I’m trying to find the “perfect” music manager for me. I use Audacity for just playing a file, but it handles playlists like Winamp 2.x (to be fair, Audacity is forked from XMMS, which is a Winamp clone), and it’s a bit clumsy to not have smart playlists, plus it takes a dog’s age to load files that are located on another drive, or at least if it’s formatted FAT32, it does. Fine if all I want to do is play a few songs while I’m folding laundry, but if I’m busy and need “automatic” music for a period of hours, I’d have to load the files, choose the files from one or more directories, select them and add them. If I’m busy, I’m in a hurry and not too fussy about the specific songs, just the general style, so a smart playlist is perfect, and I don’t want to fuck around with picking individual songs.

Rhythmbox comes installed by default in Ubuntu, integrates nicely with the desktop because it automatically takes on the Gnome theme being used, and overall, it’s pretty damned good. It does do smart playlists by whatever criterion I specify, fetches album art (and allows me to drag-and-drop custom cover art if it can’t find the right image on the web), and if you activate the plugin, it can fetch lyrics. If it can’t find any, you can add them yourself (handy for my non-English stuff). Interface is user-friendly and easy to navigate, and I can pretty much sort the display the way I want (I choose grouped by genre, then sorted by artist name, removing album titles/song length/stuff like that). Inexplicably, what Rhythmbox does not seem to do–or if it does, I can’t find the goddamned setting–is automatically update when I add new stuff, move stuff or edit tags for stuff I have already. I can manually add the folder, but if all I’ve done is add a dozen tracks by Alizée to a directory containing 600 songs, I don’t want to scan the whole goddamned directory all over again, then have it (automatically) remove songs it already “knows” about. It should automatically check the directories on startup and see whether anything new has been added, or anything removed, update any tags that have been changed, and update any appropriate smart playlists (like those set by genre). It should do this without getting in my face, hogging CPU or RAM, and without bothering me. It doesn’t. When I add new music, I want to listen to it, not sit here, scanning the directory so I can select and play the appropriate playlist.

Although I’ve always heard great things about Amarok, I decided instead to try Exaile. In part because the name is kinda cool, and in part because I’d seen it described as, “like Amarok, only better”. If I ever find the person who said that, I’m gonna kick him in the nuts (Linux user, so in all probability, a guy). I suppose that if I were the sort of person who wants to listen to Robbie Williams’ Intensive Care or Rush’s Moving Pictures, Exaile might be just the thing…but I’m not that kind of person. I don’t listen to an album, I listen to my music collection like a radio. Different tracks by different artists, but with something in common. I might be in the mood for 70s pop, or swing, or heavy metal, or classical, but I don’t want to listen to an entire album by the same artist…yet that’s how Exaile sorts the music. I can create smart playlists by artist, genre, or whatever suits my fancy, but if I want to take a quick look at what I’ve got in a particular directory, I’m gonna be clicking a lot of arrows because the closest I can get to sorting the way I want is to tell it to group by artist, and then by album, and then by track. Not particularly helpful, since I’m a lazy tagger, and very often, the album title is “Unknown”. If I have only one song by a particular artist or group because it’s the only one I like, I don’t care what album it’s on because….I don’t have the fucking album, since I didn’t buy it, since I didn’t want the rest of the songs. This setup is for people who always buy CDs, not those of us who most often want only a track or two from a particular artist or group. Also, it needs to stop popping up that stupid window-thing that tells me what I’m playing. It’s my music–I already know what I’m playing! It does allow me to use custom cover art if it can’t find any (I deliberately used a non-North American album to test it), but there isn’t an easy way to edit tags. I can view tag information, and it looks like I can probably edit tags, but couldn’t quickly find a way to add the album name, since I’d forgot to tag it for Alizée.

Finding Exaile lacking, I decided to give Amarok a shot. Maybe “like Amarok, only better” meant that the annoyances from Exaile weren’t present in Amarok. The first thing I didn’t like was that Amarok doesn’t integrate nicely with a Gnome desktop. That makes sense, since it is, after all, a KDE app, and it’s supposed to integrate with KDE (which it would–should look quite nice). It isn’t skinnable, and although I did take a stab at changing the colours so it looked more like my Gnome theme, I never did come up with anything that looked satisfactory. The default “funky monkey” theme (or whatever it’s called) is horrendous, so I didn’t even consider it. Amarok allows me to turn off the splash screen at start (yay), and I can sort my collection by genre (which means “by folder” for me, which is what I want), and I can customise the view so that all I see is the artist and title; I can remove columns for track length, album and other shit that doesn’t matter to me. A big plus is that Amarok does automatically scan the directory I set for new stuff, and changes to existing stuff, and it does so in a pretty unobtrusive manner; just a little status bar at the bottom of the window. It does have smart playlists, and it does start minimised, so I could live with it, but I just can’t look at the window. It’s a KDE app and looks like one, and if I wanted to use KDE, I would. I don’t–haven’t since the Mandrake days–and that’s because…I like Gnome better. Also, Amarok does pop up a stupid thing in front of the window with cover art (nice job on Anne Linnet–I didn’t customise that), and the name of the artist and track. I’d imagine that’s why Exaile does it (because it’s “Amarok, only better”), but I don’t care because I hate things popping up when I didn’t ask to see them. Overall, though, Amarok is pretty good, and if I poked around a bit, I could probably turn off that pop-up thing; I just didn’t bother to look for an option.

A long time ago, waaaay back in the days of 0.2 or so, I tried Songbird. I hate browser players, but Songbird is a bit different. It’s based on browser code and supports browser functions, but is and behaves like a music manager. It was buggy and a little unstable sometimes, but with a version number like 0.2, that’s to be expected. I loved the little cartoon bird “farting” music (amused the hell out of me), and I did use it for a while. Back then, though, I never bothered to tag music, so a music manager wasn’t much use to me. How can it sort my collection if I haven’t given it any data by which to do so? Eventually, though, I did buckle down and get my stuff tagged, so this time, it was much better. More stable, too. Songbird is skinnable, just like Firefox, and the default “feathers” are actually quite nice. I used a different theme, but could have lived with the default dark theme (there’s a default light theme as well). It’s very customisable, and there are many user-submitted add-ons as well. Unlike plugins that (in the Linux world) often require you to find the appropriate plugin directory in your /home and copy the plugins there, Songbird handles add-ons exactly like Firefox (logical, since it’s essentially…Firefox as a music player). Very fast, very simple, and very cool. There is no installation to it; all you do is download, extract and put the folder wherever you want Songbird to live (I put it in my /home). It doesn’t create a menu shortcut, but that’s very simple to do; just fire up Alacarte and create one wherever you want it, complete with custom icon if that tickles your fancy (I just love that little cartoon bird). There are even add-ons for Wikipedia (displays the wiki entry for that artist, if available), and one for…Flickr! If you have the add-on, you can choose to display album art for a particular song, or a mini-slideshow of images from Flickr. I’ll have to say it looks for images tagged with information in the song’s tag, but it was still pretty interesting.

For Nordman’s “Djävul Eller Gud” (my current favourite song…for now), the Flickr add-on found an image of HÃ¥kan Hemlin on stage. It had others, of course, mostly of Nordman, but other things as well. It was actually kind of fun to watch, although what on earth that spruce tree had to do with anything, I don’t know. “Djävul eller gud” means “devil or god” and is the name of both the song and the album, and “nordman” means “north-man”, so I think “nordman” was probably the trigger for the spruce tree. Still, kinda cool, and it found the correct Wikipedia entry.

I decided to try Ola, since he’s adorable, and his little pop songs are as cute as he is. It found the cover art for Good Enough with no help from me, which isn’t bad. I think Amazon has or had it as an import, so that’s probably where it looked, but it was still nice to see. Wikipedia has multiple entries for “Ola”, and he doesn’t use his surname, so I did have to change the search term to “Ola Svensson” to get the right page, but since Songbird is a browser, that was as simple as typing it into the search box, just as I would on Wikipedia in Firefox.

Switching to the Flickr slideshow for this song was kind of fun; I don’t recall seeing many (if any) images of Ola himself, but this image did amuse me. Since Ola isn’t a word, just an alternate form of the name Ole, the keyword triggers for an image of some guy’s hand in his pants pocket must have been either “good enough” (album title), or “feelgood” (song title). If it was “feelgood”, I don’t want to know why his hand is in his pocket! 😆

So far, it’s looking like Songbird is the winner, but I had to leave, so I didn’t get time to play with lyrics searches or check out the whole collection of add-ons. If it turns out that Songbird isn’t to my liking, I’ll have to research and see whether there is a way to make Rhythmbox automatically scan for new stuff, moved stuff and updated tags. I already know I don’t like Banshee because that comes installed with openSUSE. I forget why I don’t like it, but I don’t. 🙂

EDIT: Songbird just won, hands down. The cover art manager is kind of a pain in the arse, but the LyricsMaster add-on found lyrics in English by the Kaiser Chiefs (a relatively obscure group from Leeds) and El Presidente (relatively obscure, from Glasgow), in French from Alizée and (French-Canadian!) Roch Voisine, in Spanish from Juanes and Enrique Iglesias, in Danish by Anne Linnet (more popular) and Thomas Helmig (less well-known outside Scandinavia), and in Swedish from Magnus Uggla (popular artist, but it was a very new single, not on any album), from Sonja Aldén (popular only in Scandinavia), and from Florence Valentin (new, just recently signed to a label). It didn’t do as well with RadU and could not find the Romanian lyrics for “Whap-Pa”, but it did find the English lyrics, and it did find the Romanian lyrics for “Dragosta Din Tei” (though none of the other Romanian tracks on the album). Damned well on five out of six languages, and at least a showing for the sixth, plus it offers a web search option using Google if it doesn’t find any lyrics (that gave me TV-2’s “For Dig Ku’ Jeg Gøre Alting”, in Danish, though still no Romanian for “Whap-Pa”). Nonetheless, that’s quite impressive!