fragility

So here i am, trying out amaroK 1.4.2. At first, when i saw the new features list i got all excited with the dynamic collection feature, but it’s not exactly what i wanted. I still have to try it better tough.

The thing is, i usually have just some songs on my laptop hard drive and my entire music collection on my external hard drive which i don’t always carry around. So when i start amarok and the external HD is not connected, those files go away from the collection. Yes, it should behave that way. No, i don’t want it to behave that way. And rescanning all the collection when i reconnect the external HD is a rather long process which i’d like to avoid.

The perfect solution would be to be able to have two separate collections. Kinda crazy i know. The solution amaroK gives me now (dynamic collections) are to be able to add songs to the playlist from an external device (media player, mass storage device). Which is not really nice, because when i browse the external HD connected this way trough amaroK, it doesn’t give a damn about metadata and only cares about directory structure and filenames. My collection is very well organized, but i wanted to browse metadata, not filenames. Maybe i’ll get used to this or maybe i’ll find another way to solve my problem.

Another feature that got a lot of love since the last version was the last.fm integration. Now we can listen directly to streams from neighbour radio, our own radio, tags radio, etc.

This is what i really love about amaroK: at each version you can really notice that some work was done and when you hear about new features that might be integrated it doesn’t mean they will be integrated in 2 or 3 versions, but will probably make it right to the next version.

In my eternal search of a music player that i can call “perfect”, i have now found Exaile, which is nothing more than a GTK+ version of my favorite music player, amaroK.

They say they don’t have an official release yet, but they already provide a .deb. Anyway, i’m using SVN. It uses Python and it’s based on WxWidgets.

It really feels like amaroK (just look at the screenshots), and it’s not very unstable, but it still needs a lot of work to be done. It looks promising, so i’ll keep an eye on it. However amaroK won’t be leaving my desktop anytime soon.