Monthly Archives: December 2010

Linux music player with multiple artists support

Before I started using Linux at home I had been using Windows for couple of years. The music player I like on that platform most is Windows Media Player. It caused by it’s Contributing artists feature, which allows me to have multiple artists specified in the Artist IDv3 tag. In the music library I can add the Contributing artist view and play all tracks of an artist even those which comes from other albums.
I have been looking for the same functionality in Linux, but has not been successful for some time until I found music player called gmusicbrowser.
Currently it does not support splitting artists using the slash character ‘/’ which is used by Windows Media Player, but it can be easily modified as described by Quentin Sculo.
Edit file /usr/bin/gmusicbrowser using your favorite browser and find a line with the following comment:
#artist splitting
Locate end of the %split declaration and add the following line:
‘/’ => “Windows Media Player splitting”,
After you are finished with the changes, open gmusicbrowser again. Go to Miscellaneous Settings and specify Windows Media Player splitting in the combo. I also changed the layout to quodlibet-like, where the artists tab is easily accessible.

How to fix problem with displaying Czech characters (ěřž) in Opera

When I’ve installed Opera 10.63 on Debian (Lenny) I noticed some problems in rendering those characters even when typing text in textboxes on sites. I was playing with font settings in Opera, I have checked that Bitstream Vera Sans font is set anywhere possible, but still there was no success.
After some digging and playing with settings in Chrome, which was working good, I saw that it uses Arial and Times New Roman fonts which I did not have installed. It was strange, because when I clicked on the button to change the font it selected another one. But as I said in Chrome everything was ok, so I did not give that more attention.
Then after some more digging and looking for new fonts for debian I found out that there is msttcorefonts package available. This package contains basic fonts used in Windows. I don’t know why, but I have tried to install it. Then I went to Webpages tab in Opera Preferences and changed the fonts to be the same as in Chrome.
So as Normal font used Arial 16 and as Monospace font Courier New 13. Than I tried the pages that did not rendered good before and suddenly it worked like a charm!
I tried to change fonts in Opera back to default ones, but the problem did not appear again. I guess there is some hardcoded reference to those fonts in Opera, so installing msttcorefonts should be enough.