Best music player for Linux???

Tom-eg

I have tried out loads. My favourite so far is songbird if it wasn't for the fact that its such a hog. I am looking for something with loads of features and is stable, user friendly and lightweight. Anyone have any recommendations. I do think songbird is the one to look out for but its too early just yet and it needs a bit of time. Please back up your recommendations. Thanks

An Fear Aniar

The one I found worked best for me is Banshee, it's going to be included (somewhat controversially) in the next release of Ubuntu. Banshee uses a lot of juice, it's not light by any means.

I'm also trying out Exaile, but the Last.fm plugin doesn't seem to be working.

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ak27

I like exaile as well, amarok is another good choice too.

turgon

Rhythmbox for me, because all I do is listen to music and its simple to use. Load up just click once artist, click once album choose track. In Exaile it works like dropdown lists which seems to take longer, although admittedly I havent used it that much.

Ive tried Amorak 2. I wont be trying it again.



i suppose its all about what you want out of music player. I want one that can be playing music in 2 clicks and is quick to change over, principally because I use music on the computer as ambiance when Im on the net or programming. Also Rhythmbox neatly retreats to the GNOME notifications area.

pljudge321

turgon wrote: »

Rhythmbox for me, because all I do is listen to music and its simple to use. Load up just click once artist, click once album choose track. In Exaile it works like dropdown lists which seems to take longer, although admittedly I havent used it that much.

Ive tried Amorak 2. I wont be trying it again.



i suppose its all about what you want out of music player. I want one that can be playing music in 2 clicks and is quick to change over, principally because I use music on the computer as ambiance when Im on the net or programming. Also Rhythmbox neatly retreats to the GNOME notifications area.

Amarok 1.4 all the way, Amarok 2 is an unintuitive pile of s*** that has less features than its predecessor.

croo

pljudge321 wrote: »

Amarok 1.4 all the way, Amarok 2 is an unintuitive pile of s*** that has less features than its predecessor.

Yeah I have to agree. Maybe when version 2 gets to 2.4 it will be time to change but amarok 1.4 is the best player I've found .. probably because of the plugins available. I really find the moodbar useful as well at the dynamic playlists driven by last.fm suggestions that were in turn based on current playlist ... I really missed those for starters when I tried amarok2.

Galen

I prefer Rhythmbox but I use Songbird 1.12 for managing my ipod. Songbird 1.20 has a issue with nVidia graphics cards which requires you to remove software that is required by Rhythmbox and Totem (Visual effects).

turgon

pljudge321 wrote: »

Amarok 1.4 all the way, Amarok 2 is an unintuitive pile of s*** that has less features than its predecessor.

What was the story with that, how did it become so much worse?

Im downloading Amarok 1.4 as we speak. I use GNOME anyway. Amarok 2 did work in GNOME.

EDIT: Thats actually strange, Amarok 1.4 is actually good. Cant say Ive ever heard of software getting that **** after a new version. I might be actually using Amorak now, although tbh Im still attracted to the simplicity of Rythymbox.

croo

turgon wrote: »

What was the story with that, how did it become so much worse?

I'm guessing here, but from the little I read I think it was a case of 1.4 might be functionally good but it's underlying design is not good and they decide to rewrite ... and the first release on the new design is fairly basic missing much of the nice things we all liked from the previous version.

I'm hoping that with the new design it can quickly be extended to match the previous 1.4 and more... 2.1.1 was an improvement on the 2.0 that comes with ubuntu and came fairly quickly, so if the amarok team can keep the momentum going it might not be too long until we are back to 2.4. Fingers crossed!

For now I use 1.4 on my main work machine that I listen to most as I work and keep the latest 2 for evaluation on another.

BopNiblets

Audacious here, not the best but it's simple and has Last.fm support.

towel401

i'm a fanboy of audacious myself. else VLC. i love VLC's oldschool GUI

who is this

towel401 wrote: »

i love VLC's oldschool GUI

I love VLC's low-resource usage. Nothing else comes close

towel401

who is this wrote: »

I love VLC's low-resource usage. Nothing else comes close

what about commandline mplayer?

ZorbaTehZ

+1 to Rhythmbox.

Galen

+1 to Exaile (I only use songbird for managing ipod)

z0oT

Amarok 1.4 is what I'm using. I wasn't mad about version 2.0. Tried rhythmbox too but the lack of an equalizer put me off it.

kierank01

Its refreshing to see a thread like this rather than a 'when will <this> feature be implimented' type thread, shows how far linux has come.

Amarok 1.4 is good, I hated v 2.0

but my preferred choice is VLC.

thegom145

I've been using exaile a good bit for the last year or so, never had the lastfm problem that some of the other posters have been mentioning tho.

I also like moc, because I'm a command line geek

Tillotson

Mpd + Ncmpcpp is my preferred option. Exaile's also very nice.

Naikon

I use MOC. Nice console music player.

ntlbell

i'm still using xmms does everything i need

Galen

Banshee is certainly not ready, it can't rip cd properly or reliably manage your ipod.

pickarooney

Amarok 1.4 for me. I don't foresee trying version 2 again for a while. Worst 'upgrade' I ever tried.

JC 2K3

Rhythmbox, mplayer or VLC, depending on what else I'm doing on my PC.

IronMan

Amarok 1.4 for me. Version 2 was one of the worst pieces of software I had the misfortune to use, buggy, removal of great features, horrible interface. Yuck.

I also use Spotify under Wine.

anton

quodlibet

I didn't use any other players for a while, so can't really compare it.

kierank01

anton wrote: »

quodlibet

I didn't use any other players for a while, so can't really compare it.

I liked that for about a 20 minutes, but from what I can remember if you are playing a song, and click another that starts to play. There may be a way around this, or maybe I was just using it wrong.

I do like the exfalso tag tool that comes with it.

dioltas

mpd + ncmpcpp FTW!
Use mpdas as well for scrobbling:pac:

croo

I thought I would revive this thread as the new Amarok 2.3 release is very close to 1.4 now. To those that decided to stick with version 1.4 it might be time to reconsider! :eek:
Certainly it looks to have all I need to finally drop 1.4

Galen

It is just a pity about the rest of kde, for instance it usb manager (can't remember it's title) crashes every time I connect my 5th gen ipod.

Eliot Rosewater

Galen wrote: »

It is just a pity about the rest of kde, for instance it usb manager (can't remember it's title) crashes every time I connect my 5th gen ipod.

Cant you use Amarok in GNOME if you have the KDE libraries installed?

Khannie

Eliot Rosewater wrote: »

Cant you use Amarok in GNOME if you have the KDE libraries installed?

Indeed you can.

Galen

I prefer to use Songbird in GNOME but I have tried moving to kde4 but gnome is still best especially Mint.

croo

Yeah, as others have said you can use amarok in gnome - which is the desktop manager I use. I haven't tried songbird to be honest, but the things I like about amarok are; the moodbar (very useful for finding a place is say a long classical piece), the lyrics finder but I case this pretty much the norm now, the great random track selection (lots of parameters), and perhaps my favourite the "random" playlist based on last.fm recommendations in turn based on what you are actually listening to. So you chose an initial track and then based on that it uses last.fm recommendations to pick the next track from your collection... I really like this.

Anyway a lot of people were disappointed with the version 2.0 of amarok and decided to stick with 1.4 I was really just alerting those to the new 2.3 release.

[-0-]

Depends on which box I'm on... mpg123, xmms or amaroK 1.4

pickarooney

I'm currently testing Guayadeque. Some excellent features and the developer adds new stuff every 5 minutes or so. A couple of minor niggles but it's well on its way to being one of the best players out there.

pljudge321

I use Pana, which is a fork of Amarok 1.4 which has everything in it working. The Amarok 1.4 I had installed before had some of its functionality missing.

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/pana-a-music-player-based-on-amarok-1-4.html

dioltas

I use Goggles Music Manager, it's really nice and it's lightweight.

http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/

pickarooney

I've officially (press release issued and signed by 4 witnesses) switched to guayadeque now. All it's missing is a crossfader and that should be implemented any day now. Check if out if you have a huge music collection and/or like being able to position all the window elements wherever you like on the screen.

evercloserunion

I use Amarok 2; I do indeed find it less intuitive than 1.4, but it has never occurred to me to downgrade. I will try 2.3 when I switch to 10.04.

I never understood the hype around VLC? it annoys me that playing 10 songs in VLC opens up 10 windows (or can that be changed)? I understand that it's very lightweight but is it as lightweight as command line mplayer?

kierank01

evercloserunion wrote: »

I never understood the hype around VLC? it annoys me that playing 10 songs in VLC opens up 10 windows (or can that be changed)? I understand that it's very lightweight but is it as lightweight as command line mplayer?

Go tools, preferences, and tick 'allow only one instance'

bnt

I like RhythmBox for music, but I like to listen to podcasts in high-speed mode, so VLC is good for that. I wish RhythmBox were a bit better at handling files e.g. if I have a bunch of files in a single directory, that's an album, regardless of what the ID3 tags say.

jackrussell007

bnt wrote: »

I like RhythmBox for music, but I like to listen to podcasts in high-speed mode, so VLC is good for that. I wish RhythmBox were a bit better at handling files e.g. if I have a bunch of files in a single directory, that's an album, regardless of what the ID3 tags say.

ohh dont get me started...i friggin hate that. I'd love if music players were more sensitive to the folder structure rather than just scanning your music folder and categorising them itself. I hate scrolling for ages through orphaned tracks until I find the album I want.

I use amarok on ubuntu9.1, not sure which version of amarok that makes it. to defeat the above problem I find I most often use the file browser in amarok rather than the collection browser.

pickarooney

jackrussell007 wrote: »

ohh dont get me started...i friggin hate that. I'd love if music players were more sensitive to the folder structure rather than just scanning your music folder and categorising them itself. I hate scrolling for ages through orphaned tracks until I find the album I want.

I use amarok on ubuntu9.1, not sure which version of amarok that makes it. to defeat the above problem I find I most often use the file browser in amarok rather than the collection browser.

Guayadeque uses the folders as albums structure and has an album browser.

JuneBug29

Seen Guayadeque mentioned and i would like to recommend it. It is an amazing player considering the features and how little resources it requires. Has a smart playlist which i find very handy. As far as i know it doesn't support ipod's yet. Not a problem for me but may be for others. If that's not a concern i would highly recommend it. Lightweight, fully featured, fast, well able for huge libraries. Definitely check it out.

Jonathan

DeadBeeF

I've only discovered it recently, but it is enough to save me from running foobar2000 through Wine

Khannie

JuneBug29 wrote: »

Seen Guayadeque mentioned and i would like to recommend it.

Gonna check it out. Cheers. Looks a lot like rhythmbox on initial inspection.

woop

banshee, might be a small bit laggy but its great for device support

pickarooney

Khannie wrote: »

Gonna check it out. Cheers. Looks a lot like rhythmbox on initial inspection.

Be sure to get the SVN version; there have been over a thousand revisions since v0.25!

Oracle

Not sure about fully fledged music player, I just use whatever's installed by default. Although I do like Audacious2 for mp3 podcasts and downloads. It's very fast, easy to use and unobtrusive.

Naikon

The simple ones are the best for me. mpg123 = command line goodness.