A quick note; I absolutely love what the Amarok project has done with its blog. Not that they’ve done anything special, just that they’re interesting. I mean, I love hearing about the guts of things, and seeing what the devs are thinking, especially when it comes to downloading the final app and comparing that with their train of thought.

And, as always, I’m excited as expletive about the release of Amarok 2 for Windows (do I have the version right?). Finally, finally something better than iTunes on Windows. Not that it could miss.

I’m looking forward to using on Windows at work what I use on Ubuntu at home. You know, familiarity and all that expletive.

As some of you already know, the Amarok team is building the next version of their music playing software with the QT toolset. That is to say, it should compile well as a cross-platform application (instead of just for Linux and other Unix variants).

Some of you may also know that I think Amarok is one of the better reasons to switch to Ubuntu, but let’s be honest here, it’d be nice not to have to. And from what I’ve seen, the digital music playback segment on Windows is dominated by iTunes (and oh my word, how iTunes sucks) and WinAmp (show its age really badly). Amarok 2, on the other hand, does everything iTunes and WinAmp do with music, and does it better and easier and — you have to realise that for an open source application this is major news — has a beautiful user interface to boot.

The above is a screenshot of Amarok 2 on Windows. Please do be aware that’s not the finished product.

But I’m still excited. Soon I can stop using WinAmp at work. Finally.

Programs like SQLite are available for anyone to use in the backend of their program, like for instance Mozilla Thunderbird. Why, then, are we not able to store our data in a sane format like an SQL database? Why must we have these legacy things still clinging to the undersides of our applications?

On my Ubuntu box (which, for home use, is pretty much all I use) Amarok runs an SQLite database. I’ve never had a problem with the database. Never. I’m sure it’s possible, but contrast that with my constantly-disappearing and -corrupting iTunes library.

Why, in this age of awesome computer firepower, are we not making things sanely?