Well, I went to Gisborne, I got sunburnt and I had an absolute blast for new years. But more on that (Backdated) later when some pictures arrive from some mates…

In the meantime, first order of business was to locate a music player for DesktopBSD that fell into the following requirements:

* easy to use
* reliable with handling a large music collection (18k+ tracks)
* not XMMS

I really dont like XMMS, I think it is pretty bad. Ideally what I want is foobar2000.

So I installed Wine and Foobar2000, and for a while it worked fine. Then it started randomly crashing.

The list of native nix players I’ve tried is fairly extensive, with the most promising ones being Amarok, Juk and Zinf. However none of these really liked the large music collection.

Amarok, the most featurepacked of the trio, particularly packed a tantrum – chewing up to 400megs of RAM. XMMS in comparison only uses 10megs. Juk was also promising – like a lite version of Amarok, but it tended to be crash happy on my computer.

I have to admit, as godawful as XMMS is, it’s mature, solid, and does the job. If only it could have the same look and feel as foobar You just cant win everything I suppose.

I’ve got a bit more to post about, but I’ll deal with those when I have time, and I’ll backdate them. Stay tuned.