Songbird v Foobar

Interestingly enough I switched away from iTunes 7 and haven’t touched it ever since their highly hyped update to 8. I switched to foobar2000 which is actually a pretty awesome bit of software. I have however been constantly hearing about Songbird and its amazing features so I’ve now finally got round to installing it and testing it out. Here are my thoughts.

Foobar > Songbird

One of the reasons I switched away from iTunes in the first place was obscene memory usage. I’m not sure how iTunes 8 is with memory but I had many grievances about the performance of iTunes 7 when I used it. Testing Songbird on a decent laptop (3GB RAM, Intel Core2 Duo T8100 @ 2.10 GHz, a processor that benchmarks faster than most in its clock speed range), it took 5 seconds for the program to start up fully while foobar loaded instantly. Foobar’s memory footprint was absolutely miniscule at 10MB while Songbird required a hefty 80MB, though that’s fairly unsurprising considering its capabilities as a browser.

In terms of usability, as a foobar2000 user, I miss features like Cursor Follows Playback (and more importantly Playback Follows Cursor), complete ID3 tag control, advanced syntactical filters and fully customisable shortcut keys, for which I have yet to find Songbird extensions. Whatever the case these are minor concerns and are bound to be ironed out / provided in the long run by extensions or built in natively. However my concern is that Songbird seems directed more at less savvy / control-freak users who don’t necessarily want to use something like a RegEx string or SQL query to perform operations or filter their music – the functionality is based more around forms and buttons rather than console, debug window and command prompt. While most people probably welcome this user-friendly approach, I personally enjoy the ‘hackability’ and almost complete controllability of foobar. Of course, since Songbird is open-source a real hardcore user may prefer to hard code in mods, though I for one prefer not to have to recompile software to make it do what I want.

There are also several components which come natively with foobar (or as pre-installed plugins) such as ReplayGain (very important; Songbird’s equivalent is the ‘VolumeProfiles’ addon); minimise to tray (again critical [to me]; Songbird has the ‘MinimizeToTray’ addon); and a ‘resume playback after restart’ option (a nice touch to foobar; Songbird has an addon called ‘last track resume’).

This demonstrates the syntax of a Foobar preference element - a lot of the preferences are like this. There's just so much control

You can even control exactly what text is in the window title, status bar and system tray tooltip

Songbird > Foobar

Enough nitpicking. Songbird really does have some really awesome features. Its integration with the web is very nciely done – I get the impression more or less every online music service is supported to some extent, and the whole browser integration is a brilliant idea. Foobar’s web integration comes in the form of ‘freedb’ which I assume is some sort of tags downloader though it’s never given me any vaguely sensible suggestions so isn’t very good. There’s also a mini player built in which foobar doesn’t seem to have without resorting to skinning. Ratings are native which foobar is critically missing – you have to use ‘quick tagger’ [addon]. The default iTunes interface was offputting at first but the browse library by artist/genre/album etc at the top is another feature foobar lacks but Songbird has. And, of course, Songbird is open source.

It’s interesting that Songbird was developed as an open source project thus appealing to the techies while also being amazingly pleasant to use with some of the most useful and critial features built in and vast extensionability. Someone commented Songbird is like the Firefox of media players. I can’t say I disagree.

I find the way they've built a media player around a browser quite cool and certainly in line with the whole web integration thing

Songbird has a clear iTunes-like interface and the mashTape (web integration with artist/song info, reviews, even youtube) is a pretty cool feature IMHO

Songbird, Foobar > iTunes

Despite a slow load time, Songbird wipes the floor with iTunes when it comes to performance. There was a problem with iTunes 7 in which scrolling through a large library was a misery owing to the intense slowness of just about everything. Songbird on the other hand is actually pretty snappy. And of course Foobar runs like lighting.
Both are extensionable. I know there are iTunes addons etc. but both these alternatives take extensionability to a much higher level. Songbird probably uses extensions about as much as Firefox while Foobar takes extensionability to an extreme by more or less requiring them to function normally (hence the pre-installed ones).
And of course neither associates itself with a store that sells DRM music So it’s all good.

Overall, based on my experience of them so far, both are far more than adequate replacements for iTunes (unless you’re a fool and actually use the iTunes store in which case your music is useless if played by anything but Apple products). Foobar even has support for iPods (not sure about Songbird). Neither has performance issues, and both are more or less customisable enough for the standard user. If you’re after an easy and pleasant-to-use player with an automatically decent-looking interface with truly wonderful web integration, go download Songbird. If you’re a control-freak in search of hackability and control almost to the extent of writing your own RegEx (and also a completely no-nonsense player), foobar’s the one for you. On the other hand if you want a program that is slow, memory-hogging and defaults to buying music from a store with hideous DRM, go ahead and download iTunes.

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End of the Road for CAPTCHAs

Signing up to a forum the other day, I couldn’t help noticing the increasingly pervasive presence of anti-spam and anti-bot modules built in to online registration forms.

The problem with CAPTCHAs in my opinion is simply that they are stressful to use for a modern end-user. Research (c.f. some New Scientist article that I read) indicates online users have over several years become far more ‘aggressive’ in that website visits are increasingly about simply extracting information and leaving: people are becoming more ‘hit-and-run’ as opposed to ‘come join our wonderful community at Experts Exchange’! This speed and efficiency (which I think is largely attributable to Google) of surfing however goes completely out the window when it comes to CAPTCHAs: rather than simply clicking ‘OK’, users are forced to squint at a series of curly, obfuscated, low-contrast, specked, half-obscured characters, often only to be told they’ve typed the wrong characters and forced to repeat the whole unpleasant experience. CAPTCHAs break the line of thought and direction of a user, serving merely to annoy him/her; most people I know only ever think of CAPTCHAs as infuriating and time-consuming wastes of space. They’re sometimes even vaguely funny!

There’s actually an argument that the whole concept of forcing users to read half-illegible characters is doomed anyway. There are very, very good programmers and hackers out there who are working towards better text-recognition software. ABBYY Finereader is one of the leading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs out on the market, and Evernote wasn’t deceived even by my handwriting – technology has surpassed most of the humans I know! I am quite convinced that there will come a day on which computers and bots will eventually become better than humans at recognising characters and completing optical identification tests. I’m pretty sure CAPTCHAs seem to get harder and harder to the (ridiculous) point at which it takes several attempts to get one right, for example the ‘cat’ CAPTCHA at Rapidshare:

I became an expert at doing these and I assure you the answer is 'KOI8'

and this one which I think is a fake but is far too good not to include:

So CAPTCHAs are ultimately heavily limited in their applications, especially considering computers are growing in power at an exponential rate (Moore’s Law). Alternatives often offered to CAPTCHAs involve having the characters read out through the speakers. Unfortunately I think speech-to-text software is also at a highly advanced stage (so long as Vista’s attempt at it is ignored).

So, have people had any other workable anti-bot systems? I certainly think so. In fact the example I gave near the top was a good example of such an alternative: a turing test. Programs which have the ability to ‘parse’ English and make decent ’sense’ out of it are still things of science fiction. Admittedly there are some very limited versions of artificial intelligence, however those tend to cost rather a lot more than the average spammer can afford, and your average bot is still a long way from answering questions like “is ice hot or cold?”

BT: is ice hot or cold?
SmarterChild: People always ask me if there’s a smarter bot than SmarterChild. Well, now there is! Add wilma@live.com to your Contact List to see what I mean!

During the course of our conversations you may see sponsored messages. These messages have the word “sponsorship” at the end. Sponsors help me remain free of cost to you. To learn more about sponsored messages, click here —> http://web.smarterchild.com/ct?xCkO/0

Huh?
BT: is ice hot or cold?
SmarterChild: I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re saying.

———-
*Adds wilma@live.com as a contact*
———-

BT: is ice hot or cold?
Wilma: I am sorry, I didn’t get that.

I’m just getting started, so I can’t answer everything yet. I’m getting smarter all the time!

Would you like to try a search for “is ice hot or cold”?
BT: you know what, never mind…

I have to say though, my favourite proposed alternative is this one:

Perhaps the people who designed it were attempting to guarantee their site an intelligent user-base!

So anyways, I think the CAPTCHA is near the end of its life. When confronted with a picture of what appears to be a random doodle and expected to use their artistic licence to deduce some vague form of meaning from it, I’m pretty sure many people in a hurry would be annoyed, end up wasting time getting the CAPTCHA wrong multiple times and end up losing track what he/she was supposed to be doing when signing up/posting in the first place. I hope the future holds something easier to use for users of t’internet, much as I love the idea of getting users to solve Maths questions before allowing them to post comments. Perhaps ultimately Man will lose his battle against the machine and whatever anti-bot system ends up being put into place will be solved faster and with greater accuracy than humans! For now though, most machines powerful enough to perform complex human intellectual feats in any reasonable amount of time occupy several hundred square metres of floorspace in labs at NASA and IBM. I sure hope NASA aren’t secretly spammers…

Interestingly, a productive use for CAPTCHAs has actually been found. For those who still haven’t come across them, reCAPTCHA systems have been deployed all over the web. As stated on the reCAPTCHA website:

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

CAPTCHAs were useful once, back in the year 2000 when computers ran on processors just about capable 7 flops and could barely run fortran compilers (yes I am being ironic). In fact, they were quite a good, and rather an ingenious, solution to the problem, as before they began to get ridiculous they were convenient to completely and only ever took about 2 seconds, and computers were more or less baffled by even slightly complicated/curly/irregularly typed/written text versions. But in a modern world I think the whole process of exacerbating myopia is bloated, unnecessary and pointless. But then maybe that’s just me!

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Alternatives to Paper

It looks like, with improving technology, it’s approaching the end of the road for paper. And so what a relief this article was to me – after my rant about snail mail it’s plain my stance on old-hat methods of getting things done is not favourable.

While I haven’t quite decided to go entirely paperless as yet, I regard paper as a hindrance to getting things done effectively and efficiently. Among other inefficiencies: it’s not searchable, it takes up huge amounts of space (I have one year’s work filling about 10 lever arch files which span half the width of my wall), it gets lost, it’s not easy to back up, it requires one to write which is slower than typing, it’s not interactive, it wastes resources, and it’s a pain to edit.

So it seems to me that as close as possible to paperless, using technology as a helping hand, is the way to go for the sake of sanity. Therefore, for anyone who happens to be striving for sanity, I have summarised here some ideas which are easily (and relatively painlessly) incorporated into everyday life:

Notes

Whenever possible, take notes on a laptop or some electronic device (preferably one which is easy to type on). If that fails and written notes are an absolute necessity, type it up as soon as possible afterwards, or scan it in and use something like Evernote to make it text-searchable – that way you don’t get a huge backlog of stuff that needs scanned.

Also, instead of using random scraps of paper to write reminders, use a file called todo.txt on the desktop to replace post-its stuck to the monitor with a text file. Again, Evernote can be utilised to a similar effect.

Bank statements

I had piles of these and felt obliged to keep them, just in case some hugely unlikely catastrophe occurs at the bank and they lose details of my account balance, and for some bizarre reason accept a statement as proof that I had £xyz in my account (however un-photoshopped it might look). So don’t be like me – switch to online banking and be sure to opt for electronic statements!

Letters and receipts

I’m talking here about receipts for online shopping rather than till receipts (which I normally throw away unless it’s a warranty). Like notes, scan them as soon as they arrive, file them electronically using some sensible organisation (of course using OCR for text-searchability), then shred them immediately afterwards (Unless of course they’re important legal stuff or something), thus forcing the exclusive use of the electronic copy, thus relieving any stress as to where to file the paper copy. After all you could always print them again if necessary.

Of course, paper can be useful for certain occasions – writing letters for instance – which is why I explicitly haven’t given up on it; after all, things like drawing diagrams are much easier. However with the rise of handheld devices equipped with styluses, I hope to see the use of paper decline and more useful technological alternatives being used.

Superior Software Alternatives – Part 2: Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger …

This is a typical example of Microsoft advert-supported rubbish. My general policy is that one shouldn’t have to fight with one’s software, and while it is possible to hide the adverts by setting rad.msn.com to a spoof IP address in the hosts file, in my experience Messenger has frequent problems connecting which I am sure are deliberately linked to my hosts hack; it fights back! It also can’t show conversations in tabs by default and plugins require installation from an exe. For some reason it also takes quite a long time to sign in to the service and the default startup option is to intrude with a ‘Windows Live Today’ popup and after every update I am forced to check that my home page hasn’t been set to msn.com behind my back. It also generally crashes fairly often leaving the user frustrated and in general is a serious case of Microsoft ad-supported eyesore.

… replaced with Pidgin

My proposed alternative is Pidgin, a program I downloaded when Windows Live Messenger appeared to have kicked the bucket once and for all; I’ve never looked back since. It is lightweight and speedy and starts up and (seems to) signs in much faster than the above competitor. It can handle all sorts of IM protocols, including (among many others) MSN messenger, AIM, IRC, Google Talk and even Facebook chat, all of which are integrated seamlessly into a simple no-nonsense interface with tabbed conversations enabled by default. In terms of extra features, I was pleased to see an option to connect through a proxy and a highly customisable macro feature, ‘buddy pounces’.

The real beauty of Pidgin lies in the apparent simplicity and breeziness of its interface that disguise powerful features and chameleonic customisability which enhance usability remarkably for an end-user of virtually any technological background. All I can say is thank God Messenger broke!

Superior Software Alternatives – Part 1: iTunes

Almost everyone I know uses iTunes for music, and while in my personal experience it’s extremely uncommon for anyone to use anything other than Windows Live Messenger for instant messaging, it’s practically unheard of not to use Adobe PDF Reader for PDFs. In my opinion, it’s simply a sad historical accident that these programs ended up as the default, and a real pity that there are so few people open-minded enough even to imagine using better software, since there is a huge collection of truly excellent open-source and free software out there. I’ll post an ongoing blog series of superior software alternatives, and if you have suggestions for better alternatives (or disagree with me!), please go ahead and leave a comment.

iTunes …

iTunes, while having many powerful and easily-accessible features, is, for lack of a better word, stressful to use. The stubbornly un-customisable interface and the painfully slow scrolling through large libraries are annoyances, while its gleeful enforcement of DRM is a real hindrance to music enjoyment. Its unnecessarily large memory footprint and insistence on installing Safari on updates, when added to the apparently obligatory iPodService and iTunesHelper module serve merely to aggravate its users further. All in all not pleasant to use and I was glad to rid my computer of it once and for all.

… replaced with Foobar2000

My suggestion is foobar2000. As a direct comparison: it is Firefox-like in customisability in terms of skins, keyboard shortcuts, library view styles, and actually pretty much everything. DRM is not insidiously forced upon the user to the point that converting to another player would involve losing gigabytes of purchased music to the notorious m4p format, and the user experience is incredibly fast and snappy; scrolling through thousands of items is a breeze. It’s also very conservative on the system performance front, and generally a much more satisfying and enjoyable experience to use. It can also, unlike iTunes, automatically scan folders for new media; plugins (of which there are many, and of which one implements iPod support) are a breeze: a simple matter of dropping a dll into a folder; and the entire package is even portable! But for me, a power user who can’t do without APIs and programmable features, the best part is the immense power of the search bar which can use bitwise logic operators. As a simple example, to search for classical pieces with a rating of over 3 stars I query %genre% IS “classical” AND %rating% IS “* * *”. As a replacement for iTunes’ ‘consolidate library’ feature, foobar has ‘file operations’ in which you can copy / move music files using patterns. For example moving your library to %artist%\%album%\%tracknumber% %title% organises it in folders by artist and album with track numbers in the file name.

Foobar has even been rumoured to sound better than other media players and it overcomes all the problems people may have switching from iTunes (primarily iPod support). It’s a truly impressive program; there’s no excuse not to switch to it from iTunes (for music) and I’d definitely call it my best free software find this Summer!