Notices

Hello.

I'm starting a new thread. I'd suggest we keep this separate from talk on download and install problems.

This week, I removed xmms and tried canola, ukmp, and kagu. None of these offered the features I'm looking for, so I'm back with xmms. The Canola developers were insulted by my questions and tone of voice, and I don't want to do same here. I LOVE the old school look of xmms, it plays well for me. There is potential to revise ld3 tags (see below) and especially that it allows me to delete files. I can get rid of songs I don't want to carry around anymore. I love that it only uses a small amount of screen. And it looks great. The points I make here reflect only my own experience and I don't pretend to speak for anybody else.

I quit with xmms and tried the others for 3 reasons.

1. When minimized, xmms was lost forever.

I've learned there is a fix. Install the xmmsctrl program. Then a command from command line or from osso-cpu-statusbar can restore it.

xmmsctrl launch main 0 equalizer 0 play_list 0 main 1 equalizer 1 play_list 1

2. Weak playlist support. This was partly my misunderstanding. There are 2 ways too select files. One is the obvious ugly file chooser that you see if you hit the triangle icon in the button bar. That' a big ugly white thing that does not have same look & feel. However, there is a very handy thing by letters PL.. That stands door playlist. Hit the button by PL and a nicer chooser appeasrs. Under the first small button, a slider appears where directories can be added.

I've not solved everything.

For me, there is one big problem left. On N800, how to make keyboard pop up? Spaces appear for typing, but the virtual keyboard won't appear. I cannot name and save playlists. I'm guessing an N810 with slideout helps there?

I was also concerned that there is no support to play songs by genre or artist. This appears to be inherent in the concept of winamp from the old days.

3. id3 tags are not found. When I tried Canola2, my tags showed up mangled. Some songs had old style tags, some had version 2. It appeared Canola was strangling on old taga. So I used tagtool on the workstation to erase the tags and put in new version 2 tags. The builtin media player and all off thee others on n800 read the tags, but xmms does not see them at all. xmms only finds type 1 id3 tags?

I have not much in the visualization things for xmms. They absorb lots of cpu, make songs skip. But I don't care mmuch and did not try hard to fix it. I like xmms's small size and don't want a show.

Paul Johnson
Professor, Politcal Science
University of Kansas

Two options here: there's a program (on my tablet) called powertool. I believe it came in package powerlaunch, but am not at all sure, so you may have trouble installing it
Anyhow, you can run to launch the stylus keyboard forcibly. Put that on osso-statusbar-cpu.

Also, you can run xkbd, a separate on-screen keyboard, which I have running habitually. It behaves like a conventional keyboard, with Ctrl, Alt, etc., so you can also use it for accessing keyboard shortcuts.

An N810, or a BT keyboard, reduces the need of course, but these 2 software solutions should work.