Jajuk

Writing a music player for the lazy is a overwhelmingly tough job to do. The lazy people expect all kinds of automatic stuff. Play by Genre, ambience, mood, ratings. Play with untagged songs nicely instead of dumping them under one "Unknown" Label. Automatic tagging of songs whenever possible. Automatically fetch Lyrics, cover, wiki information. Ability to detect which songs the user doesn't like and play them lesser and lesser. File-tree view, album-tree view, artist-tree view. Automatic purging of duplicates. Music discovery via similar artists or people-who-liked-this-also-liked-this. Internet Radio for the ones who are bored of their collection. Some ego-boosting features for music junkies like all kinds of graphs and statistics of your collection and the Genre you like the most.

Overall, I have wayy too many expectations out of a music player. It is more like a music manager for me. Till date I hadn't gotten over my first love Amarok-1.4 completely. I didn't like the direction Amarok-1.9 and 2.0 took, so I dumpled Amarok long ago. iTunes and all its Linux clones are disappointing altogether too, so do NOT mention them. Finally today I came across this Java-based player called "Jajuk". I have to say it the most I liked since Amarok-1.4. It has brilliant features, amazingly intuitive interface which somehow hides all the complexity behind the complex features it provides. There is just an endless list of features and they actually work! It is my new default music player.

There are some catches though ->
1) Being Java-based it is heavy. Once I got used to it though, it is not a problem.
2) Global hotkeys are not supported. Now this is a *must* have. I have filed a feature request. Lets see whether it gets footage :-D.

Give Jajuk a try. It is good.
Find it here: http://jajuk.info/index.php/Main_Page