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Topic: Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu) (Read 19975 times) previous topic - next topic
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Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

I know the question has been asked many times before, but I have had a hard time finding everything that I need in one player... I may try to install Wine and Foobar, but have seen that there are a lot of bugs/problems with that, so would like something made for Linux if possible.

Anyway, here are the things that I really need in my player:

1.  Support a large library (I have over 22,000 tracks)
2.  Ability to support custom tags (I have tags such as STYLE, VENUE, LOCATION, etc.) that I need to be able to use to view my library (for my live music, I don't have an ALBUM tag, I use VENUE and LOCATION).
3.  Ability to read multi-value tags (like <tag> in Foobar)
4.  Replay Gain Support!
5.  Gapless Playback (for LAME MP3 and FLAC).

Those are all the important ones... other "nice to have things are:
1.  Ability to customize interface
2.  Plugin Support (but I think most Linux players will have this)
3.  Active Development (there are always things to improve!)

Thanks in advance for any help/advise!

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #1
I'm not sure that it has all of the features you're looking for, but you should check out quodlibet.  Install both the 'quodlibet' package and the 'quodlibet-plugins' package.

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Features

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #2
If you find something like that, let me know. Foobar's what I miss most using linux.

That said have a look at mpd (music player daemon). It doesn't support custom or multivalue tags as far as I know (though I'd really like this too) but it's lightweight, has LAME gapless playback support and loads of different clients to use with it. MPC is particularly useful for scripting stuff

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #3
i'm also missing foobar on linux

now i'm using audacious, which shows promise but definitely needs more work. there's a gapless output plugin for it but it does not work for me with cuesheets so i use the alsa output instead. maybe in the upcoming 1.4 release will solve this

however, it does not support custom tags AFAIK, neither has replaygain support. anyway, tag support is not a priority for me, coz i removed them from all my tracks and alway remove from newly ripper/downloaded tracks

audacious is not a jukebox for large libraries, but neither foobar is, so you gotta work with playlists

also, the best thing about audacious is that it supports cuesheets, which feature i couldnt find in any other linux player. this feature is buggy but at least it exists...

audacious has many plugins and supports winamp classic skins

here's a screenshot:



i'm using it on ubuntu 7.10 gutsy at the moment

for donnie: i also like mpd but audacious is better coz i often just want to drop something into the player, a cuesheet or a recently downloaded/ripper track, which i cannot do with mpd (with it i have to put it into the library folder, update the library, and put it into the playlist... )

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #4
for donnie: i also like mpd but audacious is better coz i often just want to drop something into the player, a cuesheet or a recently downloaded/ripper track, which i cannot do with mpd (with it i have to put it into the library folder, update the library, and put it into the playlist... )


I take it audacious still doesn't do gapless lame playback? that's pretty much my primary concern. But I see your point. I keep all my music organised in my music directory, so it isn't an issue for me but it would be nice to play random tracks. I think there's some nasty hacks to do this but it is one of the features planned for version 2 in the mpd wiki (mind you mpd 2 is really, really ambitious). Personally I always hated winamp so I've never really tried audacious or beep or xmms or anything too much.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #5

for donnie: i also like mpd but audacious is better coz i often just want to drop something into the player, a cuesheet or a recently downloaded/ripper track, which i cannot do with mpd (with it i have to put it into the library folder, update the library, and put it into the playlist... )


I take it audacious still doesn't do gapless lame playback? that's pretty much my primary concern. But I see your point. I keep all my music organised in my music directory, so it isn't an issue for me but it would be nice to play random tracks. I think there's some nasty hacks to do this but it is one of the features planned for version 2 in the mpd wiki (mind you mpd 2 is really, really ambitious). Personally I always hated winamp so I've never really tried audacious or beep or xmms or anything too much.


what do you mean with gapless lame playback? cuesheet+mp3?

i didn't know anything about mpd2. now i checked the wiki, but it seems to be just a big load of plans ...

i neither like winamp, foobar2k is the ultimate one, but still audacious is the most foobar-ish one on linux. all the others are the same, jukebox-like shits

http://image.listen-project.org/listen_0.4.3.png
http://lwn.net/images/ns/grumpy/quodlibet.png
http://www.wormulon.net/blogimages/2006-12...ox-coverart.png
http://www.exaile.org/screenshots/7/exaile_large.jpg
http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/images/B...creenshot-1.jpg
http://banshee-project.org/images/2/2f/Ban...ase-library.png
http://www.vivaolinux.com.br/imagens/artig...ade/wxmusic.png

these are all different apps, and yet, they are all the same

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #6
Yeah I agree, mpd2 is just a load of plans but at least the developers know what's needed. Also, a lot of the features I'd like could be implemented client side. When I say lame gapless playback I mean individual mp3 tracks playing seamlessly. I don't know of any other player that does this. Even aqualung, which has gapless as its main feature, didn't even do this for me last time I checked (although the gaps were tiny). 

And yeah, I also agree that a lot of linux music players do exactly the same thing, and not particularly well at that. mpd is an exception but not in the way you want.

amarok needs a mention too. It's very popular and has loads of features but it's not exactly light weight.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #7
Yeah I agree, mpd2 is just a load of plans but at least the developers know what's needed. Also, a lot of the features I'd like could be implemented client side. When I say lame gapless playback I mean individual mp3 tracks playing seamlessly. I don't know of any other player that does this. Even aqualung, which has gapless as its main feature, didn't even do this for me last time I checked (although the gaps were tiny). 

And yeah, I also agree that a lot of linux music players do exactly the same thing, and not particularly well at that. mpd is an exception but not in the way you want.

amarok needs a mention too. It's very popular and has loads of features but it's not exactly light weight.


well aqualung never worked for me

for audacious gapless playback, the crossfade plugin may do what you need. i have just tried it, it works and is _highly_ customizable, but it (and audacious) needs to be stabilized, audacious freezes sometimes

amarok is too bloated, not to mention that i hate kde

now i have just posted kinda feature requests on their forum

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #8
Many players nowadays are based on gstreamer. A haven't found a single one that does proper gapless playback (not even for lossless files). So this is probably a limitation of gstreamer.

amarok gapless works for flac, not for lame mp3s though.

mpd seems to support replaygain/gapless but I haven't really found a client that I like.

I wonder why gapless support is still lacking from so many players in Linux; even ipods provide support for that.


That's why I'm also stuck with wine+foobar which runs pretty stable with standard UI.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #9
I'm not sure that it has all of the features you're looking for, but you should check out quodlibet.  Install both the 'quodlibet' package and the 'quodlibet-plugins' package.

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/wiki/Features


Does QuodLibet support custom tags?  That is the main thing that I need (I have about 10,000 tracks of live music and they are all tagged with Venue/Location rather than Album).  I really don't feel like re-tagging all my music.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #10
I am pretty sure Amarok will play LAME MP3s gaplessly (it will obviously play FLAC gaplessly just like anything else).

There is a script available for ReplayGain but to be honest it isn't very good. It just adjusts the volume slider automatically.

I really wish Amarok could work as a front end for mpd because mpd is a much better audio player than Amarok but obviously has no front end.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #11
Quote
Does QuodLibet support custom tags?  That is the main thing that I need (I have about 10,000 tracks of live music and they are all tagged with Venue/Location rather than Album).  I really don't feel like re-tagging all my music.


Yes it does. It's very flexible when it comes to organizing your tracks.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #12
Does QuodLibet support custom tags?  That is the main thing that I need (I have about 10,000 tracks of live music and they are all tagged with Venue/Location rather than Album).  I really don't feel like re-tagging all my music.


I believe that it does.  It also comes with an extremely useful tagging program called 'ex falso'.  You can create custom tags with it, etc.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #13
Well.. Quodlibet is nice, but the one thing that keeps me away from it is: its very slow also
also the project seems to be dead..

mpd is the best thing for audio in linux atm, it has perfect gapless playback, it is VERY lightweight and it plays on, even if you restart X.
Now a client that supports foobars massive tagging abillities and the world would be perfect again.

xmms2 is worth a mention too... it has more or less the same goals as mpd2, but it is already usable. development is quite slow with this one, but i feel it is going to be a great player.


from all jukeboxes amarok is probably the best one. it is, no doubt, heavy, but it has a working massrenamer/tagger (altho the latter is not really flexible), utilises mysql for large databases which speeds up the whole thing a lot and it has replaygain support with a plugin.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #14
I currently use a combination of MPD with GMPC for playback, and foobar2000 running under Wine for any tagging/organising I need to do.
Dan


Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #16
Quote
have you tried qmpdclient?


I like qmpdclient a lot, the developer seems interested and it's very usable. It still lacks the customizability (and many features) of foobar but mpc can be helpful for some of that. It's the best client I've tried anyway

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #17
I have tried all of these and nothing is even close to as good as Foobar.  I guess I am going to suck it up and install Wine and Foobar (and just hope there are not a lot of bugs).

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #18
Well.. Quodlibet is nice, but the one thing that keeps me away from it is: its very slow also
also the project seems to be dead..

It's very unlikely to be dead - the website isn't updated much but 1.0 suddenly came with no prior announcement (I think?) a few months ago.

I'd definitely recommend Quod Libet for exactly what was asked in the OP (live venue tags, particularly, and also extended dates) except that it's just too slow, so I'm using Rhythmbox at the minute.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #19
Foobar runs great under recent wine and kernel. Have a look at this thread

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #20
Yes, there's really need for good players.
The stuff I need the most is:
- replaygain
- gapless
- able to manage a lot of songs
- wv support

and maybe some other stuff..
so far I'm using mpd most of the time, with ncmpc as client.
Also Aqualung looks quite promising to me and makes a lot of progress, but it could use some more user feedback/input.

I don't know if amarok is an option, I don't know if xine supports gapless playback. I think it can't really handle the amount of files I need with sqlite and I don't know anything about databases like postgresql.

There really isn't that much to choose from if you scratch all those gstreamer-based itunes lookalikes and fashion whores.
Let's try to support those few promising ones.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #21
If you find something like that, let me know. Foobar's what I miss most using linux.

That said have a look at mpd (music player daemon). It doesn't support custom or multivalue tags as far as I know (though I'd really like this too) but it's lightweight, has LAME gapless playback support and loads of different clients to use with it. MPC is particularly useful for scripting stuff


Mpd supports multiple tags of the same type. Shamefully no client supports it. I have a patched version of mpc that can show it.

Btw. gmpc has improved allot in the last few releases, but most distro's ship a 2-3 year old version. If you try it try 0.15.1 or the upcoming release 0.15.5.

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #22
I am currently using Amarok in KDE to listen to music, EasyTAG to rename and tag the files, and mp3gain to adjust the replaygain of mp3-files...

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #23
Yeah I agree, mpd2 is just a load of plans but at least the developers know what's needed. Also, a lot of the features I'd like could be implemented client side. When I say lame gapless playback I mean individual mp3 tracks playing seamlessly. I don't know of any other player that does this. Even aqualung, which has gapless as its main feature, didn't even do this for me last time I checked (although the gaps were tiny). 

And yeah, I also agree that a lot of linux music players do exactly the same thing, and not particularly well at that. mpd is an exception but not in the way you want.

amarok needs a mention too. It's very popular and has loads of features but it's not exactly light weight.


hmm. now i'm evaluating aqualung and it is great!
it seems gapless is OK now, i suggest you to checkout svn and compile it

Audio Player for Linux (Ubuntu)

Reply #24
Oh how I miss foobar under linux. Sure it works under wine, but its not the same. Sure it plays, but its slower and there are tons of little things that don't work as well as they do under windows, plus the wine windows look looks pretty ugly. I still load it up for replay gain scanning, but don't rely on it like I did under windows.

Quod Libet is decent. Searching is slow as hell, and I've uncover little bugs in it that irk me. It also lacks the ability to customize that Foobar has.

Rhythmnbox takes forever to load in files, and lacks even basic customization options for the gui.

Banshee feels very similar to Rhythmbox.

Amarok has lots of neat stuff, but feels bloated. Amarok developers have some out and said something to the effect of "our program is not designed to handle large (maybe they said 1,000) playlists". Also while replay gain support is available as a plugin it feels like a complete hack (probably because it is). I am hoping for some improvements in Amarok 2, but I'm not expecting miracles.

Welcome to the world of linux, the world of second class music players.

The real probably is all these players (especially amarok) seem more interested in flash that basic low level functionality. You build a fast player with gapless/replay gain support then you layer things on top of that. Thats what I love so much about foobar. It is a rock solid base people can build on. Defiantly my most missed app on linux.