MenZa’s Weblog

When playing around with Amarok, I discovered a handy search feature with functions similar to the of Google.

Here’s your average Amarok player playing:

So… say I want to listen to Whiskey in the Jar (any of the bajillion versions I have)? I obviously type in “whisk jar” in my search bar, narrowing my search down to this:

My only problem is, that The Dubliners‘ album Whiskey in the Jar (which features the track), also has a bunch of other tracks which get in front, so I have to either grab my mouse, or press my down-arrow. Or so I thought. Instead, I can type in title:whisk and it weeds out the ones where whisk jar match on track titles:

Let’s say I wanted to listen to Metallica’s version instead. So what do I do? I append an artist:me to it, weeding out all the matches where ‘Artist’ doesn’t match me:

After consulting the Amarok handbook, I found that there were so many more things you could search for:

• Encasing terms in quotation marks. Searching for whisk jar finds “Whiskey in the Jar”, whereas “whisk jar” does not.
• Ability to weed out terms. E.g. whisk -lizzy would show all of my The Dubliners-related Whiskey in the Jar content, but avoid my Thin Lizzy version of it.
• Search by author, genre, score, rating, title, comment and type (with the syntax author:*. Most likely most of the fields are available, e.g. year and so on).
• Combine all the above at your wish; e.g. title:whis -comment:enc type:ogg will only find files with the text whis in their title, without the text enc in their comment and only of the file type .ogg.

Of course, to reset your search query, you can just hit escape and start over.

Ultimately. Well, not quite ultimately. However, after a trial period of approximately two weeks where I’ve been testing Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn, and I’ve finally found true love.

I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off since November 2005, just after the release of Breezy, where my initial interest in Linux was erected, and I quickly became accustomed to the look and feel, the speed of the terminal and the friendliness of the community—but after a few months of having used just about nothing but Linux, XP was calling me. Well, not so much XP—more Photoshop.

I left Ubuntu behind and moved on (but installed it on my laptop in the Summer of ‘06) on the desktop-side, and didn’t really look back. Since then, I’ve used Dapper and Edgy on my laptop, but I only use those for school, not enjoyment.

Needless to say, I was excited about trying Feisty when it was released (Beryl, XGL and whatnot), so I grabbed the LiveCD, stuck in the disk and installed it on a 16GiB partition. I loved it from the very beginning–its ease of use, its user interface (Emerald is sooo pretty) and just the general improvements that had been added to the system over the past 3 releases. I kept stuffing new data on my drive—amaroK, Pidgin, Wine, essential applications for any Windows to Linux convertee—needless to say I’d filled that partition to the brim within 7 days, and thus, I turned to gparted. To my horror, gparted destroyed my entire NTFS file system, and I left it for dead. Until today. I reformatted and re-partitioned my disk completely, which means Vista now has 50GiB, and Ubuntu has 189GiB (it’s officially a 250GiB drive, meh).

What I noticed upon the second installation of Ubuntu, was that it was a breeze–I’d installed the base system, texlive, pidgin.im, compiled irssi 0.8.11 installed and setup amaroK, setup Thunderbird and copied my songs from my Frets on Fire backup I had on a DVD disk. And all this in less than an hour. Amazing.

And now that I’m on Linux (for the 3rd time), I don’t think I’ll be looking back anytime soon. With a small partition for whatever graphic design work I need, I’ll be doing everything else on Linux from now on.

Update: I’m still yet to boot into Vista. Hell, I haven’t even got Firefox installed yet @_@