iTunes or Amarok?
6th of April 2007
I don't use iTunes to buy music online with Apple. Neither do I use Amarok to buy music online with Magnatune so if you care about stuff like that my opinion my matter less.
I do however use both iTunes and Amarok a lot. When I'm at home by my G5 iMac I use iTunes and when I'm at work I use Amarok on my Ubuntu laptop. My first reactions when I started using these pieces of software were: iTunes looks great; Amarok looks ugly. iTunes is pretty good but the more I'm using these two different players the more I realize how much better Amarok is.
The reason I like Amarok over iTunes is not because iTunes isn't good but because it lacks certain features. Yes you read right. Features. Sure, good software usability is about avoiding features and I still subscribe to this. For example, I use Gnome on my Ubuntu. But if you use something as much as I use my MP3 player, you start to appreciate the features more and more. Here's what I love about Amarok that iTunes can't do:
- I can control Amarok from any window without needing to open and focus on Amarok with the Windows key. For example, I'm sitting here in Firefox and want to fast forward to the next track: press Windowskey + B. Or I get a call and want to pause the music without having to tell me caller "hang on, I'm just going to find iTunes and press the pause button". With Amarok, no matter where it's hidden I just press Windowskey + C.
- I can play random songs and I can play random albums. Playing random albums is great when you have your entire collection as your playlist.
- I can queue tracks when in random mode meaning that for example if I like to have things in random mode but want to hear this or that song next I just right click and select "Queue track" and it gets a little tag next to it. I can even queue several songs which means it becomes a shuffle mode but with a few VIP songs being played first.
- It doesn't force me to put songs into iTunes Library which is just annoying if you want to rsync your songs between computers.
- A nice unintrusive popup shows for a few short seconds each time a new songs starts (with the cover art). (I'm sure there are tools for this for iTunes too but I didn't get any out of the box)
- There's one quick search for searching inside your collection and one quick search for searching within the playlist. Obviously you don't need two when you're playing your entire playlist or you're just playing one song at a time. This feature might sound a bit weird but it's damn useful when you get into it.
- Amarok still gives songs a name even if the ID3 tags are blank. This is a known annoyance with iTunes that might have been solved already but I have numerous albums that are shown as Track1, Track2 etc. on iTunes but with names from the filename in Amarok.
Apart from those major features there are several other little difference between the two players but those are minor cosmetic things and the more I look at the two players the less I think iTunes looks that much better.
I remember reading that Amarok soon works on OS X. Now, instead of blathering more about how much better Amarok is, I'm going to go and investigate my options for forgetting about iTunes.
Some last words...
Did I mention that Amarok is free and Open Source too and scriptable with Python? How can you not love that?
Comment
One thing you did not mention, but is perhaps my favorite feature of Amarok, is the use of last.fm streams. Amarok supports all the main features of the last.fm client, all within the main UI. It is possible to add custom last.fm streams to the 'playlists' tab, so that you can have your favorite Metal, Rock, or even Classical playlists just a click away.
1. Install an iTunes controller. I use Butler.
2. Preferences > Playback > Shuffle > Albums
3. Party Shuffle.
4. Preferences > Advances > General >"Keep iTunes Music folder organized" and "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library"
5. Again, there are many add-ons for that functionality.
6. If I'm looking at my Library, iTunes searches that. If I'm looking at a playlist, iTunes searches that. Am I missing something?
7. The only time I've ever seen a MP3 named Track 1 is when it was being ripped, and was not found on CDDB (or whatever lookup service iTunes uses).
Yeaaah Amarok rocks at first I wasn't used to it and my first impression was it was ugly but it's way better than iTunes......
Men, if you have problems with ID3 i would recommend you search for KID3 on google.
It is a fantastic program to edit your id3 tags....
Have a look...
And yes, I do agree with you: Amarok is fantastic. I still do not agree with you, it is better than ITunes, but only because I don't feel the need to test another player, since Amarok does *exactly* everything I need, and what I don't need!
I totally agree on this. itunes can't even handle my music collection... Try throwing 600GB of q1 vbr encoded mp3s at itunes and watch it die a painful death (along with the computer you are running it on). This is because itunes caches all it's metadata in damned xml file. Great for a few gigs of music, but not with this amount. I can throw this whole collection at Amarok and it handles it without issue since it uses sqlite (default) or mysql for metadata storage (my god, the sanity).
I have come to loathe itunes for it's bits of complete lame, like not being able to make a playlist out of daapd share. Why??? On the flip side, I can add anything to an Amarok playlist, no matter it's source.
Amarok is just far more usable for just about every case, except simple "i want to play x song" cases. I'll take Amarok over itunes any day...
Okay this article is old, but still I feel the need to leave a note here.
I don't agree with this "amarok being ugly" thing. It looks the way your KDE looks, but since you don't have it on your Ubuntu, which comes with Gnome, it takes the standard design of Qt. So, install kcontrol and choose a nice theme, or search for a Qt theme engine which links the GTK look and feel to Qt.
"I can queue tracks when in random mode meaning that for example if I like to have things in random mode but want to hear this or that song next I just right click and select "Queue track""... sounds a lot like party shuffle.
"It doesn't force me to put songs into iTunes Library"... AFAIK with iTunes you can keep your songs wherever you like. I sure haven't put mine into the standard location, even though I let it keep the music folder organized.