1. May 9th, 2006

    Learning to love amaroK

    amarok.png

    Switching to Linux means letting go of iTunes.

    There’s a lot to love about iTunes, also a lot to hate. Mostly it’s a sweet media player, but the interface is dumbed down, and sometimes you have to fight it to get the results you want.

    amaroK is a different beast. When I first used it, it would crash more often than Outlook, pick up the wrong sound card (and I only have one), refuse to download podcasts and fail to synchronize the iPod. I thought the UI was a non-intuitive mess, getting in the way between me and my music. I missed the iTunes simplicity.

    That’s all history now. Two updates later, and a few configuration tweaks, and it runs flawlessly. At least compared to the other media players I’ved tried.

    The iPod challange was a technical one. More configuration tweaks to get it working, some problems with permissions, some not understanding how amaroK works. And mostly, trying to test it out and get over the bugs with a broken podcast. It turns out the podcast I was testing with works fine with iTunes, but none of the other podcatchers I tried. That just made everything else take longer.

    Unlike iTunes, amaroK assumes you’ll take some time to figure out how the UI works. And there’s a lot of UI to play with. But once you figure it out, it rewards you for all that effort. It’s easier to setup playlists on the fly, manage the collection and prepare queues to transfer new stuff to the iPod.

    It’s interesting to contrast the different approachs. iTunes keeps everything simple, but sometimes simple gets in the way. amaroK expect you’ll learn to use it, but when you finally do, everything is as simple as it could be.

    It feels like learning to walk all over again.

    Update: Amarok 1.4 is out. I just updated which added the Xine plugin, so Internet radio (that would be SomaFM) works!

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 5 Comments »

    1. May 9th, 2006

      Haf

      I have never really used iTunes for music playback, and I don’t have an iPod, so I can’t really say for myself that amaroK or iTunes is better. But I also like amaroK really much, it’s my favourite music player for Linux and I’d use it on Windows immediately if there was a Windows port. But unfortunately so far there is none, so I usualle use musicCube for playing songs from my sorted music collection and Winamp to play other songs or radio streams. musicCube is also quite nice, but it lacks a few of the features of amaroK and it doesn’t work as well.

    2. May 10th, 2006

      Assaf

      If you have any advise how to get the Radio streams to work … I still haven’t figure out that part.

    3. May 12th, 2006

      Mark Kretschmann

      @Assaf: Use the xine or Helix engine. The GStreamer engine doesn’t currently support streaming in 1.4. (Thus it will be disabled in 1.4.0, until we’ve completed it)

    4. May 12th, 2006

      Assaf

      Thanks for the tip :-)

      Now I need to figure out how to get Xine working, seems like I’ll have to build amaroK from source, or maybe just re-install.

    5. May 24th, 2006

      Assaf

      I just updated to 1.4.0 final. It installed the Xine engine, so I get MP3 and Internet Radio. And by Internet Radio I mean SomaFM.

      Love it!

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