Comments on: The Quest For A Decent Music Player

By: An Update on the Music Player Quest | The Changelog

An Update on the Music Player Quest | The Changelog — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:13:37 +0000

[...] written a few times (parts 1, 2, 3) about my annoyance at music players. I’d come down to two finalists to consider: [...]

By: More Bumps on the Music Player Quest | The Changelog

More Bumps on the Music Player Quest | The Changelog — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:26:41 +0000

[...] a few days ago, I wrote about my failure to find a good music player. Since then, I’ve made some [...]

By: terah

terah — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:06:35 +0000

Cliff, sadly this all started with my innocent request. I wanted a new CD player for the kitchen, smaller than what we currently have & preferably one that would mount under the cabinets. Now I’m getting something that is geek-approved and John promises he’ll teach me how to use…

By: cliff

cliff — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:53:07 +0000

I can see I’m not equipped to be in this conversation but I will say you can talk to people my age and the ipod and such is when they got left behind. I have a cd player and no idea which of the 4 million products is next so I buy nothing and listen to AM radio.

By: Russ

Russ — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 22:06:17 +0000

I’ve used Rhythmbox with my iPod Nano for quite some time and haven’t run into the problems you describe. Something is going on…

By: TL

TL — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:09:58 +0000

I suggest buying a Cowon iAudio instead of iPod. Cowon even advertises Linux support in their web site. The players support Ogg Vorbis and Flac files.

http://www.cowonglobal.com/

By: Onkar

Onkar — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:16:32 +0000

Please change the title of you are post. It seems you are not looking for decent music player but a decent ipod manager software. Because your reviews have no mention about library management, crossfade support, easy to use interface, internet radio, UPnP, podcast etc. These I believe are the features of decent music player/manager.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:51:08 +0000

Try Hipo for iPod management and mpd/ncmpc (or sonata) for playing stuff. Works for me

By: glitsj16

glitsj16 — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 08:45:39 +0000

Hi, have you checked floola recently? Floola seems to have a prety broad feature set, hope it can be of some use.

By: jonathan

jonathan — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:47:03 +0000

Your comments about rhythmbox suggest that it was treating your ipod as a generic usb player – in particular, I’m pretty sure we’ve never used trash directories on ipods. I don’t know why it would have been doing this, but I’m sure we could figure it out quickly enough on IRC or bugzilla.

By: Alexander E. Patrakov

Alexander E. Patrakov — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:48:35 +0000

Have you tried putting rockbox on your iPod? Then it becomes a dumb mass storage device that understands all sorts of audio files and m3u playlists, and can be handled with “rsync -t”. No need for anything special.

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:18:09 +0000

No, that’s not it at all. I absolutely agree that Apple is as much into proprietary lock-down as Microsoft is, if not more so in many instances.

There is perfectly good iPod support on Linux — libgpod. It is, incidentally, behind the iPod support of gtkpod, amarok, rhythmbox, and listen. As seen from gtkpod, libgpod is quite capable and powerful.

What I’m seeing is more a lack of features, testing, and thoughtfulness on some of these. For instance: not letting someone choose the path for music when copying from the iPod to the PC has nothing to do with Apple and everything to do with that program. Ditto for weird display issues, broken dialogs, etc. They can all read the iPod just fine.

Now, iTunes corrupting my database: *that’s* an iPod communication issue!

By: ix

ix — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:47:08 +0000

when Microsoft doesnt suport open standards, its their fault. when Apple doesnt, apparently its the crapy-linux-reverse-engineering-attempt’s fault

By: carmen

carmen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:43:50 +0000

cmus is awesome

By: tshirtman

tshirtman — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:00:17 +0000

mt-daapd for sharing?

By: John Goerzen

John Goerzen — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:58:39 +0000

As an update:

I’ve just tried Amarok with KDE 4, and can state that its iPod browsing problems are gone.

Also, Banshee does now seem able to copy tracks to the PC, but without specifying where or how to name them.