Zero_Dogg’s blog

Since some people seemed a bit interested in my opinions on the various music players and music managers I’ll go through a few of them – beginning with quod libet.

The initial interface looks like this:

In my opinion its interface is less than elegant. It devotes almost the entire interface to the list of tracks available and a tiny portion to a playlist-lookalike thing called the queue. Searching the library requires a pop-up window which has to be dug out of the menu.
I could not immedietly find any way to have it submit my tracks to my last.fm profile, nor did I find any way to make the player harvest album covers – not a requirement ofcourse, but it does look nice. Lyrics browser was also a bit too hidden.

Here is one screenshot of amaroK using a GTK/GNOME lookalike theme:

Information about the currently playing album easily within reach and the lyrics are just a tab away. Here is the amaroK collection browser, it takes up alot less space than that of Quod Libet and is imho much more elegant and easier to use:

Now I know quod libet is suppose to be customizeable, but I couldn’t find a way to make it look this good, if you know one, don’t hesitate to comment (link a screenshot too perhaps?)

Note also that I’m a GNOME follower, which is why I want to look at the GTK and GNOME alternatives for something better or at least as good.

I’m currently using amaroK. Now that’s a great player, and software HAS to be great for me to use a KDE program. Now, I have a music player, sure. The problem I have with amaroK is that it’s a KDE app. It brings along kded and dcop. That’s the bad part, kded crashes, dcop brings along alot of junk during startup that I don’t want, and it’s QT – so it doesn’t look as good as my GTK apps. KDE software is fine for KDE users, but KDE software is too bloated and such for other users. I’m still using amaroK, but I’d wish I could get something more. Now flame me, kick me, punch me – I’m still not going to say KDE sucks. I don’t like KDE, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. But it shouldn’t mean that I can’t be allowed to prefer GTK/GNOME apps over KDE/QT.

I’ve tried quodlibet, it might be good, but it isn’t what I want, doesn’t have the features of amaroK that I like, nor an interface as easy to use as amaroK. I like the amaroK interface.

Rhythmbox doesn’t provide the same as amaroK, it gets too much in my way.

Okay, this rant is over, don’t take it too seriously. I’m happy with amaroK, but I’d really wish there’d be a good GTK/GNOME replacement for it, but, there isn’t – at least not for me, there might be for you.

I’m tired of mozilla stuff (wow, you didn’t know that now did you). So I’ve tried the last month to get rid of Thunderbird the last few months, I tried Evolution, but evolution was way too bloated for me, and now I tried Sylpheed Claws.

It turns out, I like Sylpheed claws (all parts except the spam filter, I’ll get to that). For instance the filtering is better, I like the GNOME/GTK integration better. It can autodetect ways to create a filter from a message. Now, spam filter, that’s tricky. It has a spamassassin plugin. That’s all fine ofcourse, the problem is that spamassassin is S L O W. It takes ages to process one mail. If you’ve got any hints on how to get this horribly slow thing to work faster PLEASE comment :P.

Anyway, right now I’ve got rid of Mozilla completely. I’ve dropped Firefox and I’ve dropped Thunderbird. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are both good and solid apps, and I don’t hesitate to recommend either one of them to other people – but they are just not right for me.

I used the tools/tbird2syl.py script from the Sylpheed Claws CVS to convert my thunderbird mails to sylpheed claws in case anyone else wants to too.