jensen Are you pondering what I'm pondering?

Me and my desktop music players have always had a love-hate relationship.

When I started out listening to music on my computer I started with Winamp, like most people. It was light, fast and easy. At that time I did not really care much about the way my music files were organized on my hard drive nor whether all relevant ID tags were filled in correctly.

When I started using Linux I started using XMMS, which looked and worked like Winamp and I was happy. I always felt Rhythmbox was too big for my needs and I did not like the way it looked with the weird browser at the top.

Than Banshee came. Banshee was good looking, light, easy to manage and had decent playlist support and I don't really care about the fact that it's made using Mono. At that time for me it was a revelation. I also started to take great care of the way my files were organized and that the ID tags were filled in correctly. This was a lot of manual work but I simply did not know any better.

Around 2006 I found myself using Windows alot and I gently made the transition to iTunes. I also bought an iPod so the choice was obvious. iTunes also introduced me to a real media player and library. It automated my file organization, had support for cover albums, lots of playlist features and iPod synchronization.

When I went back to Linux Banshee had made a drastic user interface change, looking more like Rhythmbox and it lacked decent compilation album and iPod support. Some things worked, but more often it didn't.

On my quest for a decent iTunes alternative i tried out various programs, sometimes combining multiple to achieve what I wanted. When I stumbled upon Amarok 1.4 it immediately became my first choice. It has great collection support, iPod synchronization, album cover management and so on. Everything was working great and I was happy.

When the Ubuntu folks released Jaunty they included Amarok 2.0. To this day I still don't understand why they did that since it lacks about every feature a decent music player should have these days. Luckily a PPA archive of Amarok 1.4 was available which provided me with a way to continue using my favorite player.

A few days ago the guys from Banshee released version 1.5. All looked good and I decided to give it a try. Everything seems to work nicely but the file organization was not really how I would like it to be. After some bug reporting someone wrote a nice patch which I applied to a local copy of the repository and I must say that I am really pleased. As of today I imported my entire music collection and I removed Amarok 1.4.

I really hope they can keep up the good work like that and, with some minor bugs left, I think I found my new desktop music player.