Feedback on Amarok Mp3 Player

[David Fox]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Ashish Vijaywargiya
<vijaywargiya.ashish at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have installed Amarok for listening Mp3 songs on my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
> In past years I was using XMMS but it seems that XMMS has been removed
> from Ubuntu repository.

I concur with other posters in this thread - audacious is the best
choice if you want something that is lightweight and has at least some
of the look and feel of xmms.

I use amarok fairly regularly on ubuntu (and used it before on other
distributions) and it is fairly "heavy" although not so much with a
dual core amd64 box now :) but there are times where it will crap out.
(Right now is such a time - as I can't get it to start up. I get this
"amarok is taking too long to load" message and then after a bit I
have to go in there and kill amarokapp. I think maybe a reboot can fix
that problem, but it shouldn't have happened. And I've noticed this
before on other distributions, like pre-Etch debian.

What I like about amarok - quick and easy searching of files, having
all the songs in a centralized database (using mysql on amarok - and I
guess the sqlite on amarok 'neon' since there's no mysql connection
there), integrated ways to set up podcast files (although sometimes
the filenames on the directories make it extremely difficult to do any
manipulation in a shell - come on, it's a *nix app, so why put spaces
and - and other things in filenames in the first place???).
Additionally, media device integration has worked well in the past -
on my now-defunct Iriver, I used the mtp protocol and amarok
eventually was able to integrate with libmtp and work that fine. Now,
I have a better mp3 player that can actually mount as a device. :)

Amarok has gotten much better especially in 1.4 - prior to that, there
were plenty of problems, like it losing track of files and having to
rebuild the collection (imho the collection scanning can be too
"heavy" because it still seems to happen too often for my tastes), and
having it lose other things, like podcast folders in the past. Still,
there are some glitches, like not being able to listen to podcasts
(this has happened recently) untess you download them first.
Fortunately, I have sufficient bandwidth and disk space for that not
to be a problem..

Other similar applications (rhythmbox for one) seem fairly "bland"
compared to amarok. If you're into eye candy, then I'd stick with it.
And neon is looking better. There's more support for services (when
they are working) than in "regular" amarok, like connection to jamendo
(access remotely thousands of albums of bands you've never heard of)
and podcast searchers (like that, but the podcasts aren't persistent
yet in amarok neon). The last.fm and global tags are a really nice
feature to have integrated as well.