My Music Player History

Or - I may have finally settled on one!

Many years ago, when KDE3 was the only desktop environment I used, I also used all the KDE applications. Keep it in the ecosystem, right? So I used Amarok.

It was brilliant and did everything I wanted (aside from a weird problem that Amarok wouldn't let anything else use the sound after it had booted, so I couldn't play YouTube videos with sound) and then 2.0 came around.

Up until I was 20, all I had were the underpowered, dying offcast towers and laptops that my dad had replaced with better things. So when Amarok 2.0 hit, it slowed my system down considerably. As in, I couldn't run much beyond Amarok and even that was dodgy. So when I got my Win7 laptop, I switched to WMP, which...worked? I tried using Songbird as well, but my anti-virus decided that the gstreamer libraries for .wma were infected and wouldn't actually let me clean the files, just quarantined them.

Then when I got a new Linux tower, I tried Amarok again. It was still slow and over-bulky for me, so I went looking around in the repositories for other players, settling on Audacious for a while. It's still my main music player on my netbook purely because it is so lightweight and perfect for my needs with a smaller music collection. I also tried Clementine, which I did like but didn't seem as good as Amarok 1.4.

However, I still wanted a music player that had a bit more in the way of features. When I changed from KUbuntu to Linux Mint with Xfce, I gave Banshee a go. I've been using it for over 6 months, but it's got a horrible habit of crashing for no discernible reason.

So I did another round of "which music player do I try", and settled on RhythmBox. Which is running right now! It's pretty good so far. I was impressed that it analyzed my huge music collection quite quickly - took it less than 10 minutes to go through 90Gb of music. It seems like it has all the features I want in a music player - but more importantly it hasn't crashed yet!

Touch wood, etc.