So far, my first impressions are what I expected with a silver lining at the end.
Without exception, all of the applications reviewed are extremely capable and will serve you well for media playing needs. The evolution of these apps from just a year ago to their current status is nothing short of amazing. New features seem to be sprouting out of the woodwork at a phenomenal rate and I have no doubt that very soon, we will be spoilt for choice for this type of functionality.
Considering the relative youth of the project, I am astounded by the progress made by Banshee in particular. The leap from the 0.1x codebase to the current 0.9x codebase has been remarkable and welcome. I still miss the podcast/ ipod functionality which is critical for me at this point, but I can see that they have literally resculpted it to the new codebase and I reckon its a matter of days before the missing functionality is seemless grafted back in. I reckon that its the project which I am currently expecting to be my long term choice. Its lack of a navigation hierarchy in the 0.1x codebase has been totally sorted out in the current version. The rest is probably in the .svn version already, I am sure.
Next app which is close to being my one stop solution would be Songbird. I've got a thing for modular apps with tons of plugins ala Firefox and of course, Songbird comes from a Mozilla XUL background meaning that this design philosophy comes standard. Again, not all the functionality I require is built in, but it seems like a powerhouse app with a ton of functionality that will be totally sufficient for most users.
The 2 previous apps are gtk & xul based and as a gnome user, the quality of this next app is what makes me use it even though its QT based. Amarok has always been a total overkill app for me which did more than I needed and just seemed like a hog for me when all I wanted was a simple winamp replacement like xmms. At any rate, Amarok has grown and matured and my needs have evolved. To illustrate the power of this remarkable app, I configured my ipod in the device manager and amarok detected it and as well as the music and podcasts stored on it. By clicking on the podcasts, I was able to subscribe to them on my local pc as well. All of the above without typing in any url's. That's pretty cool. As i type this, some podcasts are downloading to my local amarok podcast library.
Okay, the podcasts have downloaded and been sync'ed to the iPod. I'm suitable impressed.
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