trying something new
Mostly because I had some free time over the past 11 days, I did some research looking for replacements for some software packages that I'd been using for years.
The first was a replacement for playmp3list, which was a console, ncurses frontend to mpg123. There's a part of me that still yearns to be an old-skool unix geek, and as such, I like to use console apps for tasks that really don't need a GUI, even when I'm in X. playmp3list served me well for years (I think its last release was back in 1999), but ever since the upgrade to Fedora 8, its been a massive CPU hog. My best guess is that its threading model is super ancient, and finally ended up getting broken by the newer glibc in Fedora 8. As a result, any attempt to run it, even if sitting idle, resulting in it consuming 100% of the CPU. To compound matters, the website for playmp3list seems to have disappeared from the internets in the past month or so. That removed any hope that it was ever going to see any future maintanence. I finally got around to looking for a replacement, and found a few worthy candidates:
* moc. This one actually modeled its UI on the venerable old playmp3list
* mp3blaster. This one has a ridiculous number of features, although its UI is a bit unintuitive.
* qplay. This one is fairly simple & straightforward.
I'm going to play with all 3 for a while before I decide who wins the place of playmp3list
The 2nd isn't so much a replacement as a backup. I've been using the original python based bittorrent client (that Bram Cohen wrote before he sold out to the man) for several years. While its still works reasonably well, its damn clear that its basically unmaintained, and I've been increasingly tripping over its bugs & limitations. My past attempts to find another worthy console mode bittorrent client (I run it inside a screen session which makes checking the status of a torrent possible from just about anywhere) didn't turn out well. The only thing that I had found before was rtorrent which has about the most cryptic, unintuitive UI i've ever come across. I struggled with getting it working for over an hour, and gave up thoroughly frustrated. While it had loads of nice features, the documentation was rather limited, and even after googling, I came across very few 3rd party references. So a few days ago, unintentionally, I discovered that the wikipedia bittorrent page actually has a really nice chart documenting a ton of bittorrent clients. After scanning the list, I found one that looked promising, aria2. aria2 is actually way more than a bittorrent client (it does http & ftp too, in a fashion similar to wget). While the UI isn't anywhere near as polished as the original btdownloadcurses (AKA bittorrent-curses), its at least intuitive. What I do really like is that it supports a per-user configuration file, so that I can effectively hard code options and not have to manually enter them every time I start a torrent, and more importantly, its under active development, so its not abandonware. Another plus is aria2 is in the official Fedora yum repo, so getting it installed was as simple as doing a "yum -y install aria2".