The closest thing I ever found to a perfect unified music player application was Amarok 1.4. It let me:
- stream and/or download podcasts,
- transfer between my iRiver (when it still worked) and my no-name portable ogg player,
- manage my collection of ripped and downloaded music,
- stream Internet radio stations,
- listen to Magnatune tracks,
- create playlists that didn't restrict items from being played once only per list, and
- minimize to the tray instead of a miniwindow.
Sadly, most of that is gone now with the Amarok 2.x branch, which is all that Ubuntu 9.04 has in its repositories. Much to the agony of many, I might add. Amarok is no longer the close-to-perfect application I wrote about two years ago; it's now simply a me-too imitation of underpowered Gnome-default music applications.
And I'd rather not have to use more than one application just to listen to stuff, although I know I can.
- I've tried Rhythmbox. It falls flat on podcasting.
- I've tried Exaile. It falls flat on podcasting and playlist support, though I do like its alarm-clock feature.
- I now have two CDs I ripped that wake me up every weekday morning, which run in Exaile.
- I'd go back to Amarok 1.4 if it weren't such a resource hog and a pain to restore.
- I've tried XMMS. It's the one I started with when I migrated to Linux.
- Although it has all the features that WinAmp 2.x had on the Windows side, it has the same limitations as well.
Edit: I forgot to note in the original revision...
I tried making a custom playlist in Exaile, and the order i wanted involved repeating a few songs from my collection. However, Exaile won't let any song appear more than once per playlist. That is, frankly, a stupid limitation to have in something as customized as a playlist.
What's a good all-in-one music application for Linux?
Edit:
