There are still some of us who still haven't jumped on Pandora/Spotify/etc. train, some of us who still have local music libraries (sometimes measured in dozens of Gibibytes) and use old-fashioned media players on computer. And as all software, some are better and some are worse. 

So far I've been using Amarok, but with later versions the program has gotten a few serious problems. First thing I did mind was its disregard for which folder(s) I've selected for my library, including just about every sound file I've had on my disks. But at least there was no further problems.

That was when my library was still 5k songs. That number recently saw a rise to about 20k songs, which is... A lot. And Amarok started to give me fair amount of problems when I tried to put them all on a playlist: I saw crashes on about every 3 songs, long startup — not to mention that thing became somewhat inresponsive. So I've started to look for alternatives, and I found four. First one was banshee, which quickly got thrown away for its inability to include more than one (parent) folder as your music library. (I figure that with some work I could find a way to do it, but ain't nobody got time for that...).

Second was Minirok, which is a python-based minimalistic version of Amarok. Some of you may have already noticed the problem. Anyway, it's not really that bad — it features a playlist, you can queue tracks, modifying shortcuts is easier than in any other program save from Amarok. But it too doesn't like adding 20000 songs to the playlist and... it's written in Python. Some of you may know how people joke about Java being shit and slow? Well, python is more or less on the same level. That being said, it didn't really surprise me when I saw that Minirok used a whole CPU core just for playing an mp3 file. And that's... far too much. Plus the program wouldn't close when I clicked on the 'X' button. Wasting 50% of my processing power for playing an mp3 is a no-go.

Then I've moved to Clementine. Everything started quite promising: I could quickly set up the desired settings, interface was okay, I could modify my shortcuts to some extent and BONUS - it even had working crossfade. But it was slow. As. I-don't-know-what. Adding songs to the library/playlist proved to be a very time- and CPU-consuming task — it literally took ages, almost crashed the system, and even when I disabled everything that could be disabled Clementine took itself a liberty to waste away a whole core for playing an mp3 file.

Then I went to the Software center to see what else repositories had to offer. First, right there on the top of the list, there was Audacious. It's a small thing so I was a bit skeptical about its functionality — but nope, it's almost like Google: It has majority of things I'm looking for. It can queue track, it can handle 20k+ songs on my playlist (and it's quick about it), it uses 2-5% of my processing power to play songs. It can also queue tracks, but I don't really like the interface — searching for stuff on playlist is the one thing that annoys me the most. Custom global shortcuts are nowhere to be seen, but you can control it via Terminal. Since decent DEs allow you to trigger a certain command with a custom key shortcut, lack of customizable (and) global shortcuts in the program itself is suddenly a non-issue (and I actually even like it more that way — my wireless keyboard lacks previous/next song shortcuts, but my laptop does (but lacks the extra keys that I made to function as media keys). And since every global action (at least in KDE) can only have one shortcut, controlling the program from terminal allows me to create multiple global actions with identical command. Win. Audacious also has working crossfade, is said to be skinnable and comes with a lot of plugins (disabled by default) that brought my experience close to what I had back when Amarok didn't have to handle 20k songs. (Except 'Global hotkeys' plugin didn't really work for me).

TL;DR — Goodbye Amarok, long live Audacious.