Monday, 28 March 2005, 12:32:47 EST

Every day I learn that I don't know anything. Today, OSNews.com actually managed to post something of interest — an interview with a brilliant coder named Jonathan Rentzsch (pronounced "wrench"). The interview covers everything from dude's current top ten most played songs to memory management on multiple processor machines. Rentzsch is twenty-eight years old and knows more about programming than I can hope to know by the time I am thirty-five. I like to think that I am a programmer but people like this make me feel just plain dumb.

That being said, I have been idly reading up on Objective-C and Cocoa. I want to extend my winfo program to do a lot more than it currently does and be pretty at the same time. I also want to write a decent Ogg Vorbis player for OS X since it seems that not a single one exists! When I say idly, I mean when I get bored, and don't want to try and find something else to do, I read a tutorial or two. Thus far, I have gotten to the point were I can write Obj-C classes but nothing with pretty buttons and such. I don't feel too bad about learning this stuff while on the clock because I need winfo for my job and what I have planned will be really helpful for that. However, I have started looking at next semester and I am going to have even less time then that I do now (CalcII four days per week – ouch). Oh well, maybe one day I can make a post about some great wireless program or Ogg player.

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Chris was talking about a firmware, or some such upgrade to the iPod that would enable .ogg support. If this is in the works, then maybe a .ogg plugin wouldn't be far behind for Apple's popular music player software.

Posted by Mr Frosti on Wednesday, 30 March 2005, 17:20:43 EST.

A plugin already exists. The software itself sucks. I don't listen to music like most people evidently does now. The only digital music I have, aside from a few (very few) free downloads, are the rips of albums I actually own. Inside of each album directory is a playlist that lists every song from the album. When I want to listen to music I first determine what type of music I am in the mood for and then browse to an album and load the playlist for that album. Everything for OS X, and I have tried several applications, don't work that way. iTunes will actually read in the files listed in the .m3u but it sort of "imports" them in to its global library and orders them alphabetically by the names in the ID3 tag. I have the songs numbered 01, 02,...10 etc. so that they load in the proper order and all of the software for OS X ignores that.

I have no doubt that Apple will be implementing Ogg Vorbis support soon. I just don't like their iTunes software nor their portable media player (solely because it doesn't do gapless playback).

Posted by James Sumners on Wednesday, 30 March 2005, 18:03:32 EST.