Amarok/Archives/Campaign:2.0/Analysis

Core Competence

• good and fast support
  • wiki
  • #amarok, #amarok.de, #amarok.es
  • forum
  • [email protected]
• contextual information
  • last.fm related songs
  • last.fm+wikipedia related artists
  • artist/album/song information
  • lyrics fetching
  • playcount
  • score & rating
• easy access to collection
  • sorting
  • search
    • quick and dirty search
    • advanced search
• podcast support
• the "amarok-feeling" (as a result of the stuff mentioned above)
  • amarok makes you love your music
  • amarok literally makes you rediscover your music
  • using amarok you confess that music is an important part of you life

Competition

Linux

Banshee

• (+) development supported by novell
• (+) extendable plugin system
• (-) slow startup due to mono
• (-) high memory usage

Rhythmbox

• (+) easy playlist creation
• (+) podcast support
• (+) default gnome player
• (-) awful interface (messy navigation)
• (-) problems with importing various tracks
• (-) crashing a lot

XMMS

• (+) winamp clone (first choice for switchers who used winamp)
• (-) not very handy GTK1 file selector
• (-) crappy GUI
• (-) no music library at all
• (-) no podcast support
• (-) loosing market segments to other linux players

Mac

iTunes

• (+) podcast subscription (ilife-people love podcasts and they get them automatically downloaded; but do amarok users love them too? Are podcasts even more important?)
• (+) music library
• (+) well integrated with iPod
• (+) well integrated with iTunes store
• (+) lovely album view
• (+) iTunes music sharing
• (+) bundled with mac
• (+) used by every proper iPod user
• (+) smooth interface
• (+) bloody easy&fast search
• (+) relatively large navigation buttons
• (±) available for win and mac (not linux though)
• (-) no plugin support
• (-) only supports some formats out of box (MP3, AAC, WMA)
• (-) no button shortcuts (at least not on win?)
• (-) not working on Windows Vista
• (-) no queuing system (only playlists and party shuffle)

Windows

Foobar2000

• (+) tabbed playlists
• (+) small and fast
• (±) extensible through plugins (not that much available/useful)
• (-) crappy GUI

iTunes

see mac

Real Player One (>26 million)

• (+) kicking ass streaming support
• (-) very very very commercial
• (+) Support for large number of media file formats "out of the box"

Winamp (>5 million)

• (+) easy to use
• (+) memory saving
• (+) supports almost every audio format (even vorbis)
• (+) big list of awesome vis
• (+) themable
• (+) good streaming support
• (+) extendable plugin system
• (+) generic mobile player support
• (+) supported by IM's for what-I-am-listening-to feature
• (-) music library is bascially ... shit
• (-) even modern themes don't look that good
• (-) no handy queuing
• (-) xmms-like multi window system is harder to use
• (-) button-size competes with Planck-Scale (veeery small)

Windows Media Player (>45 million)

• (+) bundled with windows (windows == biggest market share == big plus for wmp)
• (+) appeals well integrated into windows
• (+) playback from within IE (ActiveX) and MFF (plugin)
• (+) generic mobile player support
• (±) rips by default to WMA
• (-) only supports MP3 and WMA out of the box

Target Groups

Users

• Age: 14-(about)35
• everyone who's listening and/or buying music on the PC
  • using mobile players
  • is interested in contextual information on his music

Needs & Views

• the interface has to be bloody easy to use (self-explaning)
• easy and fast playlist creation
• easy and good looking collection management
• search feature for fast access to a certain song
• ability to obtain statistics about the listening behaviour
• easy ripping
• easy extendable with all kind of plugins
• hell good looking interface or the possability to make it be good looking (themability)
• low memory usage (for gamers)
• easy device/media-player integration
• I-wanna-show-what-music-I-am-listening-to feature for instant messengers (Needed: Plugins for messengers, scripts for amarok. Would google support us in GoogleTalk?)

Distributions

• main stream distros, using KDE or don't prefer any DE at all

Needs & Views

• easy packagable
• ability to preconfigure stuff
• proper use of standards
• way to give feedback
• wanna ship the most stable/usable/good looking application to their users

The Brand's Advantage

• Free and Libre (=> e.g. Firefox-users feel better than IE-users because they believe they are cool)
• Possibility to REALLY influence development by feedback and bug reports
• Fast release cycle
• High quality, stable product (at least on *nix)

Values

• Music is an important thing
• Keep Amarok easy to use
• Always have fun
• Team work is awesome
• The team is responsible, not a single person

USP (UDP)

• available for *nix, Windows and Mac OS
• Good user - developer communication
• Innovative development
• Fast development
• FLOSS