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.