1. Editing Tags: Its a pain in the ass in iTunes. One doesnt have an album level handle. For example, if u want to change the name of an album, there is no easy way of doing it, one has to edit each song in the album individually. Amarok on the other hand has album level handles.
2. Album Artwork: Its a piece of a cake on iTunes. On Amarok, if amazon has the artwork then fine, otherwise one has to save the pic then go select it by path. There is no copy paste kind of thing with respect to the image URL itself, unlike iTunes.
3. Playlist Features: While the Music library view in iTunes makes it easy to make new fields by searching with respect to any tag, in Amarok one has to configure the collection view before such a thing. Also iTunes playlists lack features like queuing a track to play next. This is very very useful feature.
4. Last.fm: Amarok's support for Last.fm is truly lovable. Everything is provided inside the player window itself. For iTunes, one has to externally install a program and use the last.fm features through iTunes. But one thing that is better on iTunes is that I can love and ban the songs from my own library as well, unlike Amarok where I am allowed to love and ban songs of only the tag radios.
5. Store: iTunes store rocks. Magnatune of Amarok on the other hand is naive and does not have any main stream artists. I dont know whats the point in having such a store is.
6. Videos: Although with an mplayer plugin and some tweaking I can add videos to my Amarok playlists, it is still nontrivial. With a descent container format like .mov iTunes blends in properly with Quicktime for movies and makes life wonderful with respect to videos.
7. Devices: Device support features are truly debatable. Although both the players support iPod I cant sync them wherever I want. Amarok crashes on the normal iPod software and iTunes fails to detect any format other than the default apple firmware. This is a pain. I sync with iTunes.
8. Ratings and Statistics: Rating systems are good on both the players. Although the statistics are better on Amarok. They give a list of favourite artists, genres, singers, albums etc. There is no equivalent thing for iTunes in built.
9. Shortkeys: It is completely non trivial to setup shortkeys the way we want in a Mac. iTunes does not come with global shortkeys. Which is very painful. But the front row thing with the remote is just too cool. Amarok being a part of KDE makes life easy with respect to shortkeys. I can set whatever keys that I want.
10. Looks: iTunes cover flow looks cool, but Amarok lets you put what ever theme one wants and make it as u want.
11. Info: iTunes has no mechanism for getting album/artist/song info. Amarok has a context tab which gets info about the artist, album and song from wiki. There is also a facility to get and put lyrics centrally for all the amarok users. This totally kicks ass.
12. Indian Music: More often than not, Indian music is from the movies where the music director is different from the singer, song writers. This makes it immensely difficult as the there is no multiple artist support on either of the players. (Alka Yagnik is treated differently from Alka Yagnik + Sonu Nigam). And it makes the things even worse when u have to ignore AR Rahman altogether and make the artists as the singers or either way. I need something where a song can have multiple artists. Something where a single album can have songs from different artists and not call it a compilation.
