Itunes Killer?

[Corban]

Hey I've been checking this program out recently and it looks promising... I believe if all goes well it could beat out itunes as the best media player availible. http://www.songbirdnest.com/home

[The Beatles]

I think you misspelled "mp3blaster" as "itunes"...

[Corban]

Haha, no I think I'll take itunes over mp3blaster.

p.s. I'd also like to point out that it will be availible on both the MAC and Linux OS.

[Devari]

*coughamarokcough*

[Alcaline the Badger]

It's like Limewire and Itunes put together, but I lovers my Itunes, so nope, I'm not even going to look.

[Devari]

Seriously though, http://amarok.kde.org/ is a very, very good (graphical) player.

[Devari]

...but of course, only available for Linux and OS X until much later this year.

[The Beatles]

And Windows sometime in 2007/2008, I guess.

My real beef with all the players is that none of them can touch Rhythmbox when it comes to music management. Of course, rhythmbox's playing backend, gstreamer, sucks. Thus I use mp3blaster, which is even more resilient than xine (amaroK) -- it's only skipped once since I've been using it for a few months. AmaroK skipped at least 10 times in the same amount of time, and Rhythmbox hundreds of times. (I do a lot of compiling with Java at work, and repeated disk/memory/CPU hogging is something Java excels at....)

[Devari]

The Amarok 1.4 beta 1 seems to be a lot better with xine-engine. On my slower machine, the only time song transition is at all noticeable is on certain points in The Wall, such as the transition from Run Like Hell to Waiting for the Worms, where any skipped beat makes a difference. I was really impressed, since I'd been using Amarok/GStreamer and having frequent skipping.

And, except for a sad lack of any rating system, I find Amarok's music management to be quite good.... What do you like about Rhythmbox's system better?

[The Beatles]

The fact that navigating to load any given song to my playlist is a mere few clicks in the inmutable interface:

Scroll with wheel to an artist, click. Scroll to an album (or a song already, maybe), click. Double-click plays. In total three clicks is usually enough, sometimes 4. Selecting an album's only 4 clicks. Etc, etc. With amaroK, the sidebar might not be there, and you might need to click through those side-tabs and top-tabs, then expand the tree a few times (more awkward), then right-click and two or three menu options all starting with "Load". It's just not the same at all. I'd rank 'em:

Rhythmbox > mp3blaster > amaroK > XMMS

on only music management.

[Devari]

Takes me 5 clicks to load and play an album in amarok.....

[The Beatles]

Matter of taste, then. I think it doesn't touch Rhythmbox, but it's a matter of taste, really.

[Devari]

Probably. I've purged most non-vital GNOME stuff off of my install, so I can't really try out Rhythmbox.

I remember trying to use Totem once, though. That was a disaster!

[windhound]

I thought I saw rhythmbox with xine backend in one of fedora's repos..

I like xmms 'cause its light, simple, and works alright. wont play some formats that I have, but overall its a fairly nice player = P
3 clicks to play an album in xmms
click add, select dir, release
click appropriate folder
click play / double click song

gxine is one of the better xine players..

amarok is.. meh. I dont really care for it

may take a look at songbird later

[The Beatles]

XMMS: you still have to muck around with the file selector...

Rhythmbox+xine: yes, but they took it out in a later version, blamed foolishness too.

gmplayer is very good too.

About the only thing I like about amaroK is the lyrics.