SwitchBuntu

So I was excited to get back into Ubuntu mode last night and tried using Gimp (modified with Gimpshop to make it somewhat familiar) to create a post card for my wife’s upcoming solo art show.  Lo and behold, Gimp seems to be a rather unstable little beast.  I’m not sure if it is Gimp or the Gimpshop mods that make it bork, but I would get random crashes whenever I opened up a few large-ish files (about 5MB each…hardly anything out of the ordinary for compositing work).  So back over to Windows I run to use Photoshop.

Also, my experimentation with Rhythmbox album art embedding didn’t go too well either.  I’m back over in Windows using iTunes (of all things!) to manually copy album art from the iTunes crappish randomly named separate file debacle and pasting them in the ID3 tag using iTunes’ UI since it actually works.

Well, maybe after I get a few of these fires put out I’ll head back over to Ubuntu land for some more experimentation.  There simply has to be a better way.

So I start out the new year some what exhausted and some what refreshed. I’ve been 100% over in Vista land since I started a project to clean up my new music downloads (skreemr is your friend). Well, it took me quite some time to experiment and I found the tools for music management on Windows are plentiful in number yet lacking in completeness. I was mainly trying to make sure everything I wanted to keep from my “SIFT” folder had proper ID3 tags and embedded image art, but I gave up on the image art for now since Winamp does not embed art into files…it just plops an image into the folder which is rather lame. I tried some other tools but none of them were easy enough that I would use a whole different app for image art embedding after figuring out and getting used to the winamp UI quirks that are actually quite powerful if not terribly confusing for a noob. iTunes is the overall winner in usability, but it too does not automatically embed files with album art. You have to do some wonky cut and paste action for each one of your files…something I’m not up for.

Now that I’m back in Ubuntu-land, I’ll give Rhythmbox a shot at the prize but I’m not going to get my hopes up now that I’ve seen how abysmal things are on the Windows side. Am I doomed to a life of listening to iTunes approved music just so the metadata will be spotless and my album art will be plentiful? Perhaps, but I’m not going down without a fight.