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Description
Listen is a complete music player with:
-Lyrics
-Wikipedia information about the song, artist and album.
-last.fm audioscrobbler and related artists.
-Complete library management
-iPod support
-Podcast
-...
It's very useful and easy to use, but many people never heard about it. It could be installed instead of Rhythmbox to compete against Amarok.
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Comments
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frandavid100 wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 13:23
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I like Rhythmbox better. Just my opinion.
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shadowfirebird wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 13:46
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Errrr..... you've just got one more convert to Listen.
I don't like Amarok OR Rythmbox. I don't like the idea that a program thinks of itself of an all-singing, all-dancing music control centre.
But Listen manages to present the whole thing in a less obtrusive, taking-over-y way. I especially like the four display modes.
Now probably Amarok and Rythmbox fans are saying that they can't see a difference. Maybe there isn't much of one. I'm just saying it's converted me.
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tixxit wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 13:49
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Its still prerelease software (0.5). Does seem promising though, perhaps you should repost this at a later date. Although, I like Rythmbox.
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picpak wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 13:54
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Listen hasn't been maintained for over a year. I suggest trying out Exaile: http://exaile.org/
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kenden wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 14:46
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I agree with picpak: Exaile is the new Listen.
Rhythmbox is good enough, and fast; I don't see the point of changing the default.
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jerichokb wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 14:54
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Personally, I use exaile, but have no problems with rhythmbox as the default; everyone knows there are alternatives they can use instead if they so choose.
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wyth wrote on the 4 Mar 08 at 22:43
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The problems with all the gtk apps with podcatching capabilities are many, and they have a long way to go before they catch up with (the admittedly problematic) Amarok:
• Streaming: They won't stream a podcast; they will only download Amarok will stream if you double-click, and you download with a right-click.
• File Names: The downloaded files do not have human-readable text in the file name. The tags denoting the name of the episode/podcast/whatever should be there so you can easily find your data even if your podcast app isn't open. Again, Amarok does this, and I think Listen did this.
• Saved Locations: Some of the applications don't even organize the podcasts into folders for respective podcasts, but just dump them all in the main file. I believe this is an Exaile issue, but I don't recall off-hand. Rhythmbox puts them in their respective folders within the main file for podcasts, but you would never know the file is
• Expandable Tree Menus and Folders: There's no way to organize your podcasts according to categories in a ready way of your choice. Part of this has to do with having a tree menu. On all of the gtk apps with podcatching capabilities, in the app itself, you can't group, say, your tech podcasts in a Tech folder, and news podcasts under News, etc. Amarok can do this, and Exaile has the tree menu for your collection, but doesn't allow you to group your podcasts by theme. If you have a lot of feeds, you want some way to keep them organized.
• Simple, Direct Interface: Exaile has promise, but needs a lot more polish. The tabs idea it has going instead of a standard playlist is unintuitive and counter to what you get with just the standard Collection part of the app. If you go to your collection and double-click, say, Al Green, it drops down and shows you your Al Green albums. If you double-click anything in under Collection, they automatically add themselves to the current playlist. However, if you double-click a podcast, it opens another tab to show you what's available. This creates a lot of screen clutter. Again, Amarok has this covered; both podcasts and your collection are presented in an expandable tree menu, and you can download within that menu. There is one playlist part of the app, and whether you're playing a song, a podcast, or streaming radio, it all shows up in the same place, eliminating a lot of clutter. Exaile has way too much going on, and Rhythmbox just isn't as easily navigable.
Other Problems:
• Exaile is crashy, and Listen is both crashy and lock-uppy. Rhythmbox is pretty clean and runs well, and is wonderfully light in comparison to the other apps, but suffers from the other drawbacks. (I wonder if the plethora of view options in Exaile, and possibly Listen, are what make them crashy.) Banshee needs Mono, and from my last experiments with it, suffered the same podcast drawbacks as the other gtk apps. The Python standalone gPodder was promising, but again suffers the same drawbacks. It's almost like all the gtk apps took their podcatcher cues from each other.
• Amarok is heavy, slow, spawns a crowd of kio_http and kdeinit processes that often hang after the app has done its thing, the app will occasionally hang when you click on it to bring the window to the fore, it will crash about one out of every seven times it's opened, and will lock up the OS on occasion when transferring data to an mp3 player. It's also a QT app that although not bad, does not integrate well into gtk.
I've put a lot of thought to this so far, because I desperately want a decent podcatcher that does things intuitively and simply. If I had the time and knew C or Python, I'd love to do it myself, but I'm not a programmer, just a user. It seems to me that what is outlined above would provide some basic utility for a decent podcatcher; it wouldn't even need to play the data itself, it could spawn out to another app like gPodder. But I don't see any real development on this front, and don't think we'll get a decent podcatcher anytime soon. So for now, it's Amarok.
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