Journal drinkypoo's Journal: music players for linux 16
Are there ANY music players for Linux whose interfaces are not pure crap? Rhythmbox was closest, but it's basically abandoned. Banshee's interface is canned crap. Just try rating a song that's currently playing, for example; you have to go find it first. And how did that song get to be playing, anyway? And why won't the same thing that started that song playing, start a different song playing instead of just looping this one I never clicked on over and over? Winamp is more or less unusable at modern screen resolutions and in any case has only the most primitive library support, so I'm not going back to the future.
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I moved to Windows Media Player; I was hesitant at first, but honestly it is pretty decent. Definitely better (in terms of usability) than any Linux media player I have come across.
It's the choke factor that stops me. I've used WiMP in VirtualBox OSE for tagging purposes; it's hard to find something that will gracefully search the internet and pull information, and which also handles wma etc. WiMP is less than graceful but better than most. But WiMP just chokes windows all the time; now that I have all kinds of cores and whatnot I can afford a choking VM but it's still an ugly solution.
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t seems like it would be impractical to use a VM for media playback, though; I would opt for a native solution, even if it is terrible.
It adds little additional difficulty in this case, because my music library is on a volume not directly attached to my computer. WiMP 11 on XP in VirtualBox seems to be approximately as fast as Songbird on my actual OS (Ubuntu Karmic x64) at scanning it, for what that data point is worth (basically nothing.)
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Not really, it's a DT Research DT168, AMD Geode LX 800 (500MHz.) Draws ~5W peak, has quad USB2. USB seems kind of flaky but runs my MyBook well, I get about 7MB/sec real-world performance streaming from it, about the same doing writes but maybe a little slower 'cause I used XFS. I may go back to using a laptop, but the power consumption is quite a bit higher.
Songbird (Score:2)
It is the "Mozilla" of music players - earning a spot alongside Firebird and Miro as very-good XUL applications that share the Firefox heritage:
http://getsongbird.org/ [getsongbird.org]
You have a huge and valuable set of plugins, theming the UI, plus a great web-integration for music blogging, etc.
I wish it were packaged for Debian/Ubuntu in the apt repositories. Still there are contributed builds/packages for many platforms:
http://wiki.songbirdnest.com/Developer/Articles/Builds/Contributed_Builds [songbirdnest.com]
And debs are here:
http://ww [getdeb.net]
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Wow, that's ... iTunes.
Very impressive. It looks like the kind of software I'd like to switch to if I weren't stuck with the real iTunes to sync my phone. And I'm not happy about that. Being fucked over AGAIN by the Apple lockdown experience is making me wish I'd waited for an Android solution. You think I'd have known better...
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It's actually better than iTunes in many ways - it's fully integrated to real web-browsing, not the Apple, walled-garden.
It has an extention eco-system that is - not vast like Firefox - but healthy and very valuable.
You CAN strip your DRM tunes to plain mp3. There are cheap apps that do just this on the 'net.
I de-coupled my daughter from the Apple-bonkers, after she got bit and almost lost all of her music.
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It has an extention eco-system that is - not vast like Firefox - but healthy and very valuable.
Valuable if you're not running the latest songbird, that is. It appears basically none of the addons are for 1.5.x. Luckily it's pretty useful without them. It's too bad the people running the website aren't smart enough to let you search for addons by supported version.
Functional over pretty (Score:2)
I use QuodLibet [google.com]. It gets the job done, and manages to not do anything weirder than I would. (I'm working on listening to every last song in my playlist, in random order. I think I'm down to 20 hours or so of music I've never heard... time to start putting together a new cdbaby order ;)
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I'd second QuodLibet if only for the regex music searches. QuodLibet's the only thing I miss in OS X.
Amarok (Score:2)
Have you tried Amarok?
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Not recently; a friend suggested exaile so I'm using songbird now (as suggested first [slashdot.org]) and then if/when it pisses me off I'll switch to exaile... I'll try Amarok again after that if necessary :)
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Check out both Amarok 2.x and 1.x, big differences in the interface.
Personally, I like the XMMS2 CLI interface, though I doubt many others do.
Just out of curiousity... (Score:2)
Are there ANY music players...whose interfaces are not pure crap?