Amarok vs Itunes
Amarok and Itunes are two audio player softwares. Due to 92% of market share of windows/MacOS Itunes is more popula among windows users and as amarok runs only on Linux it has less number of users. Both are freely available on net. My personal choice is Amarok but I like Itunes as well due to some of its properties.
Though there is no comparison exist between these software as on runs on windows and another on linux.
Lets see what are the differences. I will try to not to get into technical details as a user hardly want to get into these details:
1) Platform:Itunes –> It runs on MacOS and Windows both but it is still not available for linux. It is not a open source source software thuogh It can be downloded from internet for free.
Amarok –> It runs only on linux and similar OS. It is still not available for windows. It is open source project. You can download it from internet for free.
2) User Interface :
Both are equally good and user friendly. See the pics.
http://amarok.kde.org/images/stories/albums/1-2-series/amarok_osx.png
Amarok Gallery : Click Here
3) Sound Quality:
Itunes : Sound quality is good but somehow I noticed that it doesnt work efficiently. To clearify the sound it basically suppress volume a bit which is quite noticable. Though its sound quality is as good as amarok player.
Amarok: Superb sound quality and refined. I just cant live without amarok.
4) Look and feel :
Itunes: It has only one theme. You cant change the theme. Though it looks attractive.
Amarok : There are lot of themes avaiable for amarok. It looks simple and clean.
5) Computer Resources:
Itunes: It consumes a lot of resources of your CPU.
Amarok : It is light.
6) Global Shortcuts:
Itunes: Itune dont use the global shortcut. Global shortcut means that we can control the software using alloted shortcuts whther that software is active or in system tray.
Amarok : There are some standard defined global shortcuts but you can change it if you want.
7) Randomization:
Itunes: The random funstion used in Itunes is not that much affective.
Amarok: The ramdomization is properly done.Listening to song in random mode is great.
Sharing of songs:
Itunes: The sharing of song feature is superb. You can also set passwords.It is not in amarok.
Amarok: It has no feature like this.
9) Radio:
Itunes: Best jukebox and number one music store.
Amarok: It is not that much impressive.
10) Information about the song:
Itunes:
–> It displayes the song cover image.
–> Rating system is not that much impressive. Just counting number of times it is played doesnt make it a good rater.
–> Lyrics is not displayed.
–> Not much information about the singer,artists etc.
–> Need to install plugin for submission in last.fm
–> There are not much extension available for itnues.
Amarok:
–> It also diplays the song cover.
–> Rating system is great. It will count for everything. If you stop a song in between it will reduce the rating automatically. It is not only based on number of times songs are played but on lot of other features too.
–> You can either add you lyrics or it will fetch lyrics automatically from internet. It is displayed side by side of the song.
–> Full wikipedia of the artists is displayed.
–> Last.fm is included by default. You just need to put in the login password.
–> There are lot more extensions/scripts available. You can easily install them by opting the script manager option. You can download all sorts of extension avaiable on internet.
Might be there are more differences in technical terms but these are just those difference which one user experience.
-sansor
(sansor@gmail.com)
In regards to music management, amarok beats the shit of out itunes. I can do everything with ararok with ease. Its features are so intuitive that I get used to them fast. Especially and importantly, it is lightweight. It runs without effecting the system resource. Whereas itunes always assumes that my computer are no more than an iPod. It hogs my system as soon as I run it.
The other thing I don’t like about itunes is that, in windows Itunes always comes bundled with the crappy quicktime. To install itunes the user have to accept quicktime also. And other the programms like iPod service, quicktime system tray are enabled to auto startuo without the user’s pemission.
However I am not satisficed with amarok. Its sound quality is so poor. I installed amarok 1.4 in Unbuntu 5.10 and Suse 10.1 In both cases the bass sound was lost when played by amarok. Actually I came across this blog while googling a solution to that sound problem. In the meantime I use XMMS.
monkey
June 5, 2006 at 5:34 am
hi,
Thanks for succha a good feedback. I dont know how did you find the sound quality of amarok is so pooor. There much be some problem with your alsamixer. Please check it out.
Thanks pointing I something very important which I forget to mention in the blog.
-sansor
Sanjay Kumar
June 5, 2006 at 5:23 pm
fine blog! http://www.altontownship.aillinois.com
brownie
July 2, 2006 at 12:14 am
hi
.. this little entry of yours helped clear up my doubts over whether i was missing out by not being a windows user and using itunes… clearly, i’m okay 
interesting comparison… i’ve been using amarok on gnome running on debian for a while now, and besides everything else, it integrates beautifully with my ipod (apart from the ability to upload video
thanks
wiplash
July 20, 2006 at 6:35 am
Amarok!!! Now that i know amarok i can’t live too with out it
Kore
August 14, 2006 at 10:11 am
Amarok is great but until there is a windows port it im going to stick with itunes on my main computer. Its great having amarok on all my linux boxes though.
Mirddes
October 3, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Amarok is the best media player ever coded. iTunes is one of the worst. I hate proprietary software monopolies. WMP 11 is actually better than iTunes 7, but that’s not saying much
Amarok is exactly what everyone needs. Once the Qt license errors clear up and someone who is dedicated comes along, I really hope that it is ported to Windows. Until then (and hopefully after then), I get the honor of using it on GNOME and Ubuntu!
Will
November 29, 2006 at 1:57 am
emu10k1 + debian + kde + amarok + xine + postgresql =
– bass and treble adjustenment in sb live are best)
(btw. don’t use xine equalizer, it can’t handle frequencies below 60
gapless playback in amarok is not perfect with any engine, how about itunes?
Wolfmoon
February 2, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Amarok is awesome. As far as the sound quality is concerned, I think it is as good as any other media player. The most important aspect of any media player is its library feather, and Amarok has no comparison in this. Just take at a look at these figures:
Windows media player took 3 hours to scan my collection of 6257 songs.
iTunes took nearly an hour to scan my collection and then it had to convert all .wma files to .aac, and I wouldn’t even discuss how much time that took.
Amarok only took 5 minutes, yes you heard that right, only 5 minutes to scan my complete collection and add them to the library. Can you beat that?
And as discussed by others, the rating and lyrics feature of Amarok are simply awesome. It even fetches lyrics for nearly all the hindi songs, which is simply great.
And the best part, my laptop can not even feel that Amarok is running on it, there is no effect whatsoever on the performance. I wouldn’t want to compare it to windows media player or iTunes which are experts at hanging my laptop despite the fact that I have about 1 GB of ram and a core duo processor.
Therefore, you can easily conclude that Amarok beats any other media player, yes any other media player, I am not restricting myself to iTunes. hands down. It is the best there is. And best of all, it is free and open source!
Rahul Jain
February 4, 2007 at 2:37 pm
are you guys all linux users?
I think that you guys made this acticle to make you fell better about amarok….i used to use linux, but i would always run into some dependency problem and spend more time looking for some solution than actually using it. I now have a mac and LOVE iTunes…it has never asked for a dependency and converted 50 songs from wma to mp3 in under 10 mins on my macbook pro c2d…no offense, but i think that you are just angry because they dont make itunes for linux….i like open source apps, but i would rather use a commercial product that is free by far…the open source community just doesent have the money to make as good of an app…have you seen the visualizer in amarok…compare it to the visualizers available for the itunes on a mac….what is this crap about the sound quality being worse?…I guarantee that windows drivers for a soundcard would result in higher quality sound…and on my mac…i dont have to worry about sound card drivers, or sound quality for that matter( i have an hd sound card in my macbook pro)…just make open source apps for commercial os s and only make them if there is no free commericial competition!
Just my 2 Cents
-Ethan
Ethan
April 11, 2007 at 3:47 am
“are you guys all linux users?
I think that you guys made this acticle to make you fell better about amarok….i used to use linux, but i would always run into some dependency problem and spend more time looking for some solution than actually using it.”
That’s bullshit, and you know it. If you selected any kind of decent distro, they come whit synaptic package manager (or smart, or YaST, or Adept, or YUM, etc.), just click on what you want to install, and it will download it (incluiding dependencies) and instaling it.
And, no, Amarok is far better than iTunes, I feel frustrate when I have to use a Windows box and it has iTunes (or even worse, Winamp or WMP).
Luis
April 17, 2007 at 7:17 am
Why didn’t you use some better screenshots for amarok…
Augusto
May 2, 2007 at 8:21 am
[...] This is one of a number of posts detailing how to install Ubuntu 6.10 (codename Edgy) on a Thinkpad X41. This post focuses on using the amazing music player Amarok. Rather than me going into the many reasons why no other music player even comes close, have a look at it’s website, or read here. [...]
Ubuntu on Thinkpad X41 - Working With Amarok « SOS
May 11, 2007 at 12:53 pm
amarok is great, i cant beleive a really good application like that existed and i didnt even hear about it. u must try it.
xmido
May 12, 2007 at 8:10 pm
Amarok – sounds fantastic, but what’s the point if I haven’t got linux. Make it windows compatible.
grosmz
May 14, 2007 at 12:28 am
Hi,
You got to tell me what engine you are using. In my setup, Audacious sound quality beats the pants off Amarok… but Amarok is what I want…
All on Feisty.
Cheers!
Leon
June 14, 2007 at 8:28 am
I used iTunes while I was still on my Windows. Once I moved to Linux, Amarok beat the (sorry for the expression) crap out of it. It searches for Lyrics, Album covers, and Artist information automatically. It scanned my collection of about a thousand songs in about a minute. I don’t feel Amarok in senses of CPU and memory usage. Organizing files is a lot easier through it, and actually, my songs were all messy in one folder, until I used Amarok’s organizing feature to make things tidier. In terms of sound quality I sense no difference, but maybe that’s because I don’t have any special prefs for sound such as equalizing and stuff like that. I use the global shortcuts all the time, which is alot faster than opening it and clicking buttons. Heck, even opening the window from the system tray I can do through a global shortcut, Win+P. I didn’t even change almost any of the shortcuts, cause I liked the Win+ format. It doesn’t clash with almost anything else.
Hen
July 11, 2007 at 9:46 am
I feel I should add to the debate regarding those who think Amarok is being played up only by Linux users who don’t have the option of running iTunes.
I am a Mac user (10.4 on Intel Core 2 Duo) and I use Amarok almost every day I’m using my Mac. Even though iTunes is installed straight out of the box and Amarok is a hassle to install on OS X (easiest way is to use Fink, a little command line knowledge helps) it’s well worth it as it’s a *much* better player than iTunes.
Aside from all the features mentioned above, it’s just plain better at giving me control over my music and how it’s stored. In my case I keep all my music on a headless server (running Debian) so that it’s accessible from my Mac, my laptop, my Windows PC, other people’s machines, etc. Basically I can play it anywhere in the house, without having to worry about what OS each machine is running, or whether the machine holding the music has been switched off (the server is always on, as it has other tasks too). With this setup Amarok works a treat. I can even configure it to use a remote SQL database on the server to store the music index so that it can be shared among all the client PCs rather than having to build a new index on each machine.
One other thing — and this is the final nail in the iTunes coffin for me — it supports *only* the formats that Apple have blessed. Personally I like to store all my music in FLAC, so if I want to play it in iTunes, well tough luck because Apple would rather you used their proprietary lossless format, which may or may not be supported in 5 years’ time. Those of you who are re-encoding WMA files to MP3, do you have any idea how much sound quality you’re losing? Transcoding from lossy to lossy is a very poor choice IMO.
Amarok is extensible, the playback libraries support many formats, and should a popular new format appear you can be sure it will be supported too, regardless of whether it’s blessed by Apple, Microsoft or whoever. On that note, when I’m using Windows (which isn’t very often these days) I use Winamp, as although it’s proprietary it’s still a lot more open (and less bloated) than either iTunes or Windows Media Player. There are countless freely downloadable plugins for just about any music format you can find, something both Apple and Microsoft could learn from instead of trying to force users onto their own preferred formats (AAC or WMA).
There is one saving grace to iTunes — I can easily uninstall it from my Mac. Which is more than I can say for Windows Media Player on Windows.
Paul.
Paul
July 16, 2007 at 11:15 am
I’ve been an Amarok user for a long time, absolutely love it. All my music is ripped to Ogg Vorbis, I stream from last.fm a lot, and also normal Internet radio. I sync music to my Palm Lifedrive with no problems.
I recently got a Macbook Pro and started to use iTunes, did not like it. So after looking around I found “fink” which would build Amarok on my Macbook. So now I have it running on my mac with no problems, and I’m happy again.
KDE 4 is in the works, which will use QT 4.0. The free QT 4.0 is now available to Windows and Mac OS X. So that means, as of KDE 4, Amarok will be able to be compiled not to rely on X11. It will be a normal mac or Window app.
supun
July 27, 2007 at 5:05 pm
It was interesting to read your opinion of randomization. I would give the edge to iTunes on that score. As a listener of both popular and classical music, I appreciated iTunes ability to randomize various styles of music, and through the judicious use of the “grouping” field have pop songs randomized, but when playing a classical work, have all movements of the work play sequentially, then go to the next randomly selected piece of music. I’ve only been using amarok for a few days, but it isn’t clear to me this sort of functionality exists.
YMMV
September 26, 2007 at 7:11 am
Amarok is superior.
D
October 10, 2007 at 9:33 am
You need to improve your English. Also the spelling mistakes are killing my eyes and my head was about to implode. Other than that well, of course Amarok kicks the shit out of iTunes.
George
October 30, 2007 at 2:33 am
George, please try and avoid starting a sentence with “Also”. Lime juice in my eyes would feel more pleasant and take into account that I am not even an English native.
Mind the interpunction: ” Other than that, well of course (…) “.
Snirp
February 28, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Nice comparison.
I have been using Amarok for a few years, and simply love it.
I must say that I like it much better than iTunes,
I really didn’t know it was better for me, until I finally tried iTunes.
I have owned a mac with iTunes for years, but never used it until this week.
Its not a bad program, very stable, but its features are lacking and it doesn’t seem to support all of the formats that amarok does.
Amarok is my favorite music player, but…
I have problems with Amarok (maybe these are limited to my system)
1. when searching through my collection for a song or artist, the application crashes (not sure if there is just too much in the database)
2. I get some random freezes when editing song tags
3. the interface has an unstable feel…(jerkyness of the user interface)
m. masseo
March 7, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Well, m. masseo, I have a library of something like 6k songs and the search is instantaneous. Is your library much bigger than that? Otherwise, well… if you try to search while amarok is scanning or updating your library or loading the whole library into a playlist, it might crash.
As of iTunes, I totally hate it. I am obligated to use it for reasons I really don’t want to get into, but only for certain uses. It’s slow, doesn’t support a lot of things that even winamp 2 had, it has a tendency to do stuff without my concent, the UI is awfully clumsy and actually ugly (which is just an extra, not something very important), the lack of format support kills and it takes YEARS to transfer music to my cellphone (compared to drag&drop).
When in Windows, though, using winamp with a 6k-song library is quite painful. It gets so slow and it’s quite annoying and, as much as I hate to admit, is something iTunes doesn’t suffer from. It’s overall slow, but doesn’t get any slower with a large library. And It might even be just as fast as Amarok when scanning, but haven’t tested it yet.
Superdarion
April 27, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Good write up.
But I think Amarok’s tagging with MusicBrainz is great. Havent seen that with anything player. Also, havent used iTunes that much, so not sure if there’s anything equivalent is available with itunes.
MusicBrainz tagging with Amarok is great!
nisarg
May 6, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Hey there Superdarion, I just saw a reply here…
Well, I have over 18,000 songs in my amarok database.
After reading waht you wrote, and realizing my issues, I think I’ll try a mysql backend instead of SQLLite. I’ll se if it helps my amarok search woes.
Thanks
m. masseo
May 26, 2008 at 5:33 am
Every sandpiper praises its own swamp,
Gordon
May 30, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Hi guys,
There is no comparison betweenb the two. iTunes still doesn’t update the library automatically when you save new music. YOu have to update it manually and creates duplicates. it is a resource intense piece of shit.
How can you even still discuss about a software that only shows songs after you tell it to scan them. If you add a high number of songs you might as well delete the whole library, go for a walk in the park, out for dinner and when you come back it hasn’t finished yet.
Amarok’s event driven core knows when you add even a single file; it even knows when you modify tags with a different software. I think it checks inodes to find out messages from the linux filesystem. That is way ahead of anything ever possible on windoz.
QatQat
qatqat
September 6, 2008 at 8:11 am
My name is Cliff ROBBINS,
FredderiK
November 8, 2008 at 7:24 am
lol @ fredrik
haha
December 11, 2008 at 1:57 pm