Due to a combination of a hard drive failure, the volume control breaking on my usb mp3 player, and the purchase of a powerbook, I find myself ripping my CD collection once more.
So far, I’m up to 447 songs, 1.2 days, 1.70GB … that’s one of the things about iTunes: it’s not afraid to give you pointless stats that are nevertheless amusing. There’s a long way to go, as I’ve only ripped about 20 CDs of a possible 150 or so. Before the hard drive failure I had approaching 30gb of music, though much of that was borrowed from other people’s collections…
Other things I like about iTunes: it just gets on and rips when you put a CD in. Integration with CDDB for retrieving track information is sweet (but a mixed blessing – I’d rather use the more ethical freedb). The playlists are cool, the ability to rate music even cooler, and the smart playlists are fantastic. Play all the songs you played last week? All the least frequently played songs? Everything by artist, year, genre? Nice!
When I was pulling out another stack of CDs from the cupboard to rip,
it did amuse me to find a copy of a Leonard Cohen album amongst the more mainstream music. I’m not sure what possessed me to buy it, but now I know why one of the tunes in The Secretary sounded familiar when Nic and I saw it. That prompted me to go check out the film’s web site – if you haven’t seen it, you may find it a little “unusual”! Incidentally, the female lead is the sister of the guy who played Donnie Darko, another weird but good film.
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to settle in to the Apple environment for actually getting some work done. The biggest problem is a total lack of decent editor. JEdit is ok, but has quirks on OS X and is poorly integrated into the Apple GUI. Eclipse is big and clunky, and wastes too much screen real estate on big fonts that I can’t change. BBEdit is interesting, but at over £100 it is a costly proposition to deploy on all machines. SubEthaEdit is fantastic, mindblowing, cool, amazing and so on. We got to try it out for the first time this afternoon when David (who’s maybe back in blogland) and I did some hacking on a future journal article. I’m not sure I’d want to use SubEthaEdit all the time though.
Related posts:
Maybe vim? (No I’m not joking!)
It’s damn fast, has syntax highlighting for nearly everything and some great features if you get past the vi keyboard modes. What I particularly like is writing quick macros.
I use Idea for most of my work but when I need certain things it doesn’t do well I use vim.
Thanks for the suggestion, but I’m a vimophobe, and not a big fan of console-based editors in general. I prefer a richer interface if possible, which is why I stuck with jedit for so long under linux.
I did try Idea for a while and found it tolerable … I think I’ll give it another go today and see how I get on.
I use gVim (Vim under X11) and SubEthaEdit for all my programming. When I need a Python debugger, I use WingIDE.
There are Carbon versions of both Vim and Emacs but neither is very well behaved yet.