Tale of Three Music Players

Once upon a time I used Amarok. Those were the good days. MySql Databases with statistics, etc. Then Amarok 2 came along. I figured out a way to go back to my former love, with the capabilities instead of cheesy looks.
But this didn't last forever, for then I got a Eee PC, and due to my laziness, I didn't install amarok1.4 (the good one). Instead, since I had lost my database, I tested Rhythmbox.

Rhythmbox was good to me for a while. We played many a piece of music together. Then a friend encouraged me to test out Banshee. Banshee did scores just like Amarok did! So I tried it out.

Banshee had everything I would want in a music player. It had scores (though not nearly as good as I had remembered amarok), it handled libraries for videos, and even though I couldn't embed my tags in the videos, it tagged the videos. What Rhythmbox didn't have was a good library organization, and Banshee handled that too! (kinda... it sorta did it while it was going instead of all at once like I would have wanted... leaving half my music sorted and the other half messy in the same folder).

But Banshee was still new, and so didn't have a good relationship with mp3s. In fact, my poor flash drive was being read/written the whole time the song was playing, so I decided that this was reason enough to go back to Rhythmbox. After all, it's the tried and true that keep us going. Besides, Rhythmbox could handle me dropping new files into the folder right away.

Soon, I bought a CD. Without proper CD ripping equipment, I was forced to copy the *.wav files off the CD, and then encode to mp3. But the mp3s were tagless.
So I tagged them in Rhythmbox.
But Rhythmbox couldn't sort them. Instead I had to deal with "Track 1.mp3" files. Which was unacceptable. If I do this with another CD, the files would get replaced!

Then I discovered a program. EasyTag. EasyTag easily tags the mp3s and sorts them.

So I ran it. The mp3s was now organized.

But my playcounts!! They were gone! Rhythmbox couldn't handle the files being in a new location!


So then I remembered my former love. Even without MySql Amarok is superior in all functionality.


Amarok:

• Score and Playcounts (which happen to be smarter then Banshee)


• Scripts/Plugins


• Lyric support (you know... for my Swahili/Kikuyu music)


• Last.fm Support (+ queuing if offline)


• Smart Playlists


• Good Random tool for Playlist


• Organize Mode


• Album Cover Organizer


• (+ A lot of other options.. in 1.4)

Rhythmbox:

• Playcount


• Hot Scanning


• Very stable


• Random tool for Now Playing


• Lyric searching


• Last.fm support (+ Queuing if offline)


• Easy to add covers to CURRENTLY playing song

Banshee:

• Playcount/Score (inferior)


• Lyric support


• Unstable


• Last.fm


• No organize mode, but it organizes...kinda


• Video Library!