AMAROK Fun

Amarok's pissing at my pants. Well, it's just plain pissing me off actually. I now once again remember why I do NOT use it.

An old while ago, I needed a playback interface for a live performance; prior to install on my Laptop, I reviewed what was available on my desktop. I did the same preformance already with the laptop, but it was with UBUNTU 6.06LTS at the time: having my .ogg sounds on the desktop, it was enough to single click on them to start playback in xmms. Fun. Easy. Unbeatable.

In the meantime, I've switched all machines to Fedora7, and XMMS is getting older and older, wasn't behaving the same, and no xmms-special-shortcut-keys package was available as .rpm for Fedora (it's called xmms-itouch); OK, let's try something else.

Target is: play any song that's "at hand" in a single click, no preload, no playlist load, minimal latency between action and sound, single key play, single key stop, single key pause, and the sound has to stop naturally at it's own end, not continue playing the remaining of the folder, list, disc whatever. Well, that's just a setting where you point'n'click to get a sound played and nothing else, it's as simple as that & don't expect any software player to behave like that. Don't.

[End of the story is that I compiled itouch myself since nothing but xmms agrees just to play something without doing/taking any other action]

And what of amarok? The standard in sound processing tools for play/pause, including audacity, is SpaceBar, so I used the amarok shortcuts configurator to point it on spacebar as Play/Pause shortcut. did the job as uch but since it require extra input to stop at end of track or to add a track to a playlist, it wasn't the tool I needed. But nice anyway, with the Covers, Lyrics, Wikipedia lookup and all that.

Since then, I have to choose between listening to music or do some real work when my real work happens not to be playing some music, since every time I hit the spacebar in a text editor a sound start or stops. I've reverted, defaulted, edited the config file as root whatever a 1.000 times, the SpaceBar is now my play/pause shortcut for Amarok. The Music is with Me; for as long as I do not trow this thing out the window.