When comparing Amarok vs Audacious, the Slant community recommends Audacious for most people. In the question“What are the best audio players for UNIX-like systems?” Audacious is ranked 1st while Amarok is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Audacious is:
Audacious is a classic music player at heart that has not felt the need to weigh itself down with an assortment of unnecessary options. Advanced functionality can be attained through plugins available from within the program.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Loaded with features
Amarok contains the following features:
Built-in equilizer
Built-in lookup of songs and artists (Amarok will display Wikipedia articles or lyrics of songs that it can find.)
Ability to add online playlists or streams, which is great for online radios such as soma or di.fm.
Supported by Cinnamon Desktop media widget.
Built-in iPod and iPhone support.
Built-in MTP and USB support.
Built-in music services for Ampache, gpodder.net, Jamendo, Last.fm, Magnatune, Amazine Music, MP3tunes, and podcasts.
Amarok can configure, add, and import scripts.
Pro Original design
The design of Amarok does not resemble most other music players. It's definitely in a class of its own.
Pro Global keys to move from one song to another, rewind X seconds, advance X seconds, etc
The ability to assign global keys to move from one song to another, rewind X seconds, advance X seconds, etc. Other players do not have that feature.
Pro Search in the playlist while seeing other songs
You can search for songs in the playlist... without adding a filter that prevents you from seeing the other songs. That way you can find e.g. the song that has been played before House of the Rising Sun. Using other players you can not search for songs in the playlist without hiding the songs that are not looked for.
Pro Streamlined player not weighed down by unnecessary options
Audacious is a classic music player at heart that has not felt the need to weigh itself down with an assortment of unnecessary options. Advanced functionality can be attained through plugins available from within the program.
Pro Tons of plugins
Pro Lightweight
My audacious uses only 18.5 MB of RAM. It has a Winamp visualization style that's very minimized and convenient.
Pro Support for Winamp themes
Audacious can switch from its GTK interface to one that matches the looks of the famous Winamp player. What's even better is that this interface supports any Winamp themes, which allows for more options.
Pro Folder oriented player, but able to play any music container and highly configurable
Lets you play, delete and even change metadata of your music files.
Pro The easiest player for multiple types of files
It plays dts, aac multichannel, etc.
Pro Compatibility with most media formats
It's able to reproduce most of media formats without external plugins.
Cons
Con UI is not the most intuitive
While the design of the UI is different to most other music players, the way it actually functions can feel foreign to many and result in a lot of confusion.
Con Resource hog...
Con No seamless transition between tracks when they're on different files.
Con Doesn't feel very responsive
This is particularly the case with the play/pause button: it feels like there's a delay from when the button is pressed to when the music actually starts/stops.
Con No manual sorting fields
There is no option to add one's own categories to the sorting fields.
Con Updates are not very frequent
Con No bit perfect output past 24bit
Audiophiles require this, and while most users might not notice a difference, audiophiles will appreciate the improved audio quality.
Con Buggy
For example when using Visual Studio Code and Audacious you get flicked out to the gnome login screen.