i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

Well, the good news is that after trying Banshee off and on for a year or so, it is finally working in my OpSu install. Arriving at that realization is another story.

...

First, more of the good news. Banshee seems to use a lot less cpu power (compared to Amarok and Songbird) both in scanning the library and in playback. So my music server computer is running somewhat cooler under load (yay!)

But the journey? I needed to rip a new CD. Referring, of course, to my install only: I discovered KAudioCreator (KDE3 version) wouldn't rip because it is missing some kio-slave (or so it says). K3b for KDE4 simply crashes out when asked to rip. K3b for KDE3 won't rip, though it doesn't precisely crash. (It also won't retrieve album and track data.) I tried to load some other aspiring CD rippers from YAST, but they refused to load, complaining there was no available FLAC -- which didn't make sense, because it's clearly there, available in YAST.

So, off to google various forums there were three schools of thought: (1) "you're stupid, Kb3 works fine. (2) Some of are using Audex, available from the OpSu Build Service, since Kb3 won't rip. (3) Kb3 works, but first you have to engage in serious bug repair modifying various permission settings at the root level.

As you might have suspected, I didn't find (1) helpful, even though it was not precisely directed at me. I tried Audex, but it would require a roll-back of my KDE 4 install, so I didn't want to go that route. As to (3) -- are you kidding me? I suppose in a worst-case scenario I would do this, but definitely not tonight.

I then tried to help YAST out -- I manually selected "FLAC". Suddenly all the other rippers were happy to install.

I installed serveral ( ), but the only one I actually located in the menu system afterwards was jripper, which is written in java.

After some puttering around figuring out the settings I managed to get a credible rip.

Which is when I decided to try Banshee. I build my smart playlists based on "comment" entries in the tags. So, I needed to edit the tags and thought I would see how Banshee worked as a tag editor. (Just fine, as it turns out.) The really frustrating part is that itunes uses a different set of comments than Banshee/Songbird/Amarok -- so I have to re-comment everything to get my ipod playlists to work right. One of these days, I may get around to linux-izing my ipod and get passed this ridiculousness.