Any Decent Audio Players?

Any Decent Audio Players?

Amarok doesn't play CDs (and is slow etc).
Rhythmbox doesn't do Replay Gain and if you try to enable it through gconf-editor it doesn't work either (and it is a bad iTunes clone etc).
Quod Libet doesn't seem to do files/directories mounted through SSHFS (but is otherwise… reasonable).
VLC stutters for non-local files (and wouldn't be very ideal if it didn't either).

Edit: I forgot to mention Exaile, which seems to be the only player I've tried that can properly play my music, meaning it a) actually plays, b) doesn't stutter and c) applies Replay Gain. It's as slow as Amarok, though, and besides rather bloated for my tastes. It completely freezes up while adding tracks, etc. I suppose it's better than Windows Media Player or something...

<a href="http://audacious-media-player.org">Audacious</a> sort of a WinAmp/XMMS clone...
<a href="http://getsongbird.com/system-requirements.php">Songbird</a> which personally, pisses me off...but maybe...
<a href="http://banshee-project.org">Banshee</a> sort of Amarok-like...
<a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/beepmp">Beep Media Player</a> based on XMMS so has that same WinAmp 2.x style.

I know I'm missing at least one... but I don't think I've ever seen a "one size fits all", there's always something where you need your main player, and your player for what the main player can't do...

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Audacious sort of a WinAmp/XMMS clone...

Winamp's layout has always pissed me off, the only reason I used it was because I wasn't aware of foobar2000 which is better on all accounts. All Winamp clones I tried were about equally bad or worse, at any rate. Sounds reasonable from the page, though. I might try it.

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Songbird which personally, pisses me off...but maybe...

Hate it, and besides it crashes.

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Banshee sort of Amarok-like...

I was thinking of trying that, but I got rather tired of trying stuff that doesn't work. I guess I'll give it a whirl, but it's certainly not my style.

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Beep Media Player based on XMMS so has that same WinAmp 2.x style.

Hate it.

Originally posted by Vectronic:

I know I'm missing at least one... but I don't think I've ever seen a "one size fits all", there's always something where you need your main player, and your player for what the main player can't do...

foobar2000 fits all. Heck, maybe I should take Wine more seriously.

Originally posted by Vectronic:

I know I'm missing at least one... but I don't think I've ever seen a "one size fits all", there's always something where you need your main player, and your player for what the main player can't do...

Exaile maybe?

Totem

Originally posted by jase21:

Totem

I don't think it does Replay Gain, does it? Either way, it's Gnome's equivalent for Windows Media Player, by which I mean it's better than WMP, but not the kind of tool I'm looking for.

Basically Quod Libet would seem to be the best thing I tried, except that for some reason it doesn't play my SSHFS mounted files. Well, that and foobar2000 through Wine, but I'm not quite sure if Wine's audio quality is as good as a "native" player could be.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

Exaile maybe?

Yeah that's another... and another Amarok clone...

Originally posted by Frenzie:

foobar2000 fits all

Not for me... it' fits all except for ripping/trans-coding and mass-tagging, where I use Quintessential, but that's only about once a week, so no big deal...

Originally posted by jase21:

Totem

It doesn't have much of anything, VLC is better and VLC sucks for audio...lol

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Not for me... it' fits all except for ripping/trans-coding and mass-tagging, where I use Quintessential, but that's only about once a week, so no big deal...

I meant as a player; it plays all the files, supports all the output modes, has the best audio quality, etc... Nevertheless, foobar2000 is by far the best GUI tool for trans-coding and mass-tagging? I admit I use MusicBrainz Picard for something you could call mass-tagging, but that's mainly because of the integration with MusicBrainz. There's also a Discogs plugin for foobar2000 that offers similar functionality if MusicBrainz isn't your thing, but I was referring to somewhat more manual things like changing the dates on an entire album. Nothing does that as fast and easily as foobar2000 I'd say, but Ex Falso seems decent too in the tagging and renaming department (though like I said, the majority of that is done by Picard). I used to use Winamp with a separate tagging tool (I forget which). It also has a super-easy integrated ripping dialog, but I tend to use CDex on full paranoia with Lame at -preset-extreme (mainly because I'm used to it). The Quintessential player seems to have changed a lot since 2002 btw.

I use Foobar for some of the simple things, like Year, or Album, etc... but... Quintessential has everything all in a neat little dialog...lol
And yeah, as far ripping goes, I'm the same... pretty much just a single click, and wait for it to finish... but may as well do it in Quintessential since i'll use it to fix any tags and stuff anyways.

The only thing where foobar2000 may end up being somewhat lacking for me is adding lyrics, but I don't tend to do that anyway.

Either way, I'd advise you to look at MusicBrainz Picard or the foobar2000 Discogs plugin. Especially MusicBrainz has a great database. I added about two dozen releases personally (that weren't in there yet) since it's almost the same effort to do that as it is to do it locally (albeit you need to add a bit more proof for information and stuff) and then Picard can tag & rename automatically, and (hopefully) other people can profit from what I did. Besides it helps to match up my Last.FM played tracks with the Musicbrainz DB.

On another note, Quod Libet seems to have fixed itself in regard to my SSHFS, but now it's giving me problems with permissions and /var/spool/lastfm/whatever. Maybe I should try updating from the frozen release that comes with Ubuntu. Edit: bleh, except it is the most recent one. I don't want to bother with SVN... and it seems to have stoppped working again with the SSHFS *sigh*

I found something that actually seems to be capable of playing my music without too much fuss. It's called Decibel Audio Player. The version that comes with Karmic Koala is 1.0 and doesn't do Replay Gain, but 1.02 comes with Lucid, so I downloaded the DEB and it claims to be working now. It's clearly not applying Replay Gain, however, despite activating the module (ReplayGain should NOT be a module anyway, it's _quite_ essential). All my Papa Roach (and basically everything with ReplayGain) sounds equally loud in foobar2000, but in Decibel volumes are all over the place. It also fails at gapless playback, even with the --playbin2 command line option. It also does the freezing that Python applications seem to do to some extent, but it's not nearly as badly affected as the other player applications. It also doesn't do global shortcuts (but neither does foobar2000 in Wine, I guess). Basically it looks really promising and works better than most things, but is somewhat handicapped by the Gnome "the user is an idiot and there should be no options whatsoever" syndrome (choosing how to apply my ReplayGain, for instance — perhaps it's applying per track and that's why it's failing so badly or something, although that would be weird since if anything it should sound more equal then....).

So yeah. Still looking, but temporarily using this.

If you're looking for an audio player than can also make coffee, then you should stay away from Decibel...

Hmm... guess I'm staying away... that's my problem with all the Linux media players, lack of options... they can all do the straight-forward "click play" stuff...

Tried <a href="http://aqualung.factorial.hu/home.html">Aqualung</a>? claims to have ReplayGain, though they make it sound <a href="http://aqualung.factorial.hu/manual/aqualung-doc-part_6_3.html#id208882">scary</a>...lol, also has a horrible interface...

Originally posted by Vectronic:

If you're looking for an audio player than can also make coffee, then you should stay away from Decibel...

Hmm... guess I'm staying away... that's my problem with all the Linux media players, lack of options... they can all do the straight-forward "click play" stuff...

Like I said, the mindset behind Gnome isn't very attractive.

Btw, tried Audacious, horrible interface, and fails at gapless as well. Whether or not Gstreamer is the cause in some of those other players, it's apparently not that much "considerably more powerful than GStreamer."

Originally posted by Vectronic:

Tried Aqualung? claims to have ReplayGain, though they make it sound scary...lol, also has a horrible interface...

It breaks my eyes, but it actually plays gapless and after enabling the "RVA" option (should be on by default!) it seems to apply ReplayGain correctly as well. Beats anything I tried so far. I don't really understand how it works, though. Does "music store" mean database? Wtf?

Edit: and it doesn't seem to have a function for Last.FM (far less important than gapless and RG I must say, of course)

How come these stupid audio players seem to do the opposite of what Linux is often accused of? They're just trying to build flashy interfaces without a solid base to build on. foobar2000 is the solid base, the plugins are the flashy things you can do add to it.

I'm also looking into mpd since I read that it provides the kind of solid base I just referred to, but I can't quite figure it out with GMPC as a front-end.

Goggles ?

Supports Replay Gain. http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/

I was unfamiliar with Goggles, thanks.

Major plus: it's the only one that doesn't freeze up while adding music (if you don't count foobar2000 in Wine).

However: It lies about being capable of gapless playback. It's a lot closer than any of the others (save for Aqualung & foobar2000 in Wine which actually do gapless — haven't tested mpd properly yet), though, since the gap is only a fraction of a second rather than this super-obvious gap. But it's still a gap.

It looks and feels somewhat like a Windows application? I suppose this isn't really a con (it looks more at home than Aqualung), but it just emphasizes how it's not foobar2000 more by looking somewhat similar to it.

Also, I don't know what its support of ReplayGain is supposed to mean, but with ReplayGain set to either album mode (preferred) or track mode switching from, say, Pink Floyd to Oomph! results in a major volume difference, whereas foobar2000 and Aqualung produce them at equal sounding volumes.

I mention these because I've been using The Wall to test gapless playback and switching to some more or less random Oomph! track to test ReplayGain.

Does anybody know if the Crux theme is available for Windows XP/Wine? <_< By now it seems that's the only thing that will work properly. I can set shortcuts to foobar.exe /next, /previous, etc. to produce global shortcuts.

http://www.bobulous.org.uk/misc/Replay-Gain-in-Linux.html

soundKonverter ?

I suppose I could try a few test files and see if that makes a difference, but the RG was scanned and applied by foobar2000 and works (among others) on my mp3 player, Winamp, Aqualung, and mpd and is completely according to spec as far as I can tell.

Edit: nope, same results when retagged with soundKonverter, as expected. It's Goggles alright.

Edit 2: As I hinted at before I managed to get mpd running properly and I've been testing it with a combination of mpc and Ario. It passes my gapless, Replay Gain and Last.FM tests (after some fiddling with the settings), but its lack of ability to just play a song or a folder easily without adding it to the rather explicitly specified music directory is a bit of a pain. I also don't think it can play CDs, so it's roughly on par with Amarok, although unlike Amarok it's quite light on resources.

Yeah, I guess I should point out that I was using Amarok before because it would for the most part play my music, but I just thought it was generally too slow and it not playing CDs despite being allegedly so "full-featured" really pissed me off.

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe one day sooner rather than later, we will have a player that does everything we throw at it.

Regards

The most important thing for a music player, it would seem to me, is to play back music well. It seems like only Aqualung and mpd understand that.

And I hope we will.

List of audio players - filched from Ubuntu forums. If you have the time ..

Audio players

1. Rhythmbox

2. Banshee

3. Exaile

4. Listen

5. Decibel

6. Gmusicbrowser

7. Quod Libet

8. Amarok

9. Songbird

10. atunes

11. Youki

12. Audacious

13. Christine

15. Gejengel

16. muine

18. Quark

19. juk

10. sonata

11. Gimmix

12. Aqualung

13. Bluemindo

14. Pympd

15. Mesk

16. GMPC

17. Goggles Music Manager

18. Jajuk

19. lsongs

20. jukes

Originally posted by ocky:

List of audio players - filched from Ubuntu forums. If you have the time ..

lol not really atm, but I already tried about half of those anyway. I'll juts add some commentary (mostly for myself)

Originally posted by ocky:

1. Rhythmbox
2. Banshee
3. Exaile

Of these, I think I like Exaile best, but that probably says more about Rhythmbox and Banshee than about Exaile.

Originally posted by ocky:

4. Listen

The latest version seems to have RG. I guess I could try it (and see what it does with gapless).

Originally posted by ocky:

6. Gmusicbrowser
7. Quod Libet
8. Amarok
9. Songbird
10. atunes

Quod Libet and Amarok are... reasonable, don't like the others.

Originally posted by ocky:

11. Youki
12. Audacious
13. Christine
15. Gejengel
16. muine
18. Quark
19. juk
10. sonata
11. Gimmix

I haven't tried all of these, but those I did try had the regular defects and for the most part players like muine don't look very promising from their websites. I'll have to look into some of them, though.

Originally posted by ocky:

12. Aqualung

As said, the clear winner among Linux audio players. Its most serious defect is not submitting to Last.FM, seconded by having an interface that is rather awful imo.

Originally posted by ocky:

13. Bluemindo
14. Pympd
15. Mesk
16. GMPC

I'll have to try these.

Originally posted by ocky:

17. Goggles Music Manager

Woo, it manages not to freeze while adding music (especially unlike the allegedly perfect for large collections Quod Libet). Too bad it fails otherwise.

Originally posted by ocky:

18. Jajuk
19. lsongs
20. jukes

I'll have to try these.

Jajuk looks good and is in the repos. However replay gain I think is only supported in the newer versions.
" * status changed from new to closed.
* resolution changed from None to fixed.

Done in 1.8, added volnorm option in advanced tab of preferences view."

The newer versions are available from:- http://sourceforge.net/projects/jajuk/

I use xine-ui for just about everything.
Just be sure to get all of it's codecs though
Especially the libxine1 and win32 stuff for your distro.
Juk works well if you already have the music on your Hard-Drive.

Since I got around to moving my desktop into the living room it's not longer an issue (I play audio almost exclusively through foobar2000 on Windows), but for use on my Ubuntu laptop I've settled with Goggles because it stays responsive and is otherwise reasonable.

Originally posted by Lykopis:

I use xine-ui for just about everything.

I've never seen much in using players primarily aimed at video for audio unless I'm only playing a couple of songs.

Glad you got it worked out.
Since I don't use M$-Window$ at all, foobar2000 wouldn't help me much.
Xine is in fact really very versatile, the UI part just refers to User-Interface nothing more.
Also Xine has many GUI front-ends depending on what Linux distro you happen to use.
Xine-ui just happens to be the one you can find the easiest and download for use.
Once you learn all of it's features you can play/view most audio/video files,
also play lists can be made and saved and it doesn't need to rescan your
libraries at every load-up, so it's really fast to get it going.
For large music play lists (something like a 100 + songs)
I like juk. It even has a tag editor for your audio files.
Oh and on a Linux Box you are already running your sound through
a pulse audio or Xine back-end anyways,
So what difference would it make as to what GUI front-ends it?
The sound would still come through the same decoder and
sound the same no matter what GUI/player is used to load it.
Anyways good luck.

Originally posted by Frenzie:

I've never seen much in using players primarily aimed at video for audio unless I'm only playing a couple of songs.

Consider Window$ media player (most people use it for music)

Audacious is my all-time favorite because it's one of the rare players that's written in C/C++ and not some kind of resource absorbing programming language like Python. First it was VLC but its playlist support is very crappy and always gets corrupted. I reported that several times in the past but it never got fixed so I gave up on using the player as a music player.

Like VLC Audacious resource usage is very little and like Winamp it has global hotkey support, a very important feature to me. One feature that could be improved on Audacious is the GUI because all the skins look very unappealing.

Originally posted by Lykopis:

Consider Window$ media player (most people use it for music)

You can run it in "minimal mode" or some such. I don't care for it the least bit, lol.

Originally posted by Isoik:

Audacious is my all-time favorite because it's one of the rare players that's written in C/C++ and not some kind of resource absorbing programming language like Python.

Yeah, all of those Python-based players really don't seem to work out very well.

A bit old topic maybe, but Guayadeque is an awesome music player quite similar to foobar2000 (or even better).

Goggles is still serving me well (or at least as well as something not foobar2000 can ), but that definitely looks interesting. Thanks!

I like Songbird the best but editing the metadata is sloooow.

I like Qmmp. It's light, fast, and simple.

I like audacious GTK, which is very different from the plain audacious player... but I REALLY like the command line players mplayer and mpg321. mpg321 only plays mp3s. However... get this... the whole thing is less than 128 kbs! Can you IMAGINE?

SHOUTcast Radio SHOUT Out to 'friskyRadio'! Ever since its birth in 2001, friskyRadio has gradually emerged to the forefront of the cutting edge, underground music scene -- and with an audience that hails from over 140 countries, it certainly has international appeal

Originally posted by kersurk:

A bit old topic maybe, but Guayadeque is an awesome music player quite similar to foobar2000 (or even better).

It's pretty decent, but not quite my thing.

http://www.webupd8.org/2010/08/deadbeef-is-ready-for-ubuntu-1010.html#more

New Maverick player might be of interest.

I hadn't heard of Deadbeef. It sounds really good, so I'll definitely give it a whirl.

Deadbeef is quite good. A quick overview.

• it does ReplayGain well, including on MP3 with ID3v2 tags — Aqualung: equivalent; Goggles: worse
• it doesn't choke when adding lots of files, but does lock out access to the interface while it's adding files — Aqualung: superior; Goggles: equivalent to worse (since Goggles requires files to be added to the music library, which isn't something I necessarily want just to play some random file or song)
• it only does gapless playback on some filetypes — Aqualung: superior; Goggles: equivalent
• it supports Last.FM scrobbling — Aqualung: worse; Goggles: equivalent

Aqualung is clearly superior on all accounts save Last.FM support, but I'm glad that Deadbeef, Goggles, and mpd are around to show other players how not to suck. I have to say that if mpd could play random files easily without changing things around in mpd.conf and restarting I'd probably be using that instead of anything else. Plus I don't really want everything to be in a library before I can play it. Since I don't typically use Linux for "real" music listening I tend to pick Deadbeef's or Goggles' Last.FM submission over Aqualung's technical superiority.

Basically, Deadbeef and Aqualung deliver what Quod Libet promises: "Are you sick of audio players that think they know how to organize your music for you? Do other media libraries choke and die after a mere 10,000 songs?" Goggles is a little too focused on its library for my taste, but it's certainly not horrible. Still, the point is that I like Quod Libet's philosophy better than Goggles' philosophy. Quod Libet, meanwhile, does not deliver on its promise at all and it chokes horribly. I suspect it's due to Python, because all Python-based players seem to suffer from the same defect.

Of course, programs like VLC (technically a video player) can also play music. You know, mplayer, helixplayer (realplayer), etc.

Of course it's all a matter of taste and some people may not care about any of the things I consider important; audio quality is generally good these days, after all, whereas a decade ago some applications were clearly better than others.

Anyway, I actually tweeted about VLC yesterday.

#VLC stops playing when you empty the playlist. #fail Take example from #foobar2000 or #aqualung or something.
http://twitter.com/#!/Frenzie/status/16235305577218048

However, that was about playing videos. For music it doesn't do it for me.

mplayer is a great application, but a little too involved for playing music.

I'm not familiar with helixplayer, but it sounds like it's more of an easier alternative to VLC media streaming than anything else.

Here are two audio players I've neglected to take a look at (because I hadn't noticed/found them before) that sound pretty good.

http://cmus.sourceforge.net/
http://moc.daper.net/

try clementine. I have not tried to play CDs. I simply copy tracks into HDD.

This is a more-than-two-years-old topic. I wrote down my conclusions last year. Decibel Audio Player, which I previously found inadequate, seems to have improved quite a bit since, but it's still too bare bones for my taste.

Amarok 1.4 didn't live up to my requirements (and Amarok 2 even less), but I suppose it's possible that Clementine does.

In any case, I'm still happy with the winners from last year's write-up: Aqualung and Deadbeef. It's also still a pity that mpd can't load up tracks at random.

I didnt checked the date. It was on first page on linux section