The Bottom Line
KDE users have it easy: Amarok is slick enough to crow about in a room full of iTunes or Windows Media Player users. On a Gnome desktop, however, burning and ripping with Amarok seems problematic, and then there's the issue of the app looking a little bit out of place. Of course, our friends who use iTunes or Windows Media Player 11 on a Windows XP machine have the same problem: iTunes looks like a Macintosh program, and WMP has a decidedly Vista-ish look to it.
I'll take another look at burning and ripping with Amarok soon, and I'll keep an eye on the Gnome apps. Rhythmbox is known for a relatively slow pace of development, so my hopes that it will come into its own in 2007 may be a bit premature. Banshee is farther along, but I can't get it working reliably at this point. (Anyone have any tips for me?)
Listen will kick butt someday when it can rip and burn, and when it has had a bit of an interface overhaul. And Exaile is being built true to Amarok's fine blueprints, so depending on how quickly it matures, it could find a permanent place on my desktop this year. But for the moment, I'm sticking with the suite of tools I listed at the beginning of this column. Sometimes, individual tools that meet specific needs still work best. Have you found a better solution? Speak Freely in the comments section!
Robert Altman's 2006 cinematic adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion turned me into a Garrison Keillor fan, and I decided to start listening to the venerable weekly radio broadcast.
The problem: The show airs on Saturday afternoons, when I usually have far better things to do than sit around the house listening to the radio. Fortunately, the Prairie Home Companion Web site offers an archive that delivers old broadcasts as RealAudio streams. But that's convenient only if you're connected to the Net. What about slapping this week's show onto your iPod and listening to it on the go?
American Public Media says no, it can't let you do that: "The reason we cannot offer the whole show up for podcast is that we feature many different bands and musicians on our show. As such, their intellectual property is being broadcast to the listening audiences. We would have to get each artist's permission, not only to distribute their music in this way, but they would also have to be comfortable with the fact that it could be shared easily."
American Public Media's stance doesn't make any sense, since the audio streams it provides are easy enough to capture as files. Sure, RealPlayer has no option to save a stream to a file for later playback, but as a Linux user I have other options. Which means that it really is possible for me to enjoy "Tishomingo Blues" and the News From Lake Wobegon as I cruise along in a BART train under San Francisco Bay.
In this case, MPlayer comes to my rescue. This multimedia playback engine is available under pretty much any flavor of Linux; I installed it on my Ubuntu box with a simple sudo apt-get install mplayer. To create a Prairie podcast, first I use my Web browser to navigate the archives, arriving at the page for a particular show. Next I right-click the 'Try this one' link and select Copy Link Location. Then I open a command-line terminal and enter the following magic incantation, replacing URL with the link I have copied to the clipboard, and FILENAME with a file name ending in .wav ("PHC.wav" works just fine):
mplayer -playlist URL -ao pcm:file=FILENAME -vc null -vo null
When you enter this command, you'll see a lot of strange communication between your PC and the server scroll by, and then MPlayer will start capturing the stream. (You won't hear anything.) The stream comes down in real time, of course, so it will take 2 hours to capture the 2-hour show. Once that's done, you'll have an enormous .wav file on your hands; it's a good idea to convert that file to a much smaller MP3 file before taking it on the road. To do so, first check your package manager to ensure that Lame is installed, and then use this command:
lame filename.wav filename.mp3
Matthew Newton is PC World's QA engineer and unofficial Linux guru. If you're new to Linux and are feeling a bit lost in one way or another, drop him a line and let him know what's vexing you. Or, speak Freely in the comments section below!
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