Amarok kicked out the window. Hello Exaile!!

My god, what happend to Amarok. It used to be a great player. The latest version turned into a -non-intuitive-non-flexible-interface- audio player.

As Brian says it very eloquently in Songbird vs. Amarok: How not to design a GUI, and currently working on interface design myself. Amarok .. WTF?

After reading the Middle pane thread on the KDE forums I was baffled. Why not add customizable (drag ‘n drop) pane widgetry layout? And for the available widgets to fill that middle pane …

  • Wiki info – How about a browser?!?!
  • Track info – That’s already above the playlist.
  • Album info – With file/folder view you can see what albums you have with one mouse click. (as was Amaroks strong point of critisism once towards iTunes).
  • Lyrics – Do you think I’m studying lyrics while I’m working?

And some other fun features:

  • The control buttons – Way to big, and worse the size is not adjustable. People are not born with visual impairments by default you know.
  • After upgrading Amarok it decides to hang at 62% every time when it tries to scan my audio collection.

I heard a KDE member speak at a dutch conference not to long ago about how KDE has clean code and isn’t to bloated. Now I know why.

Exaile

Looking for that smooth flexible, clean player? then Exaile is the new big thing. It’s written in Python, supports OSD-notify out of the box. Supports plugins (and then some!). And ofcourse also the usuals like systray support, album cover fetching .. the works.

Props to the developers of Exaile!!

And for Amarok .. I am outta here!

GrtzG

January 4, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: All ENGLISH articles, Diepe zucht, Technical

2 Responses

  1. Gerard JP » MP3 collection filesystem structure - January 19, 2010

    [...] moved away from amarok and started using Exaile as my favorite audio player. And I found ot that Exaile automatically displays the cover art when [...]

  2. svthomas - May 16, 2010

    Amarok2.X destroyed my love for Amarok–Amarok1.4.X was quite possibly my favorite Linux application during its heyday, and Amarok2.x could not shift out of its greatness, in my eyes at least. I was initially sad–and furious, for that matter–about the atrocity known as Amarok2.X, and spent much time searching for a replacement player that would fill the void known as Amarok1.4.x–the detached player was my favorite aspect of Amarok1.4.x. Exaile has completely filled that void, and more. The miniplayer is splendid, and the full user-interface is easy to use and straightforward. I have _finally_ removed the kde3.5 files from my systems and said goodbye to Amarok, and all of KDE for that matter. But we’ll save my KDE4 rant for another day :) Hello Gnome, Hello Exaile!

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