Posts Tagged ‘Music’

Amarok Vs songbird

December 6th, 2008 admin

Amarok and Songird are considered two best audio players in Linux and here is a short comparison between the two.

Amarok

This is a music player provided with KDE and is a one of the most popular and powerful media players available for Linux and has complete integrity with other applications of KDE.

Songbird

This is a comparatively new player with its first version being released recently.The developers call it the firefox of media players.Lets find out if it lives up to its name.

Starting with some of the basics features :

Feature Amarok Songbird
Manufacturer KDE songbirdnest.com
Download size 6MB 28.7 Mb approx
Type Free and opensource Free and opensource
Current version 2.0 1..0
License GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2 GNU General Public License, Version 2 (GPLv2


1.Looks and interface

Amarok has got plain interface of a media player and has a little options for customization of the looks but the the themes for the context window make a lot of difference.

Songbird on he other hand has got superb looks and at the first sight may be confused with iTunes.The themes make it look more fresh and lively.The switching between different themes without even giving a pause to the music is just so great feature.

Songbird wins here.

Screen shots:

blog2amarok

blog1

songbird

2.Sound quality

Amarok runs on both Gstreamer and Xine.Xine is much better than gstreamer .I personally felt the quality of sound generated by songbird was better than amarok.No clear winner this time.

3.Scripts available

Amarok has been in market for long and has a lot of fan following so it has got more number of scripts available(click here for a list of cool scripts).Whereas the scripts of songbird are less in number but are more efficient in have better quality specially the themes.Amarok gets an edge here.

4.Integration with applications

Amarok being a product of KDE has the capability of integrating well with all other desktop applications.Also the way its scripts communicate with applications like IM and twitter are great.

Songbird has a long way to go before it comes even near to amarok in this area.

5.Browser integration

Songbird has a complete firefox built in and can be even used to browser the web in a new tab.This is one of the reasons of it being called the firefox of media players.Whereas amarok is can be used only to access the Wikipedia page of the artist and the links in the page.

6.Cover fetcher

The cover fetcher of amarok gets a 10 out of 10 here.It gets the covers from the net with a high efficiency without any constraints of the language of the song.Wheres I was unable to use it with songbird even after installing 2 additional scripts.Amarok wins again

7.Memory Usage

This has been a big issue with Songbird since at times the memory usage jumps to severral times the normal usage.It uses twice as taken by amarok.Moreover the search engine for songs is too sluggish and so is the cover flow.Its the biggest drawback of Songbird.This is expected to be resolved in future(check for updates)Whereas amarok never has any such problem.

Final Verdict

Amarok is the winner by a little margin but is expected to face tough competition from songbird in future.While for those too comfortable with iTunes,songbird is a good option provided they are ready to compromise on some issues.Finally if songbird is the firefox of media players then amarok is opera!!

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Amarok-Reclaim Your Music

October 14th, 2008 Amol Gupta



Amarok is the music player for linux.Well it does not seem to the normal music player from the very first look and its isnt anyways.This is the best music player I ever came across in my life.On configuring for the first time it looks a bit like iTunes.Wilth all the audio formats supported and gstreamer sound engine by default it gives all the basic functions of a music player.But there are several other features that make it a great music player. Some of them I like the most are:


1.Search for music.Like the iTunes you can search all the music by refering to anyhing like the title,artist,album,time added etc.

2.It keeps a well updated database of the music and with the entries such as number of times the song has been played,last played and also the retundent and dead entries which can be removed by a single click.

3.The best feature is the Cover manager.I dont know hoiw it accomplishes the task but surely does a good job.By just one click one can find all the thumbnails/album cover for the music collection.And its highly efficient (I got nearly all of them even for the Hindi and spanish albums)

4.Another cool feature is the context manager where one finds all the information of the song such as the lyrics of the song(for all songs of all times!!),the wikipedia page of the artist(if available),other songs by the same artist and if one is not satisfied with hte lyrics, there are a lot of scripts for gertting lyrics each functioning in a different way.

5.If you are using gtalk via pidgin you surely must be looking for displaying current music track as the status ,well thats just a script away!!

6.well another script named “save lyrics to ID3″ attaches the lyrics to the mp3 file so that you need not download the lyrics again when you transfer your music.

7.Looks of amarok are surely killer.Switch over to the funky monkey theme and feel the difference.Moreover there are hundreds of killer themes for the context viewer which surely give an out of the world experience.

8.iPod users can directly make use of amarok as iTunes to transfer music and when I say transfer it means transfer in both directions,yes and you always thought transfer from iPod to PC was mission impossible!!!


9.Radio in amarok is as simple as plug and play with so many options available.

10.Music keys on konqurer.

11.update twitter with the song you play!

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