Hm.  One of the things that I liked in a recent ('98?) version of BillOS
was their media player.  Tonight, I was looking for something that would
let me play streaming media (aren't some people doing some kind of
Internet radio?).

One program that I turned up was XMMS (/usr/pkgsrc/audio/xmms).  I'm not
sure if it supports playing live material from the 'net, but it's a cool
audio player, with several plugins available (most of the plugins seem to
be visuals, though some seem to be for audio transformations).

As I type this, I have two Ghost Dancers (one raised, the other lowered)
dancing to Autour De Lucie's Le Ciels de Traine, along with a ``blur
scope'' and a couple of others.


I also didn't care for the way that XMMS's window titles interacted with
twm, so I tried running KDE from my main account.  There are several
initial configuration options that you don't get to see if you've got an
established KDE configuration, I thin.  (My ``toy''/sandbox account didn't
get any of those options after I upgraded KDE, but my main account
(KDE-free for the most part) had a short config. walk-through.)


The only two problems:

 * I can select/preview screenblankers but they don't seem to work in KDE.

 * KDE audio effects wored for a little while, but stopped after a while.

(Oh, and the Ghost Dancer seems to crash, taking xmms with it, if I try to
walk down certain of its menus.  But, that's okay; I like Space Ghost
anyway.  (^&)


So the point of this ramble is that XMMS is cute, especially with its
plugins (I didn't notice anything about it supporting ogg-vorbis, but it
seems to play .ogg files quite nicely), and KDE continues to look slick.
(Fade-in menus look nice, though on my system the fading is not
consistant---some flash up, some fade in.  Even on the KDE main/start
menu, the fading is inconsistant.)

Definitely something to put up on an eye-candy machine (in case anyone was
looing for suggestions for demos).  (^&


  ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu