Welcome to a new category of blog post: heart-it-or-fart it.

This is an extenstion on the “Inciting Hatred” category, also allowing for praise.

I have a headphone socket on my laptop that seems a bit loose or a connection is dodgy. So, I’ve pulled out my old-and-trusty iMic – a device that came around so you could (for example) have sound input on a bunch of Macs that didn’t come with it (like my old 500mhz iBook). It also happens to have great audio out.

So, plug it in. little thing pops up saying “found new sound device, would you like to open the sound preferences panel”. So far, so good. So that’s what I do, open it, select my audio device and close it.

Then, if i’m lucky, it’s actually seleted it. More likely I have to go back and select it again, kilall esd, select it, relaunch rhythmbox.

Then i can play.

Maybe one song.

Then it skips over everything else in the playlist without playing them.

Quit rhythmbox, start it up again, works. for one song.

rinse, repeat.

Or, if you’re more lucky, you’ll get a fraction of a second of sound out of rhythmbox before it skips over everything. you even get a red stop icon next to the song. If you click on it, you see “Playback Error. Not negotiated”. Hrrm… not a very good error message there.

Oh, the other thing, if you succeed in playing your playlist, you then get, at the end, ALL OTHER SOUND EVENTS that happened for the ENTIRE TIME your playlist was playing. Because what pleases me more than ever is hearing 80minutes worth of gaim sounds one after another.

In the old days i would just “killell esd; esd -d /dev/dsp1”. This doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Verdict: fart it.

(oh, and before anybody says anything – i will be filing a bug report. just the sort of bug that you’re amazed that it was let out as a non-beta release)