codergeek42

One of the simple reasons I love F/OSS so much is that - in general- It Just F***ing Works(tm). Today, for the first time in as long as I can remember using it, this has failed me quite miserably.

Part of my gift this year to all of my friends this year is an audio CD - a custom compilation of various holiday-themed music. One thing I'd love to be able to do is add CD-Text to the tracks, so that their players (if capable) as well as their computer - should they choose to import it so - will easily have the metadata already in-place, and the tedium of having to enter that information manually from the decoratively printed track-list is substantially eliminated.

Well, this is proving to be far more difficult than I thought it would be. Rhythmbox, my favorite music player, currently just does not support this functionality, though it is under development. I've also tried Banshee, which uses Brasero for its CD-burning functionality, and that also fails quite epically. Next up in my attempts was K3b, which correctly burned the CD, did not add the CD-Text as I wanted it to. (It would not display any metadata in Rhythmbox on my Fedora desktop, and also failed on both my stand-alone CD player and my mom's Windows XP machine with both iTunes and WMP.) Lastly, I searched on Google and found a way to do it with cdrdao, but that attempt also went quite unsatisfactorily:

Writing lead-in and gap...
ERROR: Write data failed.
ERROR: Writing failed.

Oh Great Lazyweb, is there a straightforward way to accomplish this feat? Or am I doomed to copy the songs to my dad's PC and burn them with Nero (which I really don't want to need to do...)? For the record, my burner is a Pioneer DVR-110D.

Thanks!

Well, Rhythmbox was being a total pain in the butt with Music Applet (which is how I use Rhythmbox a good 90% of the time), so until it recently started working again¹, I had no choice but to try an alternative media player.

Banshee fit the bill quite nicely...except for one minor detail: It re-organized my entire Music directory. Most of my albums are self-made compilations from various anime soundtracks and/or other foreign stuff. Banshee apparently doesn't know that I've the "Copy files to music folder" specifically adds "when importing" (emphasis mine). When I set the preference after importing my entire folder, it should not re-arrange the already-imported stuff for me. I don't care if it's more efficient and better organized and will tell me the meaning of life! It's not right.

So now instead of Music/Compilations/Album/## - Song.ogg I have a bajillion folders with just one or two files (Music/Artist/Album/##. Song.ogg) since the compilations are by nearly as many artists as there
tracks on the disc. Now, after my Linear Algebra exam on Thursday, I'm going to spend much of the weekend just rebuilding my music hierarchy to its former glory.

While I greatly appreciate the work the Banshee hackers have put into it, one thing a user application should never do is alter how external files are organized (unless explicitly instructed to do so).

Okay, bugs happen; but messing up my Music is something that irks me past any tolerance and patience.

Edit: Okay, maybe recommending against it isn't such a friendly thing; but it still seems rather odd (and surprising) behavior.

(¹) I still have no idea what this was. Don't get me wrong, I love it when bugs disappear...but only when it's because they were actually fixed and not just silently worked-around or ignored. :-/

Though I'm sure it was intended, I find it highly amusing that the Kanji used as the icon for our Koji Build System is 麹 (Romaji: "kõji"), which translates as "yeast" or "leaven." That is, the build system is like what yeast is to bread: making our packages get built nicely and properly.

A very clever pun, and a prime example of the playful hacker mindset. =)

[Having trouble seeing the Japanese characters? Please see Wikipedia's Japanese Help for proper installation/configuration instructions.]