I sort of got lazy in my quest to replace iTunes with something open source. I tried the mpd software on a Raspberry Pi 4, but mpd doesn’t seem to want to talk to my msic stored on an SD card. So I settled on VLC, which at least talks to the SD card. VLC doesn’t really act as a music player, so I’m left with selecting a bunch of albums and dragging them to the VLC window. It suits my purpose for now, but I’d really like to be able to set up playlists, something that’s not possible in VLC.

Another thing is the transfer of the music files from my iMac to the SD card. For some reason, not all files got cleanly transferred to the SD card, and most of the old files were missing, so I need to find a ripping program I can use on the Pi to re-rip those music disks. But it isn’t a high priority.

Time to start digging into and solving the mpd problem.

It’s about time to check out text editors for my programming needs. Vi has been my go-to editor since the late 80s, and Emacs for certain tasks like Lisp coding, but other editors have sprung up since then. I’ve played with IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse and the JetBrain products, but never got real comfortable with them, as I tend to make small apps for which these tools are overkill.

One language that I’ve looked at recommended VSCode or Sublime Text as the tools best suited for development of app in that language. I tend to shy away from Microsoft products because M$ is such a shitty company, so I guess I’ll be downloading Sublime Text.

Any tips or tricks for new users?