Best Audio Player in Linux?

By MatthewK
in Tips, Tweaks & Customization

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  • 3 weeks later...
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Neowinian

Berger_K

Posted
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Hi, everyone.

I'm quite happy with Amarok 1.* and Kaffeine.

Kaffeine plays video, while Amarok is only audio. Prefer Amarok for audio, though. Why so? Well, because of its better looks and a smart set of features.

One important thing to add. As a playback library I choose XINE-lib, and xine only.

GStreamer's main idea and features all sound great, which can not be said about the sound it produces from the speakers. So, I'll have to wait until all the planned features their good enough realization. Yes, I know: for its makers GStreamer is the most beautiful child; but this with regard to its POTENTIAL, not its present state.

...OK, just tried Songbird. Seems great!

  • 3 weeks later...
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Grand Master

Syanide

Posted
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Just installed Songbird. I've used Rhythmbox on my new install, and I dislike it. I love Winamp, always have and always will. I keep my files well organized, so I never needed library functions, and they were never good before 5.5 came out. Which was simply the perfect audio player for me. Of all the audio players on Linux, I can't seem to find the proper equvalent. Either they're too spartan, or they rely on library/online features too much, have a busy UI and remind me of WMP/iTunes bloatware, while there's always a few options I miss. So far, Songbirld looks nice. But I have few issues. It doesn't read my folder.jpg files (which remained since my Ubuntu transition). And is there a proper album view. The add-ons feature is good, and overall the player seems promising. I think I'll stick with it. If anyone has good add-ons/tweaks/skins etc, post.

Grand Master

Syanide

Posted
Posted

Sorry for the double post.

I definitely gave up on both Songbird and Rhythmbox and I'm back with Exaile. It really proves that sometimes less is more. The most usable user interface, the library is nicely made, no fancy artwork, but searching it takes a second, incredibly easy playlist manipulation, the tabbed interface made me reallly happy, an equalizer for Christ's sake, and a nice plugin support. Me likes. I do miss some features from both Rhythmbox and Songbird (songbird probably has the best last.fm and lyrics integration I have ever seen), but they are miles away from being usable, at least for a Winamp fan. The playlists in both are horrible. The most annoying thing in Songbird was that if you start playing an album, and then browse other albums, it would continue playing the previously selected one, but Now playing list was nowhere to be found. Plus it's quite slow and unstable.

  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...
Grand Master

Growled Member

Posted
  • Member
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Songbird!!! I love the fact that it's really easy to customise, organises my library quite well and looks good. It really sucks on Windows though, it's really laggy but on Linux it runs *almost* like a dream.

I may have to give Songbird another try. :)

Explorer

breed

Posted
Posted

A little off-topic, but I have twice had to write applications on UNIX (one on an embedded FreeBSD client, another on Redhat) where I needed a program to simply play a mp3 file.

I used a program called mpg123 (available at http://www.mpg123.de/). If anyone has a need to script a file to play, this could be a good lightweight solution.

In the Redhat case, I packaged up my own RPM with the binaries into a customized Redhat OS build, and that was all I needed.

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