Blog of Mass Distraction

Sunday, November 28, 2004

A C# and other notes

I've noticed recently that I haven't been listening to as much music I normally do. That is, over the past few months I've rarely listened to anything but news in the car and I don't have any music playing while I'm working on my computer or laptop at home. This may have something to do with my losing interest in a genre I had been listening to recently; but I don't really want to go into that... I'm just getting kind of bored with it. Classical music, on the other hand, I never get bored with.
I have a collection of pieces I like to listen to, but I don't really want to play them on my laptop. What I'd like is to setup an application to control music on my desktop from my laptop. Not really a media server, more of a jukebox type deal. I realize there must be a collection of apps to do this type of thing on SourceForge or elsewhere, but I'm using a Windows machine for hosting this (I know, I know... I have a GNU/Linux server as well, but that's beside the point).
I've been playing around with some stuff for a little while now and I was thinking of doing my own little app to accomplish this, probably using C#. I've gotten to really like C# in the past little while, it's a nice little language. It's got a nice blend of the power and ease of Java with some of the added flexibility of C or C++. It takes some nice features from both languages and leaves behind some of the bad things. Don't get me wrong though, I like well structured languages and I'm really more of a C++ guy. I like Java as well, but one thing I think is a detriment to Java is that it either runs a little slow (yeah, yeah, I know there are arguments about this... let me finish) or it's a huge memory hog. Java can run fast, but it takes up gobs of resources. The .NET runtime doesn't really have this problem, of course it's also not universally compatible... but Microsoft doesn't care about that.
Anyway, another language I really love is Python. Aside from its fame for being used with Google, it really is a great language. It's very highly structured, really easy to use and learn, and is really scalable and flexible.

Another problem I have is with Mac OS X. One of the several computers in this house is a Mac and it's also got a few songs on it. The problem is, and this may be unpopular of me, but I don't really like iTunes. I feel it's kind of bloated and I don't really like the interface. It's ok in the minimized format, but still. The only problem is, I've had a hell of a time finding another good free music player for OS X. I'd really prefer a super-lite one, even something just at the command prompt, but when I tried to use mpg123 it only caused an error and didn't play anything. The only other thing I can think of that I haven't tried yet is XMMS, but I don't know if there's a native OS X build (but I do really like XMMS... more so than WinAmp in Windows).

1 Comments:

  • i recently downloaded a collection of 100 famous classical music pieces. lemme know if u'd like a copy.

    i too am looking for a good alternative mp3 player to itunes. keep me informed if you find one.

    By Blogger Sameer, at 1:18 AM  

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