I has been using Amarok for a couple of days now and, ¡OMG!. For the average user, this Media Player is just another iTunes clone, but for the trained mind of a developer is just an amazing jump to media player perfection.
Let me explain it, with a regular player you only have a big playlist with all your songs, maybe a pretty skin, and if you are lucky, an advanced media handler (like the one that comes with winamp).
But with Amarok you also have an amazing API that lets you handle Amarok througth third-party software, you can perform actions under the Linux shell, you can even make a Web-application that allows you to handle an amarok session from any browser.
I know, you can do some of this things with XMMS, but… never with such a powerfull application in the other side.
What comes into my mind when I look to Amarok is: “Database Monster”, Amarok register everything you do inside it, Songs rating is automatically done each time you select a song or you decide to skip it.
It comes with a full mysql database that runs on your system, soo you can access it througth other applications, expanding the posibilities in and amazing way.
Inside Amarok wonderfull things happend, it looks for lyrics of the song you are currently playing, checks for recommended artists througth last.fm, get artist’s biographies from Wikipedia, looks on your collection for other songs and albums from this artist, and, and, and. Well a lot of things.
You can find many of this things on winamp or iTunes, but you will never find such a wonderfull API to manipulate all this power from let’s say, a Web application.
The average user will not find any meaningfull diference with iTunes, but that doesn’t matter, because Amarok only runs under Linux, and Linux users are everything but average.
For me it was like pass from a Plain-Text editor to a Full IDE.
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