The other day,I was trying to remember an awesome playlist that I had listened to earlier. For a moment,I thought my memory was good enough to remember such details,till a lesson from my Human computer interaction class rang true :"Recognition is better than recall.. Never make the user strain their faculties to do a task using you software!!" I was using
VLC player. VLC is perfect for one off tasks,such as movies. However for music where you might want to save a playlist,it is a task in recall rather than recognition. Its a process that is not only lengthy and unintuitive,it requires that you remember some nitty gritty details like folder to which a particular playlist was saved!! Why on earth save a playlist in the first place if I am required to remember such things!!?
To solve this problem,I looked around on the net (as a good developer friend of mine once told me "Google
is your friend") and I stumbled upon a player called exaile. This was a beautiful music player albeit alittle simplistic. It solved the problems that I was experiencing with vlc in a nice and simple way. However,it wasn't long before I started experiencing problems with it. I am not sure whether this was an isolated case but the player kept crashing one too many times. It is something about me,my impatience does not allow me to tolerate such,so I purged the damn thing out of my linux box! Now, I was on a new search for a player that would not only solve the problems but also do so consistently without such mishaps. After searching for a while,I bumped into Amarok. Amarok is a kde based media player. If you use the ordinary gnome-based debian-derivatives like ubuntu,amarok installs a number of kde packages to enable it working smoothly with your gnome environment. There is a small issue with this,if you are keen with space,this process takes quite some hard disk space which you might not appreciate. Anyway,its a small price to pay considering the benefits that it accords your media experience.Once the process was complete,I began using the player,it was fantastic but for one little thing that was disappointing to a user like me,it kept crashing! You can imagine my disappointment, a beautiful piece of work like that only to disappoint at the last moment! Now,what was I to do?
After a week of trying to tolerate this behaviour,I could not take it anymore,I did my usual thing,purge the whole thing from my packages,after all,it feels good to do that when you are disappointed by something,right? It reminds me of the famous phrase by Donald Trump in the The apprentice: "You are fired!".
Just when I was about to give up on my music experience on linux,a friend suggested to me that a player called songbird might do the trick. That was a ray of hope,though I was not as expectant.I installed Songbird and started using it with baited breath. Alas,it was plain awesome! From its interface to the features supported as well as the multimedia management capabilities!
I have not been disappointed in anyway by this player since I started using it. You can try it out and let me know your sentiments.
If you disagree with what I have said,feel free to comment at the bottom and I will get back to you.
