In my ongoing quest for a good audio player (after becoming an Amarok exile and refugee) I settled on aTunes. aTunes is really good except for two quibbles...
One, it's a Java app (a Swing app as far as I can tell?) and the GUI is enormous and unresponsive and certain parts of it really behave strangely. Like clicking in text fields to focus them sometimes requires multiple clicks. It's just annoying enough to constantly throw me off.
The second problem is that it crashes all the time. Music keeps playing but the GUI disappears. pkill java has become necessary far too often lately.
So now I'm trying Exaile. It's very Amarok 1.4-like. I can overlook the fact that it's GTK because it's otherwise so nice. Best part, when asked if Exaile is going to go the way of Amarok 2, the dev has this to say:
Never ever ever ever ever ever.
I'm having a hard time coming up with any deficiencies in Exaile so far. Everything in the GUI is laid out nicely. No crashes yet.
One of these days I'll find an acceptable app... Most of these apps are good, but I'm too picky. I love how Linux lets me be picky. There is a wealth of options, and everything is free. I am spoiled.
15 Comments
It's really ironic. When exaile came on the scene I was thinking "what on earth is the point, a gtk clone? why would anyone use it just for that, amarok already has everything". And now it turns out exaile might be a way to keep the good amarok! Gonna have to try it out.
Yeah it's a sad state of affairs when the GTK Amarok clone is better than the real Amarok. At least when a mainstream KDE app isn't any good, there's usually a mainstream Gnome app to takes its place. That's one good thing about a divided community.
Thanks for pointing me to Exaile. It seems like an adequate replacement for Amarok 1.4.
I was very frustrated when Gentoo removed the kde3 packages. But now since Amarok 2.2.1 hits portage, I can say I'm pretty satisfied with it. Seriously, try it out, it'll grow on you. Just play with the playlist layout (and the widgets) and you'll get the look and feel of the good ol amarok 1.4 :)
I'm another Amarok refugee. Exaile didn't do it for me, but after trying quite a few other apps I've been very happy with Banshee.
The best thing i like in exaile is dynamic playlist
I've had quite the struggle myself on ubuntu, the only conclusion I can make is that Banshee is the one audio player on Linux that does it for me.
There's also Quod Libet. It's similar to Exaile -- a bit smaller and a bit simpler, but it may be worth a try.
<3 Banshee. Just sayin'
Try out Music Player Daemon (MPD) with Sonata. You won't look back.
I am right now between Songbird and Banshee , Banshee since its got Gnome-Do integration. Will try exaile once again.
Have you tried Banshee? I've found it to be by far the best of the linux music players.
If someone were to create a Qt4 build of Exaile, I would switch to it in a heartbeat (I'm putting up with Amarok 2 right now).
That is all.
Maverick340, I'm actually in the same boat. Right now I'm using Songbird and I like it for the most part. The problem is that it's not got very good Gnome integration and the podcast functionality kind of sucks.
I really want to use Banshee, but I don't like that it doesn't support gapless playback, which is a must for me. Although to be fair, there's some people working on it for flac and other filetypes. Now if only playbin2 would support gapless MP3 playback...
Unfortunately I can't get gapless playback to work in Exaile either (if it even is supposed to work, which I'm under the impression it's supposed to with the unified playback engine), so I'm sticking with Songbird for a little while at least.
Use mpd and ncmpc (or whatever frontend for mpd you want). Believe me, you won't look back.
Speak Your Mind
Preview
Commenting Help
Email / Avatar
No HTML allowed!
All HTML is auto-escaped. Use Markdown. Examples:
code in backticks