I have been using Amarok for a long time now as my only music player. It has all those great features like
- last.fm scrobbling
- decent tag editing
- music library
- extras like: additional scripts; wikipedia info; lyrics display, etc.
But I have always been annoyed that also among the reasons I use Amarok was that there weren’t really any good alternatives – I’ve tried a few but fell in love with none of them.
Also, some problems with Amarok were really annoyning (in order of importance):
- The database constantly f***s up. I mean, at one time you’ve got all your songs and albums. And after updating (not sure if this happens even without updating) you suddenly find out that albums and songs are all messed up – songs appear to belong to artist A according to Amarok but we all know that artist B released them. Some albums just become empty – others have only some songs, and so on. So I start rescanning the collection which helps sometimes and sometimes doesn’t. Then I probably delete the database or something like that.
- It’s slow. It loads slow and feels kind of slow. Not very slow. But not fast in my book
I am not complaining – I know I should post bug reports – and I am not being arrogant – I know nobody owns me nothing. Don’t get me wrong – I love Amarok, and I’ll probably go back to it when (if?) I get disappointed with mpd and various clients.
However, for now I’m really going on the mpd side. mpd is a daemon that resides in the background and maintains your musical collection; playlists and it does the playing too. It looks highly configurable, although I have not played with much it yet. But pretty fast I was able to configure it (with the help of ArchWiki, of course – thanks, guys) to play through my sound card and put a httpd stream (also simultaneously), which I was able to play through a remote computer.
MPD has a lot of clients written for it. That is, you can use a bunch of different players to play your music! There are GTK, Qt, Java and even console client (there’s one that looks like vim!). Also, closing your client (or crashing it) does not stop music playback. You can close one client, continue hearing music, start another and see the same playlist and collection with a totally different interface! Or you can listen to music without having to hold a client open at all.
Also, I don’t know if it’s the subjective little guy in my left year talking but I hear better sound from mpd than Amarok.
So, I fell in love with mpd!
There’s mpdscribble – a last.fm scrobbling daemon, that also works fine!
Actually, I got this idea to write a client for mpd, that will be just what I want in a music player! It seems easy because I’ll be like implementing only the GUI (or CLI, don’t know yet), because the libmpdclient library has a really high level of abstraction – you don’t need to worry about ALSA (that always looked pretty scary to me as a library).
We’ll see. For now, I’ll be just rocking and switching different clients 
