aTunes is a Java-written, cross-platform music player. It supports a variety of common audio formats, including both open source and proprietary codecs, due to its MPlayer audio engine back end. Like many quickly evolving programs, it has a few issues, but the better outweighs the bitter.

Is it iTunes or is it Amarok?

aTunes appears to be inspired by both iTunes and Amarok. Like Amarok, its music management is playlist-oriented, and it uses a tabbed interface to browse between music, tags, podcasts, Internet radio, and MP3 devices. It integrates with Last.fm and Audioscrobbler, and supports "smart" playlists that, for example, select the highest rated or most played songs. There are some similarities between aTunes and iTunes as well. The overall user interface layout seems to reflect iTunes, and every window element (navigator, playlist, or context information) in aTunes can be shown as a separate window.

aTunes 1.8.3, released in March, offers several major updates and new features that make aTunes better than it was before. The two most notable changes that work in the Linux version are the addition of a karaoke function and aTunes' display of more playing time information in the player panel for radios and podcast feed entries. Other useful features include the Play Now option in the navigator table (which automatically adds the selected song to the current playlist and plays it immediately), the artist Wikipedia text shown in the user-defined language (as opposed to English as the only option), and an equalizer. Behind the scenes, the new version features multiple playlist support, RealAudio support, an XML repository (for better compatibility with future versions), and lyrics, composer, and album artist fields for the song's ID3 tags. The new features make aTunes more appealing to hardcore audio management users.

The better, with a few caveats

Overall, aTunes is visually appealing. The default theme looks like Compiz Fusion, and under KDE 4's compositing, aTunes looks better than Amarok 1.4.8 or the latest version of iTunes. One of the little, but useful, features of aTunes that Amarok and iTunes do not have is the ability to mark an album or artist, as opposed to just songs, as a favorite. You can't rate your songs using a five-star rating system, though. aTunes also displays nice-looking graphs and a pie chart in its Stats window based on the number of plays a track, artist, or album has.

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Original link: http://www.linux.com/feature/134...