Linux Music Players

[lxskllr]

I've been on a search for the perfect music player, and surprisingly Linux has some crappy choices. It seems like most of the players /almost/ get it right, but not quite. My favorite player on Windows is Foobar2000, and while it sort of works in Wine, it hammers the cpu, and is kind of glitchy.

I've recently discovered DeadBeef(WTF name?!) player, and it's looking like it aspires to be a Foobar2000 clone. I like it, but it's like stepping back several years in Foobar2000 development :^D Check it out here. You can run it as a portable app in Linux...

http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/download.html

I'm digging it, but if development stops, I'll be back to square 1. My short list of acceptable players so far is Banshee, and Clementine. Both are kind of bloated, and I'm not sure if Clementine will sort music the way I like. It's ESSENTIAL for me to be able to sort by folder. That's how I keep my music organized, and it makes it easy for me to manually search through a playlist. I don't care much about "extra" features. I manually drag/drop to my mp3 players, and web content doesn't matter much to me. I do like freedb tagging, and that's the main reason I'm keeping Wine/Foobar2000. I haven't found a Linux player that supports that yet, but maybe I've overlooked it.

Anyway, what do you guys use? I'm hoping I'll find a sweet player I've never heard of. I recently found DeadBeef in some blog comments at OmgUbuntu(good site to find Ubuntu apps/tips/tweaks http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk ).

 

[combust3r]

Sonata (MPD client) for a long time, but right now Rhythmbox...

 

[weovpac]

Give mpd with the front end of your choice a try. I use mpd with ncmpcpp[console based]. Like you I have yet to find something like foobar2000 for Linux. Thanks for sharing DeadBeef, seems like a good player for X.

 

[H54]

I too wish for Foobar2000 but for now, its Rhytmbox.

 

[lxskllr]

Give mpd with the front end of your choice a try. I use mpd with ncmpcpp[console based].

I'm not finding any frontends that look like what I'm looking for. Also, mpd seems a little convoluted to use as a desktop client. It looks useful as hell if you know how to code. The hard part is done for you, and you just need to provide a gui, but for a noob like me it's a little complex if someone hasn't already written a suitable gui.

 

[VinylxScratches]

I like Banshee.

 

[joetekubi]

After many attempts at a suitable music player (most too bloated), I have settled on Audacious, but another lightweight player I like is alsaplayer. Both very lightweight.

 

[lxskllr]

Here's what I have so far...

DeadBeef - This is the winner so far. Very simple, unfinished, but it does exactly what I want. Simple interface, and light footprint. If it never progressed past this point I could still use it.

Exaile - Bloated pig, and wasted space at the top of the player(Highly irritating). I like the tabbed playlist setup, and that's really the only reason I'm keeping it for now. Likely uninstall

Banshee - Bloated pig, but it has nice "extra" features, and a reasonable interface. Extra features are a very low priority for me, but are nice sometimes. Might keep it installed as my "fat" player. Competition in that category is between that and Clementine.

Clementine - Yet another bloated pig. It's one saving grace is the "rain" extra. It'll play a rain sound by itself, or over music. Dumb feature, but I kind of like that. The brief 4chan meme turned me onto that, and it's nice on occasion. CLUTTERED interface, with a bunch of useless crap that doesn't need fast access. I'd uninstall it if it weren't for rain...

Audacious - A little too close to VLC which I have for video clips. I really don't like having multiple windows to control my music. In the integrated view, it doesn't provide much control. It seems to have a lot of extensions, so I'm keeping it for now, until I see what all's available for it. Will likely uninstall though.

MPD - A little convoluted for a desktop player. Frontends I perused didn't seem to do exactly what I wanted.

Rhythmbox - Not bad, but it doesn't sort by folder. Uninstalled

VLC - I use this exclusively for playing single video/audio clips. It may work for libraries, but it uses multiple windows to control music. That's kind of a deal breaker as primary player.

 

[eternalone]

VLC is great for streaming on Linux, VLC is probably my choice.

 

[TBSN]

Foobar sets the bar pretty high I guess.

I don't know much about linux players, but have you tried songbird?

 

[H54]

Didn't they stop developing the linux version?

I found the last version before development stopped to be very laggy and kind of buggy.

 

[lxskllr]

Didn't they stop developing the linux version?

I found the last version before development stopped to be very laggy and kind of buggy.

There may be unofficial development still going, But the official project is dead for Linux. Kind of pissed me off actually. They're free to do what they want, but dropping Linux support from an open source project is kind of cheesy. I wasn't that crazy about it anyway. I like the very early versions feature wise, but it wasn't very stable. As development went on, it started morphing into something I didn't like as well.

 

[H54]

There may be unofficial development still going, But the official project is dead for Linux. Kind of pissed me off actually..

Same here...

 

[lxskllr]

I just looked it up, and the Linux development forked into Nightingale. No download yet, and the project seems to be creeping along, but I guess it's worth keeping an eye on. My hopes aren't very high with the sluggish start. I predict it fizzles out, but hopefully I'm wrong...

http://getnightingale.com/

 

[Rifter]

i use exaile, for tabbed playlists. Untill there is another player with a good easy to manage tabbed playlist i will be staying with exaile.

 

[lxskllr]

i use exaile, for tabbed playlists. Untill there is another player with a good easy to manage tabbed playlist i will be staying with exaile.

Give DeaDBeeF a try. It's very simple, and early in development, but it's a solid player. It handles most formats, but not WMA as of yet. It's like an early version of Foobar2000 if you've ever used that.

 

[jae]

Too many itunes wannabes! How is Audacious too much like VLC? Last time I used it (around Ubuntu 8.04), it was like winamp.

 

[lxskllr]

Too many itunes wannabes! How is Audacious too much like VLC? Last time I used it (around Ubuntu 8.04), it was like winamp.

Using the standard skin, it's got a stripped down interface, and multiple windows a la VLC. They also have the Winampy skin, but I've never been a fan of that format.

 

[Rifter]

Give DeaDBeeF a try. It's very simple, and early in development, but it's a solid player. It handles most formats, but not WMA as of yet. It's like an early version of Foobar2000 if you've ever used that.

I will give it a shot, i really wish foobar2000 worked in linux as its my preferred player on my windows gaming machine. I have tried a bunch of things to get foobar working and it doesnt work at all with wine. I've actually contemplated running a windows VM to get foobar working

 

[Knavish]

...
I've recently discovered DeadBeef(WTF name?!) ...

FYI back in the old days (I believe it was something like an IBM mainframe) they decided to initialize the contents of memory to the Hex words "DEAD BEEF". This way, when you were debugging a program and printed a memory dump, it would be easy to determine if the memory had been modified yet.

Initially they were initializing to "0000 0000", but it's not uncommon to set memory to zero in a program, so it was not as convenient a value for debugging.

 

[VinDSL]

Anyway, what do you guys use?

The only music I listen to is on internet radio stations. And, I listen to a LOT of Podcasts.

For those purposes, I use both Banshee & Rhythmbox (although not at the same time).

Rhythmbox is very underwhelming, but I like the way it handles/archives podcasts.

Banshee is full-featured, yes, but I don't consider it bloated. You can turn stuff off, you know?

Both of these players will interface with the Sound Menu in Ubuntu, which is a big plus IMO.

And, they both work in Conky, e.g. they have suitable command line switches.

Anyway, those are my two choices...

 

[lxskllr]

Banshee is full-featured, yes, but I don't consider it bloated. You can turn stuff off, you know?

It's starts very slowly, and has a /heavy/ feel. Everything is just a little slower than the light players. Keep in mind I'm using these on low spec boxes, so it accentuates any bloat in the players. I doubt it's a huge deal on anything modern.

And, they both work in Conky, e.g. they have suitable command line switches.

DeaDBeeF will display in Conky. The album art display didn't work for me, but I didn't really fool with it either. I don't care much about that, so I rearranged the text, and commented out the art lines in the script I downloaded.

I wonder why no one has made an easy to use, "build your own" player. Would that be especially hard to code? I think it would be cool to have a blank square window, and then drag/drop items, and add different sub windows, and elements. You can pretty much do that with Foobar2000, but even that's a little more convoluted than I'd like.

I wish I could code. I think something like that would be pretty popular. make it an easy sandbox, and you could have any player you wanted with minimal effort.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Thanks for the deadbeef suggestion. It's definitely easier to setup in Opensuse than dealing with getting restricted codecs working in Banshee.

The cover art works fine for me. I have all the options selected: pulls from last.fm, albumart.org and pulls local art (cover.jpg, front.jpb or folder.jpg). Just had to add the album art column in the track list.

I look forward to whenever they can get more "library" functionality with fast search and filters by genre/artist/album/etc... That'll be all I need.

 

[VinDSL]

Just ran across this player... and remembered this thread.

Linkage: Xnoise Media Player

XNOISE is a media player for Gtk+ with a slick GUI, great speed and lots of features.

Unlike Rhythmbox, Banshee or itunes, Xnoise uses a tracklist centric design. The tracklist is a list of video or music tracks that are played one by one without being removed. This gives you the possibility to enqueue any track in any order, regardless if they are on the same album or not.

The tracks can be reordered at any time via drag and drop.

The media browser contains all available media in a hierarchical tree structure of the available metadata. It is easy to find a single track, artist or album by going through this tree or by just entering a search term. From the media browser, music or videos can be dragged into the tracklist to every position.

Single or multiple tracks, streams, albums or artists can be dragged onto the tracklist and be reordered. Within the playing track, it's possible to scroll to every position by clicking the position bar.

Xnoise can play every kind of audio/video data that gstreamer can handle.

Xnoise has seperated threads for GUI and database access, so it always remains usable (even while importing large media collections)

Xnoise was written in vala, releases are generated C-Code for GObject. For compiling distributed tarballs no vala compiler is needed.

Heh! I might give this a whirl in Natty.

 

[lxskllr]

Xnoise isn't for me. The method of creating playlists is interesting, but not something I'd really use much. I REALLY like tabbed playlists, and while I'd definitely consider a player that didn't have them, not sorting by folder is a deal breaker. I like scrolling through a ginormous playlist to get to a track I'm looking for. I know about where it is due to the way I organize my music, and searching it out manually sometimes reveals music I didn't think I wanted to hear, but do. It's kind of like flipping through a stack of CDs that are placed in alphabetical order. You might start out looking for something specific, but get sidetracked along the way by other music. I enjoy the spontaneous nature of that kind of listening :^)