Audacious Media Player Waste of Time

With XMMS going by the wayside as in no more development I decided to see what was available as a replacement in my Gutsy system.
A quick Google search presents me with a media player going by the name Audacious. That name couldn't be a better fit. And I need to point out that you should not confuse this program with Audacity which is a very good audio editor in it's own right.

I open up the Synaptic Package Manager and do a search for Audacious. Mark the main package and try to mark the plug-ins but it's not going to happen. When I marked the main package for installation it popped up an error that said it can't be installed because the plug-ins aren't going to be installed. HUH!!!

I'm trying to mark the plug-ins but the main package error prevents me from adding them on.
So I try marking the plug-ins first. Same problem. I get an error message that the main program isn't going to be installed so the plug-ins can't be installed.
This is NUTS!!!

Alright then. I'll go to their website and see what's going on. I click on the link for their site from a Google search and am presented with a page that says "It Works!"
That's nice. Maybe that page works but the software package sure doesn't. I'm getting this bad feeling. Packages are messed up and the website is down.

Okay! I'll go and grab the .deb packages. Download them and when I try to install them I get the same errors as I did in Synaptic.
GRR....!!!!!!

Okay! Sigh! I'll grab the source code and compile it from there. So I grab the base and plug-in source code and get to work.
Dependency errors! Drat! Or should I say error because it said I was missing one file.
Go and grab the source for that file, compile and install it.
Back to the main package. Another dependency error. After about 5 of these I finally get the main package installed.

Next I install the 3 plug-in packages and thankfully they go much easier.
Now I open up Audacious and it looks suspiciously similar to XMMS even though the developers have said in many articles that they are trying to design a media player that is not a continuation of XMMS and will stand on it's own merit.

I open the file browser and tell Audacious to open an Mp3 file.
ERROR! Either the file permissions are not set properly or you don't have the proper codec installed.
I check to see what plug-ins I have installed. There is a whole list of them but no where do I see one for playing Mp3's. I check on a few forums and apparently that plug-in should be either in the base or dev plug-in package.

So I reinstall the plug-in packages. Still no luck. I go online to see if I can find any other info. Plenty of people posting about problems opening Mp3 files but no real solutions other then to make sure the plug-in packages were installed.

That's when I made my decision. Sudo apt-get remove audacious and all the plug-ins.
I knew this package was a bad omen when I had problems installing through Synaptic and found a dead website.

I'll stick with VLC. It has some quirks but the additional features like audio ripping and video conversion more then make up for those few minor annoyances.
And I have to really wonder what direction Audacious will really take.
Broken .deb packages and websites that are down do not paint a rosey picture for it's future.
I know it left a very bad taste in my mouth and it will take the Audacious developers a lot of work and plenty of add on features for me to even take a look at it again.

In retrospect I did get a good refresher course on compiling and installing from a source package and I honed my skills on finding missing dependency packages.
But the time wasted on a software product of shoddy construction was time I could have used on better things.

TaZMAn

Shoutcast Bug In Streamtuner

So last week I fired up Streamtuner. It's been awhile since I have used it to listen to online music now that I have been using Songbird, so I was a bit upset when I couldn't get any listings for the Shoutcast feed.
At first I thought there was a glitch with their server but after a few days of checking it, I found it was still not working.
So I went digging.

Turns out that Shoutcast changed their website. The old Streamtuner plug-in doesn't work with the new design. What needed to be done was to fire up a hex editor and update the plug-in. But not an update that would use their new site feed. Nope! That would require a full rewrite of the plug-in code.

What I did was to find the Shoutcast address in the plug-in and change it to the new address that points to the old site that Shoutcast is maintaining.

Here's what you need to do in order to fix the Shoutcast plug-in.
Fire up your favorite hex editor and use it to open up the shoutcast.so plug-in found in usr/lib/streamtuner/plugins.
Now search for the two instances of www.shoutcast.com and replace them with 205.188.234.120 making sure you keep the spacing sane.
Now save it back into your folder.
Open up Streamtuner and go to the Shoutcast tab. You should now see your listings. If your don't just click on the Reload button.

For those of you who are saying that you don't know how to use a hex editor, no worries.
Here is a link to the patched shoutcast plug-in.
Download Plugin

Copy the plug-in, go to usr/lib/streamtuner/plugins folder. Open it as Root. Delete the existing shoutcast.so file and paste this patched file in to the folder.
Now open up Streamtuner, go to the Shoutcast tab and your listings should show up.

This is only a quick fix as it doesn't allow Streamtuner to access the new Shoutcast site and categories. Streamtuner itself needs to be fixed. I believe the original designer quit the project several years ago as there haven't been any updated versions. But I do believe there are some people maintaining it and hopefully they will release a newer 'fixed' version.

Update!!!

Thanks to Ernie for this easy fix that offers more functionality.

An alternative solution can be to edit your hosts file (/etc/hosts) and add the following line:
205.188.234.120 www.shoutcast.com
That overrides the shoutcast.com ip address provided by the DNS. It fixes the issue and you can access the webpage from the browser too.

Thanks again Ernie!


Enjoy!

TaZMAn

Install Additional Compiz Plugins In Gutsy And Newer Versions

This post is only for Gutsy users. If you have Hardy and have the up to date Compiz installed you should already have these plugins.

Do you want all those cool plugins like you see in those youtube videos?
Stuff like 3D Windows, Atlantis, Snow Globe, Photo Wheel, Wallpaper and several others?

It's real easy. If your using Gutsy, get on over to this Compiz-Fusion page
http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=5303

For newer Linux releases you can view the list of all available plugins from this page;
All Plugins
http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/

To download and install them (You will need Git) follow the directions found here;
Downloads
http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Install/PluginsFromGit


Enjoy your new plugins!

Here is a screen grab of my cube.































And here's a video I found at youtube for your entertainment.







Enjoy!

TaZMAn