Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Amarok 1.4.10 review (still beats anything)

Good Features
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1. Smart Playlist (Dynamic, Smart, Radio Stream)
2. Podcast (bbc, lugradio etc)
3. Playing Behaviour (Collect Statistics e.g Favourite Tracks, Most Played Tracks, Favourite Artists, Favourite Genres etc)
4. Script Manager (Add many behaviours , and as you may have guessed as in KDE more scripts can be brought from web in just one click)
5. Cover Manager (Easily copy cover to media players. Fetch Missing Covers from Amazon)
6. Support radios (lastfm, shoutcast)
7. Queue Manager (How many times to play, when to play). (Can experiment with the playback, similar as Statistics on point 3)
8. Burn to cd using k3b
9. Cool File Browser
10. Listen and buy music from Magnitude
11. Connect music players
12. Lyrics of songs, artist information from wikipedia
13. Track suggestion
14. Remove duplicate and dead entries
15. Equaliser
16. Support scores and ratings of songs
17. Many downloadable styles(themes)
18. Smart On Screen Display (if you like)
19. Support different back end engines (xine, gstreamer)
20. Support different audio drivers (pulseaudio, alsa, oss)
21. Support for proxy server with login
22. Support for different back end database for storing different info (sqlite is default)
23. Watch music folders for changes
24. Suggest lyrics on web if does not find on the plugin(which can be changed from script manager), for that support available browsers
25. Global shortcuts (Control songs playback from what ever work you are doing, even if your monitor is turned off. e.g Win+X = Play, Win+V = Stop, Win+C = Play/Pause, Win+B = Next Track)
26. Only concentrates on audio playback (for video playback scripts may be added to play on other players e.g kmplayer)
27. Play audio cd
28. Redo/undo your previous selection (remembers playing history)

Bad Features
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1. Does not advertise about it's features (some other players sell themselves by advertising some of above features)
2. Not native to Gnome (One of first things Gnome Users install when they install the OS is amarok)
3. Very addictive (if you don't like current song, you keep on pressing Win+B), and keep on reading lyrics.

Wish-list
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1. Equaliser should get more realistic
2. last.fm like station search on the basis of tag and artist
3. Web browsing should be enabled with flash support (play youtube videos), since video support should come in new release
4. Seek bar should be as long as width of the player or smart enough then the current version
5. Make me a cup of coffee (I can't think anything more. I think if these features are added amarok will continue the open source culture (if development stops the project is dead, something else will overtake you)
6. Radio bandwidth selection (e.g 64k)