Contact
About
PrivacyWelcome to TheCredence.com - You may like to subscribe to our RSS feed to stay updated.
Part of the difficulties most of us encounter when switching to a new operating system are related to applications. People tend to become very attached to the tools they use very often – and it's no surprise to find out that iTunes is one of the tools new Linux users miss most.
Actually, iTunes is so popular that several open-source alternatives have been developed, and used even by seasoned Unix users. It's these alternatives that we are going to talk about.
AmaroK - Amarok is the program that started it all – bearing some resemblance to iTunes even in the days when iTunes wasn't very popular. It is an extremely extensible, KDE-based player, with a huge list of features. It can play and organize almost every audio format and has almost every portable player management feature you could imagine.
Amarok also includes Last.fm support, as well as the ability to retrieve cover art, artist information and song lyrics. Amarok includes extensive features for sorting, tagging and finding music, both online through Last.fm and offline, among your own files, using tools like Moodbar. In fact, this is what its tagline – Rediscover Your Music – refers to.
On the downside, it should be said that Amarok can be quite slow when indexing files. It is also KDE-based, and feels “wrong” when used with Gnome. Some users may also be disturbed by its inability to play DRM-protected songs – although it has Magnatune support, so non-DRM-ed music can be purchased.
Rhythmbox - Rhythmbox is one of the most popular players, especially after the Ubuntu team began including it as default. It has been inspired by iTunes from the very beginning of its development.
Rhythmbox can play most audio formats, using the gstreamer engine. Its library and playlist support is very well implemented and sensibly faster than Amarok. It also has support for Last.fm, and can be extended through plug-ins, of which several are already available.
However, Rhythmbox is not as advanced in development as Amarok is. iPod support is still experimental, and the more advanced tools from Amarok, like Moodbar, are not available. On the other hand, Rhythmbox is very tightly integrated with Gnome.
Exaile - Exaile is an attempt to clone Amarok's interface and functions, but in a Gnome/GTK-based interface rather than a KDE/Qt-based one. Exaile is written in Python using pygtk, making it very easy to extend (probably easier than both Amarok and Rhythmbox).
It includes Last.fm support, optional iPod and DAAP music sharing, as well as automatic lyrics and album art fetching. Some support for tagging music exists, but it is quite primitive.
However, Exaile is somewhat slower than Amarok and Rhythmbox when indexing files, and it is quite new, meaning that it has a rather small userbase.
Lsongs is Linspire's own response to other solutions. It is also written in Python, making it quite extensible, but it has a low userbase so there are not too many available plugins. Lsongs has very good support for portable players, and can quickly burn music CDs. A notable feature is its ability to share music with other computers running Lsongs or iTunes.
Although it supports most music formats, Lsongs doesn't have support for the more exotic ones. Since it is maintained by Linspire, many open source fans are reluctant to it, thus making it less popular than its features could lead it to be.
XMMS - The X MultiMedia System is the grandfather of Linux music players. It has a very extensive range of supported formats and plug-ins, allowing its features to be considerably extended. By default, however, it is very limited, being little more than a Winamp clone. Its development team also considers it to be deprecated (in favor of the more sophisticated XMMS2), which means that many distributions are dropping it.
Conclusions are hard to draw quickly. Amarok and Rhythmbox seem to be the most popular choices, and have the most features, but many users consider them to be bloated, and trying other alternatives may prove fruitful to everyone. Rhythmbox is my personal favorite, but it's a highly subjective opinion.
Popularity: 9% [?]
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...Links you may find interesting -