I prefer to use KDE for my desktop environment. One of the nice tools included with KDE was Amarok. Version 1.4.x of Amarok was great - it did most of what I wanted. Then when KDE switched to it's 4.x versions and began taking advantage of the QT version 4 capabilities, Amarok was a little slow to keep up. A short while later the Amarok team introduced version 2.x of the player. And promptly irritated a large number of the users.
What went wrong? Well, with the change to the new core code (QT 4), the team decided to modernize Amarok. But along the way they seem to have lost the vision that made Amarok what it was. I'll be the first to say the 2.x versions of Amarok look great, but they lost functionality. The key bindings were gone, music player support (aka iPods) was gone, theming was gone, and more. It seems to me that Amarok 2.x focuses more on how the application looks than on what the application can do. Since the first 2.x release, some of the functionality has been re-introduced, but the damage was done.
The end result for me was that I listened to less music. I tend to focus on my coding tasks better when I have music playing, without the annoyance of commercials (from radio broadcasts), talking heads, or too many new songs that need me to judge if I like em or not. Needless to say, my productivity fell some.
I did look at other music players. Free/Open Source offers many choices (which is a Good Thing!) and I had no shortage of alternatives. However most of these tended to adopt either the WinAmp interface (too limited and didn't handle a large collection easily), or a Gnome desktop type of interface (not enough options, and wrong look for the KDE desktop). All the ones I tried did play music and gave me some degree of my previous capabilities, but none of them really clicked for me.
Then I heard a friend say Exaile was the closest to Amarok 1.4.x that he has found. I decided to give it a try. And things just "clicked" for me.
Exaile may not have the cool graphics that Amarok 2.x does, but it works the way I expect it to, gives me back my key bindings (by default! I don't need to manually set them), and is handling my large collection with ease. One thing I needed to change was to change the options so that Exaile will show a SysTray icon so that closing the window doesn't quit the application. One less window to clutter my desktop. Other than that one change I have a little research to do with Last.fm which I have never used but seems to have tight integration in Exaile.
I like that I can create multiple play list tabs at once and switch between them. This allows me to take a break from my usual music, listen to an audio book or podcast, and then return to my original music play list. Even Amarok 1.4.x needed me to replace the current play list to listen to a podcast (or insert the podcast into that play list).
I've only been using Exaile for an hour or so, and already I can feel the urge to code more, and seem more focused. While I may yet find some negatives of Exaile as I use it more, so far I'm liking it quite a bit.
Exaile gave me back my music!