Home Media PC

I have amarok configured to submit tracks played to last.fm. If you go there you can see what I've recently listened to.

I get frequent errors in the amarok status bar such as

Failed to submit 'Mining for Gold' and 8 other tracks

and

Failed to submit several tracks to last.fm

I Googled the messages and found many reports of the problem, such as this thread. Most people pointed their fingers at a server problem. I was skeptical.

When, however, I tried to log into last.fm through the web interface and saw it intermittently fail, that confirmed for me that the flakiness lives in last.fm servers.

I saw this thread that suggested resetting the password--even to the same password--cleared the problem. I tried that and it worked. Before, I had dozens of songs pending to be posted. After, they all went through.

Here's hoping that last.fm eventually fixes their infrastructure problems.

I was using the Amarok "Album Cover Manager" tool to fill in the missing cover artwork in my music collection.

It has a "Fetch Missing Covers" button, which goes to Amazon and retrieves the artwork it needs. The lookup often makes mistakes, particularly because I tagged artists in a discouraged "Lastname, Firstname" form. Still, it's easier to fetch them all, then go back and manually fixup the ones it got wrong.

I ran it over several hundred albums. It made a lot of mistakes, but none quite so hilarious as the one to the right. The album cover you see is what it selected for London Calling by The Clash.

My media center PC is an ASUS bookshelf computer running Ubuntu Linux and KDE desktop. I use it primarily for music, running the Amarok music player.

Our house is pretty small and open. I can see the entire living room from my desk. I often play music on the media system while I'm working. The annoying bit is that I have to get up from my desk and walk over to the living room anytime I want to fiddle the controls.

I wish I had a good way to control the music from my desk. I've been puzzling over this for a whilte. I've tried various ways to control Amarok remotely and none were satisfactory. Then it dawned on me that I was missing the obvious: I didn't want to control just the media player but the whole desktop. I can do that using something like Virtual Network Computing (VNC).

This weekend, I've been blogging about issues related to the metadata stored in my music files, such as song title and performer. Today I wrap up with one final problem—one I've yet to solve.

When you walk into your favorite music store, the music is binned and organized for easy browsing. I want the same for my digital music. I can't, and I haven't found a solution yet, and that's frustrating me.

In my previous blog entry, I discussed creating the metadata for my music collection. The metadata are stuff like song title and artist, which are stored in the music file.

The chuckleheads that run the music industry won't give us metadata, which is one reason why CDs are dying. So, we have to turn to third party services to get them. There are free services that do this, but you get what you pay for.

Just about a year ago, I converted my music library to digital form—and I love it. The CDs are all ripped to lossless FLAC format. I've got a small computer (running Ubuntu Linux) in the living room connected to the A/V receiver by S/PDIF optical connection. The fidelity from this hardware isn't quite as good as the original CD player, but it's close.

I've spent a lot of time—maybe too much time—trying to get the music organized. A lot of the work was spent trying to get the metadata right. I'm going to write a couple of blog articles about my adventures. Today, I'm going to talk about gathering the metadata—stuff you probably know if you've been through this already.

I recently thought it was time to get a disk-based MP3 player. I already had an inexpensive flash memory player, which was great for carrying a dozen albums on an afternoon road trip, but I wanted something big enough to carry my music collection into work.

My two key product requirements were:

• Open platform.
• Good sound.

Requirement number one knocked the Apple iPod product line right out.

I built a home media PC last October using an Asus Pundit-R "booksize" computer and Ubuntu Linux. You can read about the saga in my home media PC category.

Where we last left our story, there were two remaining items on my "less than ideal" list: the system was noiser than I'd like and hibernation wasn't working.

I have some better understanding—no progress—to report on the noise issue. The system is still louder than I'd like. It's not as loud as, say, a Sony Playstation 2, but it's still annoying to me. After all, people typically don't try to play André Segovia classical guitar music on a PS2.

I may be stuck and I suspect the CPU may be the culprit. I built the system with an Intel Celeron D 335 (2.8GHz) Prescott processor. It seems the Prescott architecture is notorious for heat and power issues. I wish I could swap it out for a Celeron M (Dothan) processor. The "M" stands for mobile (as in built for laptops), and they sound like great processors: zippy on the MIPs and stingy on the watts. (My Dell Inspiron 600m laptop uses a Pentium M and it kicks butt relative to its clock speed.) Unfortunately, it appears even though the Celeron D and Celeron M processors are both "Socket 478" packages, they are not plug compatible. (I've seen the notation "Socket 478M" to distinguish the latter.)

It's times like this I wish I had a good tweaking motherboard—not to overclock the processor but rather to underclock it and slow down the power burn.

Now, on to the good news: I got hibernation to work. Actually, the system would hibernate correctly—the problem was with resume. The system would resume alright into text mode, but would hang when it tried to enable graphics. My dilemma was that the ATI proprietary fglrx driver doesn't support hibernation, but the open source ati driver doesn't support the TV output.

The solution I found was to use the dumb vesa frame buffer driver. That gives me a display without video acceleration, but I really don't need it for typical use. The only thing remotely graphically involved I do is visualizations for the music player, and that continues to work fine on the vesa framebuffer.

Here are the steps I performed to make this work:

• Make a backup copy of the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
• Run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
• When asked to "autodetect video hardware" select "no".
• Select "vesa" driver.
• Pretty much take the defaults. The only place I didn't was when asked whether to use the "kernel framebuffer device interface". The default was "no" but I selected "yes".
• When asked for "video modes you would like the X server to use" I selected 800x600 and 640x480 (i.e. turned off 1024x768).
• I selected the "medium" option for "selecting your monitor characteristics".
• Then, I selected an "800x600 @ 60Hz" monitor.

With the configuration complete I restarted X and verified that the TV-out was still working correctly. Then I ran sudo /etc/acpi/hibernate.sh and watched the machine hibernate. When I rebooted the machine it found the suspend image, loaded it up, and brought me right back to where I was.

The results are great. Now, when I want to listen to music, it takes just 35 seconds for the computer to return from hibernation. The cold boot, by comparison, takes about 1:40—that's about 60 seconds to boot Linux and 40 seconds to start the KDE desktop. This is a significant improvement.

One of the issues with my media PC (Ubuntu 5.10 Linux on an ASUS Pundit-R) is that it doesn't hibernate correctly. This means I need to do a full boot to listen to a CD, and a full system shutdown when I'm done.

I've made some recent progress, but I'm not there yet. I've found two things.

First, it appears I've been running into APIC problems. If I disable it, either in BIOS or by specifying noapic on the Linux boot command line, then I can hibernate in text mode. That is, if I take a running system, switch to a text console, and then run /etc/acip-support/hibernate.sh then it hibernates correctly. Well, that part always worked. The exciting part is that when I power on, the system resumes correctly to a shell prompt. Before, with the APIC enabled, it would hang.

The problem I have now is that when I switch the console back to the graphics mode, I get a partial redraw of the screen and it hangs. According to a thread over at the Ubuntuforums site, this is a known problem with the proprietary ATI video driver (fglrx). The open source driver (ati) is supposed to be ok, but that driver doesn't support TV output.

There is an updated fglrx driver available, and I have some hope this may fix the problem. Unfortunately, it looks like the update is a pain in the butt to do. When I can, I'll give that a try and report back.

I've spent the better part of the afternoon performing a BIOS update of my ASUS Pundit-R system. I finally found a procedure that works—and about ten that didn't. I'll describe how I did it, in the hope that it prevents somebody else from following my same path of agony. This procedure may be applicable to other systems, particularly those that use AMI BIOS and the AFUDOS BIOS flash update utility.