I do believe that my recommendations very much match the mainstream of the opinions of the key people in Linux multimedia and desktop audio. Of course I don’t nearly know everyone of the key hackers in Linux multimedia. But I do know most of those who are actively interested in collaboration, whose projects have a lot mindshare and who attend the conferences that matter for Linux desktop audio.
Lennart forgets that Amarok is definitely a contender for the most popular music player on desktop Linux today. It possibly has the most mindshare of any Linux music player project. Remember that a long time ago, Amarok supported aRts, xine, GStreamer and helix. Now we can take advantage of not needing to care about a specific implementation for an audio output device by using Phonon.
Lennart again:
“Use GStreamer! (Unless your focus is only KDE in which cases Phonon might be an alternative.)”
This implies that a developer should only use Phonon if and only if the developer is targeting a KDE application. Frankly, this reasoning is not very well formed and is shameful. Perhaps what Lennart meant to say belongs along the lines of “Developers using the KDE development libraries might want to use Phonon”.
Amarok is a perfect example of an application which uses the KDE development libraries, but is not tied into the KDE plasma workspace. A grand portion of GNOME users pro actively install Amarok on their system because it is their preferred application for listening to music. Time to pick up the slack and get with the times.
