I'm still using Linux for my primary desktop for the foreseeable future and wanted to weigh in on the state of multimedia compatibility. Well, at least my own experiences. To catch up some readers, I've jailbroken my iPod Touch, it's running the 1.3 firmware, and I'm able to connect to it in Linux through SSH. Which brings me to the crux of this, a commentary on the state of multimedia apps on Linux. Frankly, they're behind Windows apps, which makes me grumpy enough to not put links in this post.

Amarok, for whatever reason, doesn't play well with my GNOME-based Linux setup. I have no idea why, but it locks right up on startup. Maybe I should try it again since the KDE libraries have been upgraded recently. This left me with gtkpod as my Linux iPod-related music manager. gtkpod wants to look at my existing file library when it starts up, when I change some information on a song, etc. It becomes a click, do something else for a few minutes, click, do something else for a few minutes routine. Not good. Synching to the iPod Touch is slow, mainly because I have most of my music library in Ogg Vorbis format that gtkpod happily converts to mp3 for me on the fly. This I like.

On the Windows side, there's iTunes, which is functional but system-intrusive, and the latest beta of MediaMonkey, which I purchased because it does what gtkpod does, doesn't intrude like iTunes, and is fairly speedy except for the ogg-to-mp3 conversions. iTunes doesn't let me put 3/4 of my library onto my iPod Touch because it doesn't want to even look at Ogg Vorbis files in its default configuration. Screw dat.

So my best iPod Touch manager is a Windows application now. 'Sokay, I'm in Windows playing games fairly often anyway. But it's irritating. The problem is Apple's dopey attempt to control the iPod's content. This is hardware that's being marketed to tech-savvy, Apple, the community will find workarounds. Open it up! I have an iRiver H340 that I can directly access like a hard drive (actually it is a hard drive) through USB. No special software's needed, I just plunk files onto the thing. If there's something new on the unit when it powers up, it updates its database and away we go. The iRiver also plays .ogg files, which probably make up over 75% of my music. But you guys have probably heard about that enough already in my blog.

OK, so after writing this so far, I noticed that my Audacious configuration is playing my freshly-ripped music with pops and clicks. I dropped the CPU usage on my BOINC configuration without any relief. Thinking maybe it was the original file, I played the same file flawlessly through XMMS. DAMMIT! I'll play with it more some other time.

My point is this: Linux's amazing flexibility has a serious drawback in the form of a lack of stable and cohesive media handling. While I'm no slouch when it comes to doing crazy stuff to get something to work on Linux and understand the value of such as learning experience, I'd rather not have to do it. I'd also rather be able to have one or two applications to do my media than one that's better at handling my 5.1 speaker setup or WMV files or DVDs with deep menu systems than another.

Linux leet hax0rz, please can I have something that works as well for me as MediaMonkey for organizing my music and interacting with my iPod Touch, and something with the excellent playback capabilities of foobar2000? I'm too dumb and busy to figure it out on my own. Actually, I may try foobar2000 using Wine. I already know MediaMonkey doesn't work under Wine.

Sometimes I miss Windows's "it just works" when it comes to multimedia.