Music Managers for Linux - Quodlibet, iTunes Alternative

Quodlibet is next up on the list of Linux music managers I'll be reviewing. For a long time, after I switched from Mac to Linux, Quodlibet was my music player of choice. The main reason for this was its look, and how it went about organizing my music. As you can see from the screenshot, there is a great deal of similarity between Quodlibet and iTunes, which is what I was used to using.

In fact, in looking at Quodlibet and iTunes side by side, their feature sets are very similar, with a few notable exceptions. Both offer playlists, although iTunes has much more robust playlist abilities. With Quodlibet, you are responsible for filling every playlist you create. In iTunes (and other Linux music managers I've discussed), one of the nice playlist features is the ability to create "smart" playlists. Almost like a filter or rule in an email program, a "smart" playlist fills itself automatically based on criteria you select. Instead of going through and selecting, song by song, your favorite tracks, in iTunes you can simply create a playlist and tell iTunes to fill it with the 50 songs you've played most often. This is not an option in Quodlibet.

One other similarity between Quodlibet and iTunes is the ability to play Internet radio stations. The only real difference between how the radio functions are set up between Quodlibet and iTunes (and indeed between Quodlibet and other Linux players), is the user (in Quodlibet), is required to find the streaming music on his/her own. Other players provide ready-made lists of stations. Not a necessary feature, but a nice touch.

Quodlibet also has the ability to sync your music library with a portable music device. I have an Apple iPod, but have never been able to get it to work with Quodlibet. Again, this might have been a solvable problem, but as I said regarding Banshee's inability to work with my iPod, it wasn't worth fixing the problem when other players (namely Amarok), were able to recognize it right away.

One major way Quodlibet falls short of iTunes (or not, depending on how you feel about this feature), is that Quodlibet is unable to access the iTunes Store. Of course, this is true of all Linux players. Some music managers - notably Amarok and Rhythmbox, which will be reviewed next), have solved this by integrating with one or two other music services - Jamendo and Magnatune. Each music store has very open ways of doing business, going so far as to allow a user to download the complete album to preview before buying. Magnatune puts little advertising snippets at the end of each track, while Jamendo gives you the unencumbered music right from the start. While there are no Top 40 artists in those stores, Quodlibet, for whatever reason, has chosen not to align itself with either.

In spite of these differences, Quodlibet does have much going in its favor.

The best thing Quodlibet has going for it, in my opinion, is a massive set of plugins. Among the features enabled with plugins is the ability to download cover art from Amazon.com. It works well, and I've not had any problems with it, except that the art must be downloaded, album by album, by hand. The program does the searching, of course, but the process cannot be automated, which makes it kind of pain to find cover art for hundreds of albums. In addition to the covert art plugin, Quodlibet also gains the ability to be set up as an alarm clock (or to slowly fade out after a certain amount of time as you go to sleep), an option to search Wikipedia by artist or album, and many tagging features.

The tagging in Quodlibet is especially robust, and the developers have actually spun off Quodlibet's tagging abilities into a separate program called Ex Falso. You won't notice that you're using two programs if you try to edit tags from within Quodlibet, but if all you want to do is edit tags, you can do it without opening Quodlibet first. This is definitely a nice touch.

And, like so many Linux players, Quodlibet has the ability to play pretty much anything you throw at it. It uses the GStreamer libraries, so - like Amarok, Banshee and Exaile before, and Rhythmbox after), it can play your mp3, aac, mp4, wma and ogg/flac files easily.

All in all, Quodlibet is a very nice player. I've not had any crashing problems with it, but after using it for any extended period of time, I find myself wishing for features other players implement automatically. There is certainly nothing wrong with Quodlibet, however. If you like what you see, it is a very good choice, although in my opinion it could use a few feature upgrades to be an excellent choice instead of just a good one.