structures class while the teacher takes those silly Stack, Queue and Linked List ADTs. The only part I try listening properly to is the applications of each. Seriously speaking, Data Structures is of no use to study unless you create the programs for each type of application or at least practice the basic programs. I don’t know how some people manage to pass it without knowing a damn what’s going on in it. OOP is easy but comes with a lot of cryptic definitions (Speaking in the exam’s POV)

Anyway, am now off to finish my records so I can go out later today. :(

Written by Harsh

August 19th, 2007 at 8:17 am

Posted in Movie,Music,Personal

Tagged with ,

Google Desktop Search for Linux and More about the same

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Google launched its new Desktop Search software for Linux and it looks like the widget below.

Google Desktop for Linux

It searches only a few kind of files as of now, but then, Google Desktop never was the best in searching. But it sure gives a handy application to search the web quickly.

Download as [ DEB ] or [ RPM ]

Or if you wish to add Google’s Linux Software repository to your OS, look here.

But the thing with me is, I never really needed a search in my daily OS use. Over the past five years I’ve learned how to manage your files side by side as I work. Sure it was difficult at first, but when some friend of yours dumps about 500 songs on your HDD, you realize how painful tagging is. Yeah, I tagged them all manually (Right Click – Properties, Google for info) on Windows and then after I finished the 3 day work and arranged them well, with Album Art and all, I discovered that MusicBrainz did the same. Only, automatically. Haha, I felt like deleting the entire collection after I discovered the software.

It might be that I don’t really keep a lot of files, like documents and all. And even if I do, not for a long time. The only thing I start the Search applet or software of an OS is to find a system file or something hidden deep under the User Profile folders. But otherwise, I always know where my files are and never really have hassles searching them out.

Sorting music is now much easier, thanks to both Amarok and Windows Media Player 11 coming with automatic file tagging and Album Art downloads. My music folder is arranged in the Artist – Album – Files and Art way. Like the breadcrumb view below:

Music arrangement

And though its arranged in such a way, its still obsolete cause these modern player libraries are beautifully sorted and very easy to use if your files are well tagged.

I don’t think anyone these days actually goes through the File Explorer and selects something to play. Its way easier in a library or a manager, can be sorted in a hundred different ways and all your files are accessible from your player itself, thus making playlists from them a cake.

So what am I getting at? Nothing, just saying that once tagged and categorized, your files are way easier to navigate through. But don’t categorize like /home/name/Documents/Office/June1 and /home/name/Documents/Office/June2 and so on. That’s just stupid and makes it more difficult to browse through. Instead just stop at the Office sub category and dump all files with proper descriptive names in it.

No one really listens to all this crap but if you actually keep categorizing and spending that extra few seconds in placing the saved file in the right folder with the right name, it makes retrieval way easier, and completely reduces your need on the search module of the OS which usually gives you a hard and dumb time searching. I mean, how innovative can a search get and be helpful to you when you simply don’t know what and where you seek.

And after the long off-topic blabber, I just wanna say that this GDS tool is quite heavy, just like Beagle is.

Written by Harsh

June 29th, 2007 at 12:52 pm

Linkin Park – Minutes To Midnight

10 comments

Linkin Park finally released their much much awaited and hyped album Minutes To Midnight, the single of which scorched the modern rock charts weeks ago.

Linkin Park Minutes To Midnight Final Official CD Cover Album Art 2007
This post is not about its release but about how I felt about the massive change they’ve done to their sound.

You can preview all 12 tracks at Last.fm’s Linkin Park Minutes To Midnight page.

Here’s the official track list from their site (With my views on each) :

  • 1. Wake (1:40)

An intro. Worst of all 3 Linkin Park albums. Though the instrumental is as great as always, being Linkin Park themselves at it, the vinyl scratching sound gets me, its bloody irritating. (2.5/5)

A hard track. Hard cause rest stuff is soft. This one could go a hit on music channels but it just isn’t a good deep song like old Linkin Park, its more like their unfathomably-popular One Step Closer kind of hard which makes no sense at all. A good track never the less, catchy in parts. (3/5)

The best song you’ll find on the album. This song is very very emotive and well sung by Chester, and rules the entire album. Its still different however, from all old Linkin Park stuff, cause its mostly slow and other things like that, but still, you would definitely like this one if you liked the mood of Numb, In The End, etc. (5/5) (My favorite)

A very cool song. Catchy, fast and everything nice. It will give you a feel of Hybrid Theory and Meteora in parts and the addition of chorus to the song does add a great deal of energy to it too! (4.5/5)

I had to check if I wasn’t accidentally playing “The Postal Service” for this one. The track has good music, nice emotions and I just love the way Chester manages to add so much to just the word “Sun”. Nice track to set on repeat IMO. (4/5)

You’ve heard this single before and you’ve loved it or hated it. But this is the second best track on the album and yet another favorite of mine. It didn’t top the Modern Rock Charts for no reason at all. (5/5)

There are some pretty deep and emotive verses in this one, but though its a full rap song sung by Mike most of the part, it lacks the good old Hip-Hop tune which goes well with his rap. The music’s bad, the lyrics good. (3.5/5)

You’ll definitely love the guitars in this one and the drums at the beginning. The song has a political feel to it, and its yet another song you can find yourself humming to, or screaming to in some cases. Again a nice track to keep on repeat. (4/5)

A slow, soft, poppy track that makes you sleep till the end where the loud chorus wakes you up and you go “Hey! This is nice .. but only in the end!”. This song could go good on radio and sorts but nothing that you’d like to repeatedly listen to. (3/5)

Once you hear this, you figure if Linkin Park has a new singer. No. Its Mike Shinoda rapping singing. Yeah, singing. Slowly progressing track and the music just doesn’t fit with his mostly bad singing. He sure raps a lot better than he sings. But the song has a very good lyrical depth to it. (3.5/5)

It sounded like “The Postal Service” again to me. This time I really had to wait for Chester to start his voice to confirm otherwise. But the song, though another slow style thats predominant on this album, has a good feeling to it and has a small guitar solo in near end which sounds really awesome. (4/5)

Mostly a guitar solo, this is a wonderful track except at the ending. Each part of the music will bring out a different emotion in you, which is what’s wonderful about this track. The bad part is, at the end, on headphones, Mike sings into one side of the headphone and Chester on the other. Simultaneously. Eeek, that’s a bad experience. (4/5)

Overall rating – (3.5/5)

Your rating: [ratings]

[Worth giving a try before you buy but for Linkin Park fans, it is a must isn't it?]

Written by Harsh

May 15th, 2007 at 10:14 am

Posted in Music

Tagged with , ,

Linkin Park – Minutes To Midnight – Lyrics

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Here’s the lyrics to each track in the Minutes To Midnight album by Linkin Park (Release date: May 14th 2007)

 

 

Written by Harsh

May 7th, 2007 at 5:41 pm

Posted in Music

Tagged with , ,