[linux-audio-user] aqualung BBOOMability

hi Tom, users..heres a bit of a diary of the hurdles i ran into when trying Aqualung, perhaps useful as a set of 'fresh eyes'.. my intorudction is a distinct frowning on my attempts to merely launch aqualing. that is, if no arguments are supplied, it simply fails instead of picking some that might work... like -o alsa -ddefault -p 2048 or whatever. amongst audio players this is a rarity. i think even alsaplayer defaults to jack with no arguments.. after figuring out working startup arguments. as an ex-amarok user, im a bit confused what the Music Store is. i tried adding /music, where my music is stored, to the list, and it said 'directory exists, add in Preferences'. so i add it in preferences, and it says 'error: is a directory'. so then i pull up aqualung's website, and find out its an xml database. so i figure i'll make a directory /var/lib/aqualung. finally it lets me add it without error. but theres no properties dialog to set paths where the actual music is. or at least i can't find it. since the store showed up titled 'Music Store' and not the name i gave it, leading me to believe it was the column header and not the store itself. at least, i only tried right clicking in the blank area delving into the manual. and quickly notice something else. there a bit of a standard for keyboard shortcuts in audio players, at least winamp, amarok, foobar2000, and audacious. in aqualung theyre completely different, so im going to have to try to learn them, or figure out how to map my beloved Z,X,C,V,B. after reading the bit on music store, it seems to discuss a manual curation process. i create an artist called 'all collection', and try adding some music. well, it only lets me pick files from a single dir, with no recursion. that might be how i operated, if i was meticulously ripping LPS off the Rega, maybe one or two a week. what is this, 1971! so at this point, unless theres something ive missed, it seems the only way im going to be able to use aqualung is by dropping the entire /music dir onto the playlist. or importing a pregenerated playlist. i try that first. its a file generated with gnu find (takes a few seconds) with an absolute path to all the audio files, one per line. none of the weird #extinf crap that winamp puts in. it works in audacious, but even there, i no longer need it as it has a 'don't scan any metadata until play time' option. i just still have the bash alias around...anyways, the playlist remains blank , on multiple load attempts. simply nothing happens. so my last recourse is dump the entire music dir into the playlist. and hope that it will automatically populate the music store with names via the ID3/FLAC tags as i play them. here again, i run into a hurdle. it wont let me just select the music dir. so, i fire up nautilus, which isnt even in my fluxbox menuy since i use graphical file browsers so rarely, in an attempt to do drag'n'drop. well, i try to drop it, and it zooms right back to where i dragged from. at this point, i gave up. every possible thing that could stand between me and using aqualung for what it was conceivable designed for, did. im sure for others its more a case of 'works for me'. thats what makes the community so great...diversity :) who knows...maybe i'll try it again some time.... c