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Amarok 2.6 Music Player Released
jrepin writes "KDE is proud to announce version 2.6 of Amarok music player. While it brings a reasonable set of new features, the focus of this release was on bug fixing and improving the overall stability. The new features are a complete overhaul of the iPod, iPad and iPhone support including solid support for device playlists; transcoding for iPod-like and USB Mass Storage devices; the Free Music Chart service is now activated by default; embedded cover support for Ogg and FLAC files; and album art support for tracks on the filesystem and USB Mass Storage devices."
I know it's fashionable to shit on iTunes, but i have a playlist with a 32656 song library playing right now, and it is using 1.6% of the CPU and 170 MB of ram. It's also serving this library to my wife's laptop in the living room, as she is listening to different songs.
iTunes is easily, bar none, the only worthwhile digital music player / library maintenance application that exists now. The only people who don't like it are the people who insist on using it like Winamp, ie throwing all their music into one huge folder.
Well, I don't play around with toy operating systems. Haven't in many years, so I can't tell you how well it works on Windows. However, consider this - Quicktime (and Safari) on Windows are running basically all the necessary OS X libraries inside a process, essentially running the whole Cocoa UI / library stack on Windows. This technology was a leftover of the Openstep days.
I have well over ten thousand ALAC files (basically Apple's FLAC, but engineered so portable devices can decode them with almost 0 CPU effort) and a bunch of MP3s. As I said, my library is 32656 files, and iTunes is using less than 2% of the CPU and less than 200 MB of RAM. I'm sure it would be using even less if this system didn't have 16 GB - it doesn't really swap stuff out like I saw on the old Powerbook G4 with 1 GB ram.
Anyway, I feel pity for your poor friends, still playing around with Windows.