I just read an article over at linux.com which really frustrated me. The author, Peter Enseleit, attempts to discuss the pros and cons of sixteen different audio players for linux.
What begins as an innocuous discovery turns into a bitch fest in every single review. Banshee does not do this, amaroK did not play this and that…, JuK is crap because of <insert excuse>. Articles such as this, which appear in prominent web locations such as linux.com need to be seriously though about before publication. Editors, where are you?
I won’t give Peter the dignity to correct him in all of fallacies, except to say that amaroK should have green ticks for every single one of his tests. Just to provide a little bit of insight:
Dapper Drake is still a beta release of Ubuntu, which may have led to some of the instability I witnessed
All of the players I looked at crashed or froze at least once
It should also be noted that the reviewer should have a fully functional system when doing application reviews, especially with one which requires external functionality (for example, xine win32codecs, which he was missing).
This irritates me greatly.
12 Comments
For amarok to be unable to play anything he must have had a seriously broken system. Sounds to me like his backend was a bit of a stinker
Argh, I just saw that also, I wanted to post a comment, but i have no interest in signing up for the site. How do these “reviews” get past supposedly experienced editors?!
Absolutely agree with the main opinion that most “review” articles just aren’t professional enough. Most sites that post that kind of article should have some rating system that the readers can use to quickly mark the article as “crap” or even take it out of the front page.
Another reason why peer-reviewed news systems, such as digg.com rock our world.
This is exactly what I tought of when I read the article. Amarok passes all the tests on my system…
We shouldn’t forget that this applies to all of those “reviews”. amaroK was not the only short-changed application to be shunned by a poor testing setup.
and, to add to seb’s argument, it is definately not THAT easy to get a well-working setup. but that’s a problem of linux in general, and patents to be more specific. nothing to do with any player at all…
I don’t disagree with you, but I think it’s a problem that we have sixteen different audio players for Linux and none of them has all the features of say, iTunes. Amarok is getting close, though.
Well for one thing it is missing a really important cross platform player, that is very similar, i mean looks nearly the same called Songbird… http://www.songbirdnest.com/
tried it out and is very good, but for me to give out reviews and it is hardly conclusive to explaining with any detail at all. If it was me, I would cover, maybe 3 or four on a weekly basis and then pick the best for each group.
ANother point is that music players are for everyone and not for a particlur group, somethings may not have features, but it may be ultra easy to use it compared to the rest, and maybe having a score would make it more compartive.
this though does raise a point about reviews!
Lazy reviews are especially a problem with distros. The reviewer installs the distro, and maybe pokes at it for an hour or two at the most. So basically its a review of the distros installer, as oppposed to the overall polish.
So I just read the review, and then the comments.
The comments are pretty funny. Seb is certainly not alone.
Translation: Shit, I hate that we have umpteen players that all sortof work, but don’t completely work and completely confuse everybody with broken backends and every other sort of idiocy. Or in other words, why can’t we just cooperate on the “right thing”.
Just more evidence of the failure of desktop linux. It’s 2006, and some people still don’t get it.