Returning to Amarok and Yakuake instead of Listen and Tilda??

Ok, I have used most of the Gnome music players and they are mostly very good and quite stable but here, I find myself back on Amarok, given up on it’s Gnome counterparts?

Well, mostly it’s the tagging capabilities that Amarok offers. Yes, Listen and a few other have musicbrainz support but most of my music is so left of field that it’s not on Musicbrainz and this is where Amarok let’s you use “guess tag from filename” and you can also do this quickly and easily for groups of files. Plus I discovered Amarok has “smart playlist” which works in a similar way that Listen does by selecting songs it thinks you are going to like from your music collection. I am not sure what action it uses to do this but it seems to work pretty good so far.

Now.. why Yakuake over Tilda? Well, there’s a few reasons for this.

1. While running ‘top’ in a Yakuake window, if you drop it hide it and reshow, it causes top to core dump.
2. Try using gnu ‘screen’ for split windows in Tilda and if you hide it and reshow, your (screen) split window is gone.. kaput.
3. There’s no way to speed up the drop down beyond 150ms in Tilda, which makes it not so good when using NX for remote desktop. Yakuake can have a 0s delay, so it’s on or off.

and I still haven’t found a photo management application that I like. The closest is Digikam (another KDE app) because it gives me better access to the underlying file system than most other apps BUT I love the export options in F-spot Photo Manager – including flickr, picasaweb or smugmug. Digikam seems to be the most comprehensive and gives me a great deal more flexibility on what information I want to see and how I want to see it. F-spot is just sexier and sex appeal goes a long way for me. I am mostly using F-spot and a bit of Digikam but occasionally open Picasa (using wine) but I still haven’t found one that really grabs me.

So, I really am having a hot/cold relationship with Gnome apps at the moment. The only native gnome app I really use is Evolution and Nautilus but I still find myself missing the ability to use tabs. Yes, I have installed PCMan File Manager but it’s not so well integrated as Nautilus is with Gnome though I recently saw a post on Lifehacker that showed how to replace Nautilus with PCMan.. when I get time maybe.

Technorati Tags: gnome, kde, yakuake, tilda, amarok, listen, ubuntu, PCman, nautilus

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