[ale] playlists not available in RealPlayer?

[Jay Loden]

Bj?rn Gustafsson wrote:
> Interestingly, Amarok chokes on a few of my MP3s, ones that I am
> certain that I encoded with lame.  (I also have some that I encoded
> with iTunes.)  It reads them and displays the correct title, length,
> &c but skips right over them when it attempts to play.  That was
> rather disappointing; even though it's only two so far, that's two
> more than XMMS didn't like.  I haven't poked around to see which
> decoder it uses under the hood, but I wonder if it uses a non-standard
> codec.
>   
Actually, Amarok can use any of a number of decoders under the hood. The 
default is I believe gstreamer, but you can get it to use Xine as the 
engine. I don't remember off the top of my head what other options are 
available, but look under the engines in the preferences (and make sure 
you have the engines package for amarok installed).
> Amarok's memory footprint is also much larger than XMMS.  I wonder if
> that has to do with its back-end database.  On my box, Amarok uses
> about 50MB of real memory, versus 15M for XMMS with the same song
> list.  VM size differences are even more extreme.
>   
Actually, I'm inclined to think it's less the sqlite database and moreso 
the KDT/QT libraries that it has to load if you're not using KDE (shared 
libs, so if you're using KDE it'd already be loaded up).
> Since it sounds like XMMS is dying, is there another simple
> alternative out there? I think Rhythmbox is unusable for a song list
> the size of mine.
>   
Amarok does have a more traditional player/playlist view style you can 
use. You might check that out and see if you like the alternative view 
style better. If you like the iTunes style but a bit simpler, there's 
also "juk", but that's another KDE app so it'll probably be heavy too. 
For GNOME apps, another alternative might be Audacious: 
http://audacious-media-player.org/Main_Page - I haven't used it myself 
so I can't comment on it other than to say the screenshot looks nice ;)

I don't think XMMS is dying really - there's always a userbase for an 
minimalist player, but it's certainly being overshadowed by the iTunes - 
style interfaces most media players are using.

-Jay