I did an upgrade to the latest gtkpod via an apt pinning to the testing release (0.99.2) and had a play around. I still don’t get to see my OTG (On The Go) playlists, but I’m not too bothered about that. I asked it to create a playlist of most listened to music. Of course, much of this is inaccurate as the iPod doesn’t bother to sync these stats to disk often enough that if I run out of juice (which I often do these days) it’ll preserve what I’ve had on. It also doesn’t sync with xmms (yet) and none of this is tied into audioscrobbler either – so there’s room for error. Here’s a list of tracks and artists though:
- Madonna – The Power Of Good-Bye
- Runrig – Rocket To The Moon
- Jefferson Starship – We Built This City
- The Corrs – Give It All Up
- Runrig – (Stepping Down The) Glory Road
- Captain Tractor – Pitcairn Island
- The Cranberries – Dreams
- Runrig – Protect And Survive
- Runrig – Running To The Light
- Runrig – Canada
- Runrig – The Greatest Flame
- Runrig – Amazing Things
- Runrig – Siol Ghoraidh
- Electric Light Orchestra – Calling America
- Runrig – Alba
- Runrig – Ravenscraig
- Pet Shop Boys – In The Night
All of these are fantastic artists I listen to all of the time, except for two. Firstly, Madonna has been quite variable over the years – I’m not such a bigtime fan of the material girl any more (but heck, she’s been in the game for so long that that in itself is pretty cool). Secondly, I don’t know Jefferson Starship well enough to say whether I enjoy their whole catalog in general. I have most music ever released by Runrig and Captain Tractor though (much of that is on CD, the rest tends to come from iTunes or similar). In fact, Runrig had better release some more albums soon because in the last year I’ve gone from never having listened to them to pretty much owning their entire 30 year back catalog and a lot of live recordings besides. Hurry up with that.
What’s the Runrig and Captain Tractor connection? They’re both Canadian on some level. Runrig have a Canadian singer these days (Bruce Guthro), who replaced Donnie Munro. Captain Tractor are a Canadian band anyway. I also have a Great Big Sea fascination (thanks Andrew, Telsa and Alan) and they’re Canadian too. Then there’s the Arrogant Worms, who aren’t in this list but I listen to quite often too. So there’s a big Canadian influence in my musical taste these days. Mostly because it’s all damned good. Did I mention that I like Canadian music? I actually also like a growing amount of US music too. The 10,000 Maniacs are on my playlists right now. As are a few others – recommendations for little known US artists are welcome.
Incidentally, the iPod is shittily designed in playlist management terms anyway – clearly I want to be able to edit more than one persistent playlist when on the go and actually delete tracks from that too. But meh. Apple didn’t seem to care enough about that or about the whole let’s use FAT32/HFS+ so we can have things corrupt when the attached laptop runs out of juice. And many other wibbles I could add about technical mistakes made in the iPod design. Who am I kidding? I love these things as much as the rest of you and Joe’s shiney new black photo/video one has made me think mine will be two whole years old this summer…
Jon.
Edit: For the pedants out there I added a reference to HFS. It doesn’t matter whether Apple use FAT32, HFS, or my_super_dooper_filesystem on the iPod. If the host PC/laptop can trash it when it runs out of juice and the iPod is incapable of doing something about it, then that’s just dumb. At least have it able to rescan its own disk for music if needed. One of the two times I lost all of my music (music still on disk but Apple’s nasty database was damaged) I was running iTunes on OSX plugged into an iPod running the Apple firmware (see, no Linux involved in any of that) when the laptop ran low on battery and went to sleep, taking the mounted filesystem with it. Just before a long haul flight. Thanks. Now I just use gtkpod and keep a backup of my music database from time to time. I don’t trust Apple iTunes or OSX with my laptop/music any more. Use Linux, it’s the only enlightened choice.