A mind of their own!

Okay, I am convinced that music players have a mind of their own. Isn't it freaky when a music player can read your mind, perceive your mood and responds with an appropriate song? Well strangely enough, this happens way too often with me. So, I have this habit of en queuing all my songs and listening to them randomly. This gives the music player a bit of freedom to play the song of it's choice. The other day, for the first time in about a year's time or so, I touched triple digit speeds on my bike, and I was reminded of how painful the wind was at a 100 km/hr, with clothes flapping around. Also, I was reminded of my last major accident, n it was at that moment did I realized that the song playing in my earplugs was one called Crash into me, by Dave Matthews Band, and down came the speed :) Another incident, this one's happened to me twice, I am riding down the road, not too fast, but not too slow either. All of a sudden something comes in the middle of the road out of no where, n decides that it'd be cool to take their time in doing whatever they were doing. So all you can do is brake real hard. I swear to God that it has happened at least twice to me, I fishtail all over the road, n when I finally come to a stop, I realize the song which has been playing is Alive by Pearl Jam. I am telling you it is really freaky to listen to this song, after a near miss. I even considered removing this song from my play-list, but I am an Eddie Vedder fan and decided against doing so. So now whenever this song plays when I am riding, I simply slow down and stay behind the slowest guy on the street. Oh and it's not just while riding do I experience such behaviour from my players. It is a universal thing with music players around me. Like just the other day I couldn't get this piece of code to run, because it was infested with bugs. So any way, when I finally got it to run, I was really happy, n then James Brown took over my speakers n started singing I got you AKA I feel good :D There are a dozen other such incidents that give me the feeling that my player is messing around with me. On my PC, there is a one in a twenty five thousand chance of listening to a particular song at a particular moment. Also, another trend that I have noticed is that when you have a large enough play-list, the genre of the song playing, rarely changes. I mean how can a player keep finding songs one after song from the same genre. And once again, I am not talking of one particular player. It happens on all players with me. Was it specific to just one player, I would have understood. Speaking of players, my favourite player on my PC is Winamp, which BTW is a really resource intensive player, once you en queue all your songs into it. I don't mind a player eating up RAM as long as it provides me decent features, but Winamp, it eats up an average of about 22-23% of my CPU cycles when it has to face my entire play-list. A couple of hundred songs and it requires less 0.5% of the CPU cycles. I wonder if Winamp keeps calculating which should be the appropriate song to play next. (5 minutes later...) Well I just observed the player's disk I/O, and it most certainly isn't analysing any audio file. In fact it doesn't access any file till the very last second. Then it accesses the File Table, and then the directories, followed by the file to be played next. Hmmm, now I really wonder what Winamp is doing with it's resources. And coming back to the original question, do media players have a mind of their own? Have others experienced anything similar? Or am I just paranoid?

Book v/s movie

Every time a movie based on a book is released, I go in for the book first followed by movie, unless of course it has a fantasy story. Then in that case, the order is reversed. However, today I have a little fray going on in my head because of the movie Slumdog Millionaire based on the book Q & A by Arun Swarup. Slumdog Millionaire has made it to the headlines of today's newspaper, by getting 10 nominations at the Oscars, which supports the review I'd gotten from my friends. The thing which goes against the book is that it's by an Indian author, and frankly speaking, I have neither read not heard of an exceptional book written by an Indian author. I wonder what I should do first, read the book, or watch the movie. Speaking of movies based on books, the other day I watched this movie called Into the wild (I know, it's an old movie but I just watched it... big deal!), which was a strange movie. Strange I say, cause it wasn't that I liked the movie, but I didn't dislike it either, still if asked, I'd say it is a must-see kind of a movie. Though I wish I'd know the movie was based on a book, which was in fact inspired by a true story, then I'd have read the book first. I guess this true story bit was the one that makes it a must-watch. It's also got an awesome soundtrack (which I'm listening to right now) which is the debut solo album of Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam guy. Speaking of music, Mettalica's Death Magnetic is driving me crazy. I can neither get the songs out of my head, nor stop listening to them. I inevitably end up purging my playlist of all other songs. Woooha... I'm getting late... Gotta go.

It really whips the Llama's A$$

As I have already mentioned before, I have now abandoned my windows (XP as well as Vista) installations, and have taken a liking towards Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon distribution) The one and probably the only problem I have faced with Ubuntu so far is choosing the right music player. After over a month of using, Ubuntu, I was satisfied with the default media player I had been using, Rhythmbox. It was then I realized how used to winamp I had actually become. Although I usually enqueue all my music in my playlist I do sometimes like to make my own playlist too sometimes, a big hassle with Rhythmbox. In the past month I did try to look for an alternative for Rhythmbox, but none were of my liking. So yesterday morning, I started a hunt for the best media player for Ubuntu for AMD64, I specified AMD64 because finding stuff for this version is tougher than it is for the Generic 32bit (i386) one. The first place that I went to look for a player was the add or remove application utility, for obvious reasons, ease of installation n guaranteed compatibility. But lo and behold, the player which apparently looked and worked like winamp, called XMMS player had problems showing text on the buttons. Uninstall time. Next up came Amarok which was pretty much like Rhythmbox. I am not saying that any of these players are bad, just that I was more used to Winamp. So anyway I decided I needed winamp, or nothing else would suffice. Google, Google, n there it was (tears of joy in my eyes) WINAMP FOR LINUX, but wait a minute, what is that, Winamp 3 alpha for linux, last updated 6 years 6 months ago. Damn it! I'll try it out anyway, winamp 3 wasn't that bad, so what if it's an alpha version. Click, download, ok, Woohhaaa!!! WTH? Its a what? A .RPM file. Now what? Google, Google, use alien to convert to a debian package. Oh i know what that is, that is one package you can double-click to install... Sigh of relief. Terminal, sudo blah blah blah, ERROR ERROR... Now what did I do wrong? An hour later it finally struck me. Oh Crap! 6 years 6 months ago there probably wasn't any AMD64, (Checked it out on Wikipedia and I was right. The first AMD64-based processor, the Opteron, was released in April 2003.) that means that this version was meant to be run with the AMD64 version, would have i been better off had I installed the generic i386 version? Naah, 3yrs after I buy a 64bit PC I am using a 64bit OS with it, I shouldn't be having second thoughts about it. But I think I read somewhere there are support libraries you could install to get the generic versions of the softwares to run. Argh! that's why I didn't switch to linux earlier. All about coming out of your comfort zone. Now what? Lets try out wine. Wine is this really cool application that builds this layer which provides support for software meant for windows. Behold, apparently you aren't safe from dll hell even while using Linux. There are a couple of other such softwares I had heard of too, but since Google makes use of wine in it's Picasa for linux, I figured it would be good enough. Went to wine's official site and discovered that a newer version of the package was available there, than that was there in the repository. Installed wine, followed by winamp. Started winamp, and it works, but wait, where have all the title-bars (the bars with the close minimize and maximize options) disappeared? There aren't any borders for the windows either, to distinguish between two windows. CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE (restarts X) Uninstall. Next came winamp lite 5.53, but it had the same problems. I looked for an older version of winamp n found a 2.9 something Installed it n it worked :)the title bar look a little odd n there was a border there for the winamp window, but it was working. I wasn't satisfied. Uninstall, reinstall new version, uninstall compiz (desktop manager) and now the new version works. Now I am satisfied, enqueued all my songs, pressed J (for jump to file) n the damn thing crashed. Uninstall, Reinstall old version, enqueue songs, J... It crashed again. For the first time I was wondering why I had installed linux. Now to reinstall compiz, but it simply wouldn't reinstall. I remembered I had purged a few folders manually, why do I do such things? Google, Goolge, try this command, Sudo apt blah blah blah and it worked. Now my system is back to normal again. Now I'll stick to the repositories. It was then that I found Beep Media Player(BMP). It looked and felt a bit like winamp, even though it lacked the media list. A little research showed that it was in fact based on the XMMS player. J and the search menu popped up. Great. The features it lacked included the lack of support for WMA format. I did find loads of plugins for it, including those for playing WMA, but they are all in the .TBZ format, and using the TAR utility to extract the package gives a failure. I have kept the files aside for when i learn how to install em. Then came Beep Media Player Experimental(BMPx), a successor to BMP. It had those iTunes type looks I really hated, but the one thing it had was a really cool Internet Radio. It supported all the formats I required too. But it wasn't much of an improvement over Rhythmbox. The hunt continued and then next came Audacious, a fork of BMP. Tried it out n it is just what I wanted. J n the jump to window opened up B and the next song started playing. This is it, I have finally found the ideal player. Audacious Rocks \oo/