GUI music players

First, I should point out that I hate GUIs. Then I should point out that I don't want to play music with a GUI music player. I'm including ncurses-type things like cplay in the GUI category. They've always made my skin crawl. So, why am I testing out GUI music players? It's because I didn't didn't realize that I misread the Audioscrobbler spec. Now that we've established that I don't know what I'm talking about, let's move on.

Yesterday, I followed the suggestion of some KDE people and tried amaroK. I was pleasantly surprised. It was pretty, it was functional, the UI didn't piss me off, and it kept showing me a picture of Mako for some reason I still can't figure out. Here's where it fell down: it wanted me to select tracks based on album/artist info in the file tags; the musicbrainz lookup function is not as useful as tp_tagger; when I tried to play tracks off of a slow networked filesystem, it skipped a bit, then it shoved its head up its ass and ate itself. It managed to finish the track before it disabled its frontal lobe, but it didn't send the data to last.fm. So, amaroK was a lot better than I expected, but unacceptable.

People seem to like Quod Libet. Joey and Erinn. So when I tried it today, I didn't expect it to be awful. Here's what it has over amaroK: it doesn't fall over and die when trying to deal with files on a slow networked filesystem. It just skips. You may be thinking that this could be easily solved with proper buffering. I'd think that too, if it didn't skip when playing files on the local hard drive. You may be wondering why I'm trying to play music on an old 486. I'm not. This is a Pentium 4 2.8GHz under almost no load. This is ridiculous. Compared to amaroK, this thing is ugly as sin, and incredibly awkward. That includes the metadata editor that people keep raving about for some reason. Furthermore, when I rearrange songs in the Play Queue, it occasionally ignores me and plays the track that used to be at the top of the list.

Rhythmbox also has problems with skipping, so I guess that gstreamer is the devil.

I'm not filing bugs because I don't intend to ever use these programs again.