music

I haven’t had sound work­ing on my com­puter since this fall’s rebuild.? It took me a while for the prob­lem to get annoy­ing enough to deal with, but it finally did.? Actu­ally, it was as much the fact that DH is get­ting fed up with Win­dows and AOL and how things just don’t play nice on his com­puter, so ear­lier this week he com­mented that he was start­ing to con­sider hav­ing me install Ubuntu Linux on HIS com­puter.? DH, the non-technogeek!!!

Well, he would absolutely be mis­er­able with­out sound on his com­puter for all the sound clips and videos he finds in his ‘Net surf­ing, so I knew I’d bet­ter get it fig­ured out.? Of course, as I started dig­ging into the prob­lem, I found out that our moth­er­boards both have the absolute worst sound hard­ware to get work­ing under Linux.? Lovely…NOT.? But I dug and dug and fid­dled and fid­dled and installed and unin­stalled until I should have been get­ting SOMETHING…and then I pulled out my moth­er­board doc­u­men­ta­tion and started reading.

Ha, I should do as I say, not as I do, myself — RTFM FIRST! ? Come to find out my moth­er­board does NOT like unpow­ered speak­ers, and of course both sets I’d been try­ing (the ones embed­ded in my mon­i­tor and the stand-alone ones) were unpow­ered.? So I plugged in the spare pair of pow­ered speak­ers we had lying around and after another fid­dle or two, VOILA!? SOUND!? WOOT!!!

This morn­ing I decided I’d try some music.? I tried out the default Rhythm­box Music Player first, but it kept spon­ta­neously clos­ing as I was using Fire­fox.? Luck­ily I had another option avail­able, because I’d installed Amarok upon its rec­om­men­da­tion? in one of my many RSS feeds.? I opened it up, told it where my tunes were on my hard drive, let it build its data­base, and for the past hour or so have been con­tent­edly lis­ten­ing to Acoustic Alchemy and Gretchen Wilson.

(Now there’s an odd com­bi­na­tion for you, true.)

HHJJ!!!!