Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Thanks for the comments, Rikki.
It's great to have so many great suggestions from generous readers. I have 12 players on my "to review" list because of this and kmf's comments above made me realize that I need to take a critical look at tagging applications, too.
Sorry Frans I forgot one thing. You set the playback device on Quod Libet as follows:
Start the applciation (d'oh) and pick Music > Preferences from the menu.
The Preferences pane has five tabs, the middle one being "Playback". On that, there is a field called "Output pipeline".
In that field you need to put the gstreamer pipeline you want to use for playback. In my case it's set to:
alsasink device=hw:CARD=DragonFly,DEV=0
Generally speaking if you want to just pass the bits through you need to use alsasink. The device parameters can be obtained by using the command "aplay -L".