I must concede I find MC's feature set broader than Amarok, but is it a classic case of Pareto principle corollary? 20 % of the features are used 80% of the times and the rest 80% used only 20% times.
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Yes, and that 20% is getting done pretty well, i think it will take at leat a cpl of generations of Amarok to get this down properly. I was looking at their forums wondering how well CUE support is. CUE files are used when you listen to mixed music or live shows where you want the playback to be gaples.. now if you use something like FLAC which is already gapless then there isn't an issue but if its mp3, then it needs to be ripped as one big file with a CUE text file. Amarok can play cue files but it can't save individual cue items in the library or treat them like they were virtual tracks which to a certain extent they are.
I wouldnt dream of getting tied down to backing up my tags/album art on a proprietary library system. I would rather have them sit on as open a platform as possible.
You can export the library to either csv, or xml files (preferred) for each tag of every file in the library. So if you migrate in the future to another player it needs to be able to read this or a transformed version of it and can import everything, tags and all into its library. So not too tied up there.
I don't have problems with fragmentation either - ext3 takes care of that. I am not aware of a reason I must be botherred about corruption and the need to keep doing checksums of my music library. As for backup, simple scripts that copy across the delta of a snapshot from one partition to the other do the job for me.
I use NTFS, journalled FS just like ext3. I defrag to keep things contiguous so playback does not suffer too much. I dont run on a very fast PC so this works out better.
Checking file integrity is more a security measure against a HD going bad, they keep getting bigger nowadays and i sometimes suspect the quality. Its not unusal to hear of drives dying in one fell swoop or progressively getting bad. Checksums protect against that. Run monthly before a backup is done. That's the biggest reason for me not to write tags back to the files as you can't tell good changes from bad.
The reason I wasn't quite willing to compare to free solution to a proprietary non-free one is, the features are primarily dictated by the customers in the latter, whereas in the former it's the developers that are the primary users and they put in features that _they_ need the most. Works for me. Works for millions of other linux users too.
All depends how responsive the devs are to user requests, if its customer driven there is already a stronger interest, thats not too say everything asked for gets implemented but in comparision to other free players like iTunes of WMP, the feedback & follow through is much quicker. Getting the feel right is a non-trivial thing to do with apps like these as there are so many posibilities to do just one thing. Even if you have the best devs on the planet it takes a lot of to & fro with users to get that feel just right. And just when you got that done, something new appears on the scene and the users are back screaming to have that feature implemented as well. Rinse & repeat 🙂
There are almost daily builds with bugfixes, new stuff to try out, debug etc. Its a very organic process, sometimes its frustrating as it feels like the product is never complete. It has a teaser just before they go to the next version and that gets devloped more. The lead dev on this product is the guy that created Monkey's Audio or APE.
Apart from the ability to handle very huge library sizes, I still don't see too many reasons to spend $40 to acquire a closed, proprietary feature set thats not cross platform and doesn't have too much use for your average audiophile. If I DO have 40$ to spare, I would save up some more and get myself a pair of senheissers 🙂 .
And thats fine, i might be coming over like an evangelist only because i had so much fun with this app over the years. Unless you feel constrained with your current app, there is a rarely a reason to look elsewhere. The biggest plus i can think of is that you get to concentrate more on the music, and how you want to manage it as it shields some of the complexity that open source gives you. Of course then you lose a little flexibitly but its a balanced tradeoff.
In my mind this app is still only 85% there, hopefully in a cpl of years its gets closer to the ideal.
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Yes, and that 20% is getting done pretty well, i think it will take at leat a cpl of generations of Amarok to get this down properly. I was looking at their forums wondering how well CUE support is. CUE files are used when you listen to mixed music or live shows where you want the playback to be gaples.. now if you use something like FLAC which is already gapless then there isn't an issue but if its mp3, then it needs to be ripped as one big file with a CUE text file. Amarok can play cue files but it can't save individual cue items in the library or treat them like they were virtual tracks which to a certain extent they are.
I wouldnt dream of getting tied down to backing up my tags/album art on a proprietary library system. I would rather have them sit on as open a platform as possible.
You can export the library to either csv, or xml files (preferred) for each tag of every file in the library. So if you migrate in the future to another player it needs to be able to read this or a transformed version of it and can import everything, tags and all into its library. So not too tied up there.
I don't have problems with fragmentation either - ext3 takes care of that. I am not aware of a reason I must be botherred about corruption and the need to keep doing checksums of my music library. As for backup, simple scripts that copy across the delta of a snapshot from one partition to the other do the job for me.
I use NTFS, journalled FS just like ext3. I defrag to keep things contiguous so playback does not suffer too much. I dont run on a very fast PC so this works out better.
Checking file integrity is more a security measure against a HD going bad, they keep getting bigger nowadays and i sometimes suspect the quality. Its not unusal to hear of drives dying in one fell swoop or progressively getting bad. Checksums protect against that. Run monthly before a backup is done. That's the biggest reason for me not to write tags back to the files as you can't tell good changes from bad.
The reason I wasn't quite willing to compare to free solution to a proprietary non-free one is, the features are primarily dictated by the customers in the latter, whereas in the former it's the developers that are the primary users and they put in features that _they_ need the most. Works for me. Works for millions of other linux users too.
All depends how responsive the devs are to user requests, if its customer driven there is already a stronger interest, thats not too say everything asked for gets implemented but in comparision to other free players like iTunes of WMP, the feedback & follow through is much quicker. Getting the feel right is a non-trivial thing to do with apps like these as there are so many posibilities to do just one thing. Even if you have the best devs on the planet it takes a lot of to & fro with users to get that feel just right. And just when you got that done, something new appears on the scene and the users are back screaming to have that feature implemented as well. Rinse & repeat 🙂
There are almost daily builds with bugfixes, new stuff to try out, debug etc. Its a very organic process, sometimes its frustrating as it feels like the product is never complete. It has a teaser just before they go to the next version and that gets devloped more. The lead dev on this product is the guy that created Monkey's Audio or APE.
Apart from the ability to handle very huge library sizes, I still don't see too many reasons to spend $40 to acquire a closed, proprietary feature set thats not cross platform and doesn't have too much use for your average audiophile. If I DO have 40$ to spare, I would save up some more and get myself a pair of senheissers 🙂 .
And thats fine, i might be coming over like an evangelist only because i had so much fun with this app over the years. Unless you feel constrained with your current app, there is a rarely a reason to look elsewhere. The biggest plus i can think of is that you get to concentrate more on the music, and how you want to manage it as it shields some of the complexity that open source gives you. Of course then you lose a little flexibitly but its a balanced tradeoff.
In my mind this app is still only 85% there, hopefully in a cpl of years its gets closer to the ideal.