iTunes conversion problem

[Wiggles]

Hey again,

I think this belongs in this section.

I'm moving over from windows, and trying to dump iTunes. I'm sick of being locked down. I even paid the extra to get drm removed, but it doesn't remove drm from all files. There excuse being that not all record labels allow it, which seems like BS because you can get the mp3 from amazon. So unless there is something else you recommend I'll probably be using amazon to purchase music from now on.

Anyway, my problem is I converted my iTunes to 256kbps mp3's, which seemed to keep all the tags, but on my droid the album art comes up as scrambled images.

So I tried using Banshee and Amarok. Banshee seemed to grab the art better than Amarok, but didn't embed it, is there a way to do this?

Amarok was so buggy, I'm surprised it was even released. I even downloaded the new patch and still had issues. In one instance it had even cleared out my tags. Thankfully a restart fixed this problem. Phew

After playing around with all this, when I turned on the computer this morning I was greeted with some error about my plasma workspace, and a blank desktop. I was still able to use the run command to start things though.

I miss iTunes, it just worked. It was easy to get music, easy to just drag over, and somehow retained album art on the droid. Main problem being I couldn't play all my music .

Running on 3 hours of sleep, so if this post doesn't make sense, I'll fix it after I've had a nap

[The Liquidator]

Re: iTunes conversion problem

Hi and welcome

Are there 2 questions here?

iTunes - it's fair to say that I know just about enough about Apple and iTunes to have made my mind up that I would never be in the market for an ipod. 3rd party replacements for iTunes can be tricky as the open source community are consistently playing catch-up. As a result compatibility with ipods can simply be dependent on how old it is - I assume your "droid" is an ipod?

There is a project called songbird. However, since partnering recently with Phillips they have announced they are formally dropping Linux support. However it is open source and has been forked and looks like it will be independently developed as "Nightingale". Meanwhile there are ubuntu specific packages for songbird in a ppa (personal package archive). That might give you what you want. The beauty with linux is there are options.

https://launchpad.net/~songbird-daily/+archive/ppa

This needs adding to your package manager. Come back if you need help with this.

Banshee will be considered by many here to be a bad choice, as it is dependent on Mono which is an open source implementation of .net (and thus dependent in the future of Microsoft).

On the other issue, have you now got your desktop back?

Ian

[Wiggles]

Re: iTunes conversion problem

Hi and welcome

Are there 2 questions here?

iTunes - it's fair to say that I know just about enough about Apple and iTunes to have made my mind up that I would never be in the market for an ipod. 3rd party replacements for iTunes can be tricky as the open source community are consistently playing catch-up. As a result compatibility with ipods can simply be dependent on how old it is - I assume your "droid" is an ipod?

There is a project called songbird. However, since partnering recently with Phillips they have announced they are formally dropping Linux support. However it is open source and has been forked and looks like it will be independently developed as "Nightingale". Meanwhile there are ubuntu specific packages for songbird in a ppa (personal package archive). That might give you what you want. The beauty with linux is there are options.

https://launchpad.net/~songbird-daily/+archive/ppa

This needs adding to your package manager. Come back if you need help with this.

Banshee will be considered by many here to be a bad choice, as it is dependent on Mono which is an open source implementation of .net (and thus dependent in the future of Microsoft).

On the other issue, have you now got your desktop back?

Ian

Hehe, sorry. Wasn't very clear. Took a nap at work, all better now haha

Droid is an iPhone competitor that runs the Android OS which I think is Linux based, I may be wrong though.

Wanting to know the best option for finding and embedding album art in the meta tags. I have album tag, but amarok was only able to find maybe 20%, unless I missed something.

I played with songbird a bit. I downloaded it manually though and ran the shell script to run it, would liked to have it install though. Maybe I need to play with it some more, but I couldn't get it to download album art.

I realize I don't know much about linux, but wouldn't using unsupported packages be a security risk?
Thats the main reason I switched from Windows.


I have not got my desktop working. I tried this
http://linux.radioactiveliberty.com/...sma-workspace/

and then tried removing everything in that .kde folder, still no go.

It crashes on login, only displays a black screen, but I can still use alt-f2 to run things.

[The Liquidator]

Re: iTunes conversion problem

Right... I think that since the launch of version 2, Amarok has not been that great at getting cover art. Have you explored using tools/cover manager within Amarok?

On the question of software, if you download from websites like in windows, yes there is a risk. Installing via the package manager from repositories hosted by ubuntu - virtually none as they have been vetted by ubuntu.

From a ppa - whilst the packages as such are not officially vetted/supported by ubuntu, you have to remember that all the source code is freely available and if anyone posted anything dodgy onto a ppa, everyone would very quickly know. In many cases you will find that most ppas are the developers own repositories of the latest packages for which earlier versions are already held by ubuntu. However, if in doubt, leave alone!

Now to try and fix your desktop

In a terminal (alt+F2 then run konsole) try the following:

sudo apt-get update
hit return and then type your password and then hit return again.
This will update your package database.
Then
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Hit return
You will then be offered the opportunity to get updates. If you've not done this before, expect a lot!
Then
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
Return
Hopefully you will get a message that it's already there, if not it will install it for you.
When finished close the terminal and reboot.

Any joy?

[Wiggles]

Re: iTunes conversion problem

that didn't work

I even logged in as a different user, and it didn't work

Edit: I installed the Ubuntu desktop over top of Kubuntu, and it works. The problem must be with KDE.

Do I need to reinstall Kubuntu?

Edit_02: I went ahead and reinstalled kubuntu over itself. This did give me back my desktop. I do wonder now though if running the repair from grub would have done the trick.

[The Liquidator]

Re: iTunes conversion problem

It might have done so, however what you were describing appeared to be desktop i.e Plasma, rather than kde specific. In that case the 1st port of call would generally be to reinstall the kubuntu desktop, and if that doesn't work one then generally has to look at plasma itself.

I'm on KDE 4.4 myself, and I strongly recommend you upgrade to that as it's much better than its predecessors. See here about how to do it

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-sc-4.4.2

If you do this, you might just find you get a similar issue. If you do the fix is

sudo apt-get install plasma - desktop

HTH

Ian