Thursday 23 October 2008

The music players for Ipod in Linux

A little bit jealous of Mac users, because those stupid people have a smart itune.
Compared with clever us, linux users, we have to confront the bloody true world.

Here are my favorite music players. So far, none of them can be called perfect.

1. Rhythmbox 0.11.6
As a 'music' player supporting podcasting, for audio ones, it works very very well, just like itune, the episodes can be marked new or old. super!
And support Chinese characters.
But it can not do the right things of video podcast transferring to ipod, even though it can play video now using visualization.

2. Banshee 1.4
Almost can do everything, including video podcast transfering to ipod, and a sync button.
But 1) not support transferring music or videos with Chinese file name correctly. Yes, you can transfer them, but when you reconnect ipod, most of the songs in ipod can not be recognized. Maybe the database in ipod is destroyed by the Chinese characters; Except everytime you re-sync your music library in ipod.
And 2) Doesn't mark the item is new or listened. (compared with Rhythmbox and amarok)

3. Songbird 1.0
Great products and ideas from mozilla. In the current 0.70 version, the synchronaztion works. (add something to tell ipod the item is video, so ipod nano 3rd gen will not see and hear any video podcasts)
And support Chinese characters.
But it has same shortcoming with firefox 1) too much memory usage, because of internal web engine embeded. 2) Without new/old marks in Ipod. Also, 3) It can not watch folders, but this feature is coming in half of year, feb 2009. 4) Very weak functionality for podcasting.

4. Amarok
Mark new or old, video podcasting and transfering, supporint Chinese characters. Only missing the sync button, but it can add the new podcast episodes to a queue, which collects all the items are waiting for transferring to ipod.
But 1) No sync button, have to manually sync each playlist, transfer episode and delete old episodes. 2) Very odd KDE interface and menu, difficult to find the right place to show what's in ipod libary and how to transfer or sync.

2 comments:

UK Cross said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
UK Cross said...

Banshee 1.3.2 add sync function and can read the files in ipod, I think this is because of sync.

Because it still can not watch folders and only can sync all musics in library. So watching fuction is not needed in this case.

2 things needed:
1) new/old marks for ipod podcasts
2) Chinese characters problem. Still a lot of music files with non-english file name can not list correctly in ipod.

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