| Edgy-Penguins
- "Linux for Non-Geeks" - Apps & Projects - Zinf |
Introduction:
With
XMMS and Rhythmbox already included in your system, you may wonder why
on earth you would want yet another audio player. Well, tastes vary by
user,
and Zinf is different enough to warrant interest, Zinf is in
many ways a middle-ground between XMMS and Rhythmbox. As you can see,
Zinf is bigger and easier to read than XMMS, and, redundant as it may
well be to say, much smaller than Rhythmbox. In terms of features and
ease of use, Zinf is also pretty much in the middle. If you're not sure
whether to bother or not, just go ahead and give it a go. That's the
nice thing about Linux, it doesn't cost you anything to give new
applications a try.  By the way, if you click the westernmost icon at the top right hand side of the Zinf player window, the equalizer will appear in the middle of the window. The other buttons should be clear enough, but if they aren't, Zinf will explain what they do when you run your mouse over them - a very handy feature. |
| Note: Zinf is available
from
the DAG repositories, so you will need to add that reository to your
Synaptic repository list if you haven't done so already. The
instructions on how to do this are provided on page 152 of "Linux for
Non-Geeks."
Once
DAG is in your Synaptic repository, be sure to update the package lists
(by clicking
the Update
List button in
Synaptic) before moving on. Downloading and Installing Zinf via APT/Synaptic: To download and install Zinf, just type zinf in the Find box of the Synaptic main window, click Install Latest Version, click Execute, and then follow the general procedures you learned in Chapter 10. Running Zinf: Once installed, you can run Zinf by going to the Main panel menu and selecting Sound & Video > Zinf Audio Player. When it first runs, you will get a small dialog window (shown below) asking you whether you want to change your audio file associations so that when you double-click any of them, Zinf will open up instead of XMMS or Rythmbox. Until you've taken Zinf for spin to see whether or not you like it, click No.  Once you've done that, the next thing you will want to do is have Zinf search your Home directory for music to play (MP3, OGG and WAV files). Just click the MyMusic button and a Wizard (shown below) will open. In the drop-down menu next to the words Look for music in, select My Home Directory, where most of your music should be anyway. If you don't, then Zinf will search your whole hard disk, which takes too much time. Once you've done that, click the Start Search button to, as if you need me to tell you this, start the search. The length of time required for the search, of course, depends on the amount of stuff you have in your Home folder.  Creating Playlists in Zinf: Once Zinf completes the search process, it will show its results in the left pane of a window (which opens along with the wizard window) titled My Music: Current listening list, which will open every time you click the MyMusic button in the main Zinf player. You can easily create playlists in this window by selecting the songs you would like to add to a playlist and then pressing the Add button. The songs (links actually) will be copied to the right pane of the window, as you can see in the image below. You can move individual songs up and down the list to your liking, and when you are ready to save the list, click the Save button. A small dialog window will then open up asking you for a title for the list, so type in the title you want to give it, and then click OK. The playlist will then be easily accessible in the left pane under My Playlists. You can then close the window and start playing it by clicking the play button in the Zinf player window.  Zinf Skins: There are a couple other interesting features,such as a the ability to download music from emusic.com and the ability to play Internet radio stream, but you can play around with those yourself. I will here, however, cover one more interesting feature: Zinf skins. Like XMMS, Mozilla, and the GNOME desktop itself, Zinf allows you to customize its look through the use of skins designed specifically for Zinf. Unlike those skins, or themes, for XMMS, which retain the basic XMMS shape, those for Zinf can provide much wilder results. There are three skins included with Zinf: Zinf (the default skin), ZinfClassic, and Aquatica (also shown below). To try these out, just click the Options button in the Zinf player window. This will bring up the Zinf Preferences window, where you should click Themes in the left pane to see the choices. These choices will appear in the right pane, where you can click on each one and then click the Apply button in order to see what they look like. If you would like to add a few more to your collection, you can go to the Zinf homepage and go to the Themes page., where you will find many more that you can download. As you can see in the images below, the differences can be great.
If you find any skins you like, download them to your Home folder (perhaps to the Thematics folder you created in Chapter 5), and then install them by clicking the Add Theme button in the Themes page of the Zinf Preferences window. |
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