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

Amarok

• Version 1.4 can’t sort an iPod’s library by genre. Oh, and any version less than 2.x isn’t supported upstream anymore.
• Version 2 has mysteriously lost: the ability to see an iPod’s playlists, the ability to store a playlist in an m3u file and automatically keep it up to date, the ability to sync the Amarok statistics to an iPod, and more. Reminds me of the Gnome print dialog fiasco. “We’ve removed features. It’s better! Really! Oh, and we won’t support the old version either.”
• The entire Amarok 2 interface is very slow and sluggish.

So just as I was about to post about how nicely Amarok’s playlist saving works with Firefly, here I’m instead posting how I can’t use Amarok because it can’t even do what Rhythmbox does with an iPod anymore.

Banshee

• Can’t play most of my iPod tracks due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug.
• The only player other than gtkpod that groks iPod advanced playlists.
• No way to tell it where to put tracks copied from iPod to PC.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.

Listen

• Now does actually see the iPod and seems to play it well.
• When you try to copy tracks from the iPod to the PC, it appears to work and gives visual cues that it’ll work, but silently does nothing.
• Strangely thinks that every track is a different album with some albums.
• Strangely doesn’t let you sort when you’re looking at a playlist.
• Doesn’t let you set a rating.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t see an iPod at all if it’s in fstab.
• Won’t play much of my iPod’s music due to a long-standing case sensitivity bug (since August 2008).
• Won’t let me sort anything when viewing a playlist.

Conclusions

I’ve renamed some of the directories on my iPod so they work with Banshee and Rhythmbox. I’m going to try Banshee for awhile and see how I like it.

So I have an iPod, and I have several PCs. I have the 60GB iPod, which is enough to hold my entire music collection. I want to have my music there, and on the PCs, and sync it all together: if I rate something 4 stars one place, rate it 4 stars everywhere. If I add music to my PCs, add it to the iPod, and in the same playlists.

Nothing like that appears to exist.

So here are my reviews of some of the Linux-based music playing systems. I am not all that happy with any of them. Actually, these aren’t reviews so much as they are wishlist (or more serious) bug lists.

Amarok

Last looked at it just before KDE 4.

• Copied tracks to iPod OK, but couldn’t put them in a playlist on the iPod.
• Poor sorting of stuff on the iPod. One giant list of albums, and no sorting of the playlist.
• Did seem rather stable.
• Showed album art from local collection only — not from the iPod.
• No apparent actual syncing; just copying back and forth.

Banshee 1.4.x

• Claims to sync with the iPod, but doesn’t actually document what it does anywhere. Messed up my iPod when I tried it.
• Mysteriously can only copy tracks from PC to the iPod; can’t copy tracks from iPod to the PC.
• Rescan library wouldn’t remove missing tracks. Not sure if it did anything at all.

Listen

• Couldn’t ever get it to even see the iPod. Complex interactions with hal. Numerous bug reports with complicated workarounds — or not. Fail.

Exaile

• Bug in the box that asks where the iPod is. Couldn’t get it to see the iPod.

Rhythmbox

• Doesn’t actually delete iPod tracks. Moved them to /ipod/.Trash-1000. Caused my iPod to fill up until I noticed that.
• Doesn’t update the iTunes DB at all, rendering new tracks invisible to the iPod.

gtkpod

• The best, most fully-featured iPod support out there. Far better than iTunes even.
• Docs claim to have some sort of iPod-to-PC syncing, but it is poorly documented and appears to break if the absolute path to the music on the PC ever changes — and doesn’t support more than one PC because it writes the paths to a file on the iPod.
• No built-in player, but can send tracks to xmms, xine, audacious, or the like.

Other

I have had brief experiences with the popular proprietary software such as iTunes. The one time I tried iTunes, it ironically scrambled most of the metadata on my iPod, especially the playcounts and the data that said whether or not I had listened to the podcasts. I am none too enamored with other Windows software either, and of course all this stuff is proprietary.

So, I guess music players are like mail readers. They all suck. Some just suck a little less.

We’re looking for an MP3 player for our kitchen. Ideally, it would be a standalone device that can browse and play music from our server using Wifi. It should have its own speakers and a reasonably small footprint. If it has an FM tuner, that’s a plus too.

I’ve tried searching, and found things such as the Squeezebox. But ones that are decent at this task seem to be in the $200-$300 range. That’s trange, because TV devices that do this are actually cheaper!

I’ve tried Googling, and can’t seem to craft good search terms.

Any ideas?