This is not only my new favorite Linux app, but also by far the best music player I’ve used, period. Amarok has terrific smart playlists, support for autodetecting track information based on musicbrainz fingerprinting, automatic downloading of album cover art from Amazon, an OSD feature to briefly overlay the info of a track as it begins playing, crossfade, song suggestions, automatic lyric download, and iPod support (although I haven’t tested this yet). It’s almost the perfect player.
Some small criticisms: The UI is very good, but a little cluttered in some places due to the number of features and amount of smart information available. It isn’t that bad, and I do have a ton of music, but it would be nice if the program could be sped up a little bit, as it lags a tiny bit sometimes. Could just be my computer and my collection, though. Inline tag editing (clicking a field in the playlist) like JuK’s would be nice, as would adding an item to the right-click menu to auto-detect track information, instead of having to open up the meta tag editor window. Playing music with the aRTs engine was a little bit troublesome at first, but aRTs needs serious help. Remembering what random songs were played, like in iTunes and Rhythmbox, would be great (it works going backwards, but not forwards). It doesn’t appear to have a graphic equalizer, but that’s about the biggest thing I’m missing.
Apparently there is an equalizer, under the Tools menu, that I missed. It is not available for the aRTs engine, however, and is rather limited. Inline tag editing is also in place, but is rather unintuitive – you have to select the song, then shift click on the field you want to change. More usability annoyances/bugs: If you change the album title of a song that is playing and try to download the cover art, it will not work because it is using the old album name. You can’t download cover art in the meta tag editor, only in the cover manager or while the song is playing. I am unable to edit the meta tags of a certain set of my songs, I think it may be due to their complex file names, but I have not confirmed yet.
As you can see, I don’t have any real problems or huge wishes thus far. I’d tried it in the past but it kept crashing on me, first on trying to load my music collection and then on trying to play music using aRTs. This time (after I got all the dependencies installed, grr), it worked perfectly and is playing very well – I highly recommend it.
Tags: linux