Audacity and Amarok

So before the NFL playoffs this afternoon I spent some time streamlining my media management and moving over to using Amarok. I think I finally got things going correct, but Amarok's a bit clunky when it comes to the iPod. What I love about it is it's podcast management, that seems to be well done. Right now adding a new song seems to go like so.

Start with GRIP, rip to music/encode to get it ready. I had grip go straight to music/mp3 where I have my music but they seemed to fight. I made it use "--preset extreme" to lame which is half the size of insane but sounds good to me.

After that, load the files in Amarok, do whatever edits to the id3 tags I want in the /encode dir, and then "move to collection" which drops it into music/mp3. It's id3 tag editing is a bit better than gtkpod's was if you ask me, but both are pretty close. The main thing I like about Amaroks is that if I select 3 tracks, it defaults to multi-edit mode, and it disables a few things like Track Name from being changed in edit mode. Then you can go to single edit mode and do all the track names and other track specific stuff. Very slick.

Now this is where things get a bit hairy. I wish Amarok could just tell me what is different between the collection and the iPod and either automatically sync things up, or prompt me to handle everything. Also, if I change the rating on the iPod I don't think it grabs that correctly, or even lets me browse that on the iPod. I've been using the rating to flag items that need work with a 1-star rating. Then I figured I could work on it and get it back. That brings up another problem, to change the file I'm working on, (i.e. to change it's genre), I need to edit it, then copy it to my collection, overwriting my old item, and then it seems everything goes well. There may be more things that gtkpod handles correctly and Amarok doesn't, but that's life I guess. Oh well, maybe I'll help out with Amarok development for iPod related stuff or just use gtkpod for that stuff.

One more feature is grabbing the CD cover art, I really dig how it grabs it and sends it all to the iPod. Not shabby at all.

Now, I'm also taking this time to "digitally re-master" some tapes I have, copy them to a CD in case I want it, and then encode them. Audacity is a fairly good .wav editor, and I'm digging it. The "Noise Removal" tool's been pretty good, and it's "Bass Boost" and "Equalizer" plug ins have been good. So I'm happy with the one tape I have done and I've got two more I'm going to do in the next week.

So that's what I'm wasting my time with for the moment. Hopefully I'll ahve it done soon and play with videos on my iPod. Then I can get back to working on the house.