Half a Page of Scribbled Linux

I’ve been using gPodder to manage podcasts on my Fuze. It’s a really nice Python program (for Linux and Nokia tablets, but has run on Mac and Windows) and comes closest to doing what I want as anything I’ve tried. There were a few things that didn’t work optimally on my Fuze. The first was that the Album tag isn’t set on Podcasts. This isn’t a bug, but more of a quirk of how the Fuze organizes podcasts–maybe you could call it a bug, or maybe we should blame the podcasters for not getting their tags right. The Fuze groups podcasts by album tag, not artist or title. gPodder won’t mess with the ID tags in files by default, but there’s an option to set them. Unfortunately, this option only sets the Title and Artist tags, so the Fuze lumps all the podcasts in the “unknown” group. As any self-respecting geek would, I looked at the source and modified it to set the album tag to the title tag if the album tag is blank.  This change will be included in version 0.13.1.

Next was album art. I suppose most people don’t care if there’s a picture next to their podcast, but I like them. Album art is pretty poorly supported for non-iPods in everything I’ve used. The documentation for gPodder didn’t say anything about this, so I looked through the source and found an option for Rockbox cover art.  At the time, I didn’t know what Rockbox was, but since have learned it’s open source firmware for MP3 players.  I love the idea of being able to change the code running my Fuze, but alas, Rockbox doesn’t support it.  I digress.  The important thing is that the Rockbox option will copy the podcast album art (that gPodder already downloads) to the folder on the Fuze where it stores the podcast files.  It calls the file cover.bmp and converts it to BMP format.   The only options are to enable this and the maximum image size.  The Fuze needs a file called folder.jpg in JPEG format.  So I added some options for generic MP3 players that let you specify the file name, format and image size of cover art.   This change has been checked in to the code repository, and will probably be in version 0.14.

I’ve got Amarok transferring and transcoding music to my Sansa Fuze. However the cover art that it gets from the Internet is not transferred. I haven’t completely figured this out yet, but there are some ideas as to how to do this. This script works for my Fuze with modifications:

coversdir="/media/SANSA FUZE/MUSIC"

database=sqlite

line 80:

convert "$inputfile" -resize 176x176 "$coversdir"/"$artist"/"$album"/folder.jpg

The Zenworks management daemon chews up lots of CPU to the point of bringing my Thinkpad T60 to a grinding halt. The OpenSUSE community recommends disabling it. It seems I’m not the only one who has issues with ZMD.

I just noticed there’s a run button on the script manager in Amarok. I selected Transcogg and pressed run. It popped up a message saying it needs mp3gain. OK done. Then it wanted mpg123. This wasn’t available in the Add/Remove Software program. There was a mpg321 though. The homepage of mpg321 says it’s a free replacement for mpg123. OK, I loaded that. I stopped and reran Transcogg–no pop-ups. Upon transfer the status line at the bottom of Amarok says not playable on device. The firmware for the Fuze supporting OGG is less than a week old–maybe there’s a configuration for the Fuze that’s telling Amarok that it only plays MP3s. Something else was different this time. I plugged in the Fuze and Amarok connected automatically instead of me having to hit the Connect button. In the configuration for the device, now the transcode before transferring to device option was enabled, so I checked it. I clicked transfer and whattaya know, it worked!

I found the script manager (menu/Tools/Script Manager) and installed Transcogg, which will convert from FLAC to OGG on transfer. The media player options still won’t let me select the transcoding option (it’s greyed out), but the “transferring files to media device” section is enabled and I’ve selected OGG as the format to convert to. Still no go.

I’m still trying different applications to manage the “rip CD to FLAC, update tags, download cover art, play in Linux and transcode to OGG and synchronize to my Fuze” process.  There’s also a separate path for Podcasts, but that’s another story.

The latest victim is Amarok.  I started with my CD collection in ~/Music.  Most of it is in FLAC format in the standard ARTIST/ALBUM/SONGS directory structure.  In each album directory is Cover.jpg, which is the full size album art.  As we know from our reading, the Fuze’s screen is 220×176, so anything bigger than that is a waste of space and if it’s too big, the Fuze won’t show it at all.  So scaling the images is required.  The fuze will look for a file called folder.jpg to display, so the image file has to be renamed too.

Starting Amarok, I told it where the music was, then tried to tell it about the Fuze.  It didn’t autodetect the player, despite it being mounted to /media/SANSA FUZE.  Then I installed libmtp. That didn’t help either. So I manually added it as a generic audio player. Now synchronizing a directory of OGG files worked fine, but no cover art. Transferring a directory of FLAC files failed entirely, leaving them in the transfer queue with X icons next to them, but not telling me why they failed.

The mailto: links brought up Evolution from Firefox 3.0.2 on my new Fedora 9 installation.  I use GMail.  To change this, I found these Lifehacker instructions.  Everything was already there for GMail except for the preference.  On Linux, choose Edit/Preferences, then the Applications tab.  Scroll down to content type “mailto”.  Select “Use GMail” as the action.  You can check out the details of the actions.  In the address bar, enter about:config, then enter “mailto” in the filter.