Many of you know I teach English and American folk dance. This has
given rise to an interesting software problem.
I have been using a laptop and a set of inexpensive and portable,
but quite powerful speakers ($30 from Trailing Edge) to provide
the dance music from MP3s I've made of relevant tape, LP and CD
tracks. I've also got the dance summaries in the same directory.
This makes for a nice system. All files and named for the dance,
so it is easy for someone to find.
I need to be able to display text files and to play the mp3s and
to sometimes slow down or speed up the tunes, preferably not
changing pitch.
For the moment, I'm biting my tongue and using 2xExplorer to navigate
the directory -- F4 opens a file in a text editor. Double clicking
an mp3 opens Win Media Player which has speed controls for MP3s.
I'd like to use Linux and have things come up into the player system
with appropriate controls already opened.
Good: I know enough about Linux and Perl to be able to get things
started OK and to display files. May even be able to learn enough
about GTK to make it pretty, but that is down the road. For the moment
the Ubuntu/Gnome file browser would be fine.
Bad: The media players have a lot of unfortunate features:
XMMS, beep-media-player, VLC, alsaplayer all have REALLY small GUI
presentations. Most of the folk likely to use the system don't want a
postage stamp but something nearly full screen.
Amarok, RhythmBox are ok in size
MP3Blaster is text mode, which would likely be adjustable, but not as
attractive.
Speed control:
alsaplayer does slow down, but the sensitivity of the control is
REALLY touchy. Tiny movement of slider gives +/- 40% on
speed, where I need 5-10%
VLC slowdown fails in regular GUI.
amarok -- complex, could not see speed. Amarok Wiki suggests
that the developers don't think this is "interesting"
beep-media-player -- could not see speed (see below)
mp3blaster -- text mode, could not see speed
xmms - could not see speed (see below)
I tried to compile the Scizzor plug in for xmms and beep, but though
this seemed to succeed, no joy when I tried to use it, and
the plugin did not appear in the directory where I think it is supposed
to be. Note that I needed to install xmms...-dev to get xmms-config and
needed to change the Makefile and install.pl so
beep-config --> pkg-config bmp
I haven't tried SndStretch plugin.
So far I've not been able to change key bindings successfully in any player.
Any ideas? I think alsaplayer is closest if I can change the size of
the GUI display and adjust the sensitivity.
FYI: I'm running Ubuntu Dapper and Ubuntu Edgy on my machines.
J Nash