Music player for Gnome?

[carderne]

I've just installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron and I've installed restricted drivers and downloaded codecs etc. I've decided to give the built in movie player a try, instead of VLC... for now.

What music player can you suggest, instead of RhythmBox? Or should I just stick it out? It doesn't seem very customizable...

[PostmanPot]

Amarok.

[Tux]

sudo apt-get install amarok

best fscking player for linux

[sn3rd]

Great choice...

Also, for something more lightweight and Winamp-like: Audacious

Edit: Oh, and welcome to the fun side of computing :D

[ghoti]

amarok

[carderne]

Thanks. And it doesn't matter too much that it's KDE? I saw in Ubuntuguide.org that there's a Gnome version called Exaile... Or should I just stick to Amarok? Downloading it now. (Gotta love Synaptic!)

[Broo]

Try XMMS ..... Winamp lookalike.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/04/15/xmms_tips.html

[carderne]

I'm not particularly fond of Winamp, but I'll have a look at that too.

[ghoti]

You will have to install some KDE libs for amarok... but kde>gnome :P

[general_koffi]

Exaile is basically Amarok for Gnome.

[hawker]

Banshee? Songbird?

[carderne]

Those both look nice as well.

[dabbler]

Try XMMS ..... Winamp lookalike.

http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/04/15/xmms_tips.html

I see that xmms is no longer in repos

You can compile it yourself tho ;) Just checked it myself and it works fine in Kubuntu.

Instructions here:
http://blog.xanda.org/?p=436

[Pooky]

I got iTunes working in Gnome, albeit a bit buggy.

[Aqua_lung]

I got iTunes working in Gnome, albeit a bit buggy.

Blasphemy!

Why waste all that resources on a music player when Gnome has darn good alternatives? I can understand running it on a XP virtual machine to visit the store but using it in Gnome???

[SuperAntMD]

Amarok all the way...

[oronte]

Perhaps I'm just crazy, but I can't stand Amarok. It's has lot's of great advanced features, but it doesn't cover the basics. Coming from Winamp (and the most recent version is truly amazing), Amarok's library organisation sucks (Winamp's is much more convenient and gives you easier access to more of your music on one screen). Worse still is it's playlisting. After the first song, double clicking on another song will not get it to play. There isn't even an option to right click and do the same. You have to add it to the playlist, stop the current song, and then double click to play it and as far as I can tell there's no way around that.
While Amarok is otherwise great, because there's no way of doing these basic actions I'm stuck using Rhythmbox.
Although Songbird looks promising. In about a year it should be perfect.

[Aqua_lung]

Perhaps I'm just crazy, but I can't stand Amarok.

You are not alone, I nearly got whipped in another thread for making my feelings known.

[milomak]

Perhaps I'm just crazy, but I can't stand Amarok. It's has lot's of great advanced features, but it doesn't cover the basics. Coming from Winamp (and the most recent version is truly amazing), Amarok's library organisation sucks (Winamp's is much more convenient and gives you easier access to more of your music on one screen).

i don't understand. all my music is available under one playlist.

Click Playlists along the side panel. The uncollapse Smart Playlists. Uncollapse Collelction. Click on All Collection. That always updates my collection and shows my music.



Worse still is it's playlisting. After the first song, double clicking on another song will not get it to play. There isn't even an option to right click and do the same. You have to add it to the playlist, stop the current song, and then double click to play it and as far as I can tell there's no way around that.

are you talking about double clicking on a song from an external program? cause for me double-clicking on a song in the playlist plays it. From an external program the default seems to be to add to the collection. i don't know whether this default action can be changed to start playing what you have double-clicked in the external program. i would guess it is possible.



While Amarok is otherwise great, because there's no way of doing these basic actions I'm stuck using Rhythmbox.
Although Songbird looks promising. In about a year it should be perfect.

[SuperAntMD]

Perhaps I'm just crazy, but I can't stand Amarok. It's has lot's of great advanced features, but it doesn't cover the basics. Coming from Winamp (and the most recent version is truly amazing), Amarok's library organisation sucks (Winamp's is much more convenient and gives you easier access to more of your music on one screen). Worse still is it's playlisting. After the first song, double clicking on another song will not get it to play. There isn't even an option to right click and do the same. You have to add it to the playlist, stop the current song, and then double click to play it and as far as I can tell there's no way around that.
While Amarok is otherwise great, because there's no way of doing these basic actions I'm stuck using Rhythmbox.
Although Songbird looks promising. In about a year it should be perfect.

Not sure im following you properly here, but what i do is put ALL my music in to the playlist which displays at last count 6033 songs, then I have the context menu open on the left for album art, lyrics etc.

Then if I want to make a "playlist" even though the whole thing is supposedly a playlist i just right click on the next song i want and click "Queue track" which can be done as many times as you want.

With all my music in the playlist anysong i click on plays immediately.

Does that speak to some of your concerns? I really recommend you try it again. :cool:

[oronte]

Possibly I'm not understanding. I'm referring to the library in Amarok. In Winamp (and even Rhythmbox) the library takes up most of the screen space and has separate lists for artists, albums, and songs. Eg. If I click on Vanessa-Mae, it automatically filters everything to show me her albums and songs immediately - no collapsing, etc (which I think is a comparitively inefficent method for browsing music).
If I double click on Vanessa-Mae then the playlist changes and it starts playing a song by her. Similarly if I double click on an album the playlist changes to the album and plays a song from that album (the current song and playlist ends/disappears). You could right click and 'add to playlist' (which is the default and only behaviour for Amarok).
If Amarok had a plug-in or had the option of changing the default behaviour to allow better library browsing and playlisting then I would agree with all of you.
I guess it comes down to how you use your music player. If you just want a random song from your collection or something similar Amarok is fine. But if (like me) you want to listen to songs from a particular arist and half an hour later you want to listen to someone else or perhaps there's a particular song you want to listen to between all that, really for anyone who's used to taking control of their music and making changes on a whim Amarok is grossly inefficient.

[SuperAntMD]

OIC, ok yes i must agree with you to some extent.

The default "Collection" Tab on the left is useless hence i put everything into the playlist to make it easier. You are referring to the "Browse" function for e.g. in iTunes which you can toggle the list of Genre/Artist/Album at the top for speedier browsing. The same can only be achieved in Amarok by tytping in the search bar at the top but it works pretty well and changes the list while you type.

At first I missed that function to, but now i have no complaints. The search bar is really exactly the same.

[oronte]

Not sure im following you properly here, but what i do is put ALL my music in to the playlist which displays at last count 6033 songs, then I have the context menu open on the left for album art, lyrics etc.

Then if I want to make a "playlist" even though the whole thing is supposedly a playlist i just right click on the next song i want and click "Queue track" which can be done as many times as you want.

With all my music in the playlist anysong i click on plays immediately.

Does that speak to some of your concerns? I really recommend you try it again. :cool:

I get it, but not really the same. Eg. I want to listen to Alanis Morrisete, I want to listen to any of her songs at random (which is how I usually listen to music). Your idea might work sometimes, but I guess my listening habits are out of the ordinary, although if anyone has any other ideas I'd be happy to hear them. But thanks for that SuperAntMD, for random days, that would work quite well.

[milomak]

if you type alanis in the search box, it will display only her songs and play only those displayed in random order if you have that enabled. hth.

[SuperAntMD]

if you type alanis in the search box, it will display only her songs and play only those displayed in random order if you have that enabled. hth.

Exactly, what you want is very very easy to do.

[oronte]

Hey that actually works! Load the playlist and then filtering and double clicking works in the playlist window. Winamp/Rhythmbox filtering is still more elegant and provides more visible options and opportunities for further refinement (well more Winamp than Rhythmbox) at your fingertips, but this will do nicely. I'll try it out over the next week and see if I can get used to it. Thanks Milomak and SuperAntMD

[milomak]

i would agree with you that you should be a way to click on an artists name and only that artists songs show up. it would for sure improve the ease of use.

[wezhira]

i really dont see what the problem is ive been usin amarok for 2 years now my default media player and it does everything a windows prog eg musicmatch real player (have not tried winamp) would do albeit even better under collection its artist album if i click on an artist it drops down all the albums all i have to do is drag the song across to playlist window i find it simple and intuitive no other linux media player comes close

[chiskop]

Possibly I'm not understanding. I'm referring to the library in Amarok. In Winamp (and even Rhythmbox) the library takes up most of the screen space and has separate lists for artists, albums, and songs. Eg. If I click on Vanessa-Mae, it automatically filters everything to show me her albums and songs immediately - no collapsing, etc (which I think is a comparitively inefficent method for browsing music).
If I double click on Vanessa-Mae then the playlist changes and it starts playing a song by her.

Look above the library panel, there are a couple of options. Group by > to choose to list the library by artist, artist / album, genre, genre /artist or you can configure the first second and three levels of the tree.

Or, if you enter Vanessa-Mae in the search box it'll list all the songs by Vanessa Mae (or with the words Vanessa Mae in the album or song title).

To the OP, on Gnome I've been using Listen (http://http://www.listen-project.org/). I've been using gnome and didn't want to download all the kde-libs just for amarok. It is not quite amarok, but I'm happy with it.

[carderne]

I quite like the simplicity of Banshee, but it's quite slow. I think also the fact that all of my music is still on my NTFS partition makes it all a bit slower. I've never really liked WinAmp, but that's probably only because I'm used to iTunes. foobar seems very promising but I don't have the desire or time to fiddle with it and get it looking like a normal music player. Songbird does look promising but at the moment it's ter hampered. Exaile isn't bad, but it lacks quite a lot of Amarok's features. But I hate how Amarok looks. So at the moment I'm still booting Windows and using iTunes, but with time I'll switch more to Ubuntu. I also wish there was a Linux version of GOM...

[hawker]

@carderne

If you like Banshees simplicity, why don't you use Rhythmbox?

I've used all the aforementioned media players (exaile,amarok,xmms,banshee,rythmbox,itunes,winamp ,foobar, etc etc) and the one I keep returning to on Linux is rhythmbox or banshee.

[carderne]

@carderne

If you like Banshees simplicity, why don't you use Rhythmbox?

I've used all the aforementioned media players (exaile,amarok,xmms,banshee,rythmbox,itunes,winamp ,foobar, etc etc) and the one I keep returning to on Linux is rhythmbox or banshee.

You're probably right. Now that I've tried everything I can happily return to RhythmBox I suppose.

[wezhira]

song bird looks promising gonna give it a try

[milomak]

i am an ease of use kind of guy and have used amarok because it offered a whole lot of features while providing that. but the shouts for rhythmbox made me curious. i will be trying out this bad boy cause it seems to me to provide the same functionality in an easier format.

[oronte]

i am an ease of use kind of guy and have used amarok because it offered a whole lot of features while providing that. but the shouts for rhythmbox made me curious. i will be trying out this bad boy cause it seems to me to provide the same functionality in an easier format.

It turns out Rhythmbox is the best after all (for me anyway). I've spent the last two weeks only using Amarok and I love the advanced features, but my earlier comments about the basics stand. Being forced to use playlists to achieve something similar to the Winamp/Rhythmbox system is just inefficient. Also it occasionally freezes up on me when filtering or selecting on start-up (I'm using Mysql and I've got a really fast PC with tonnes of RAM) Rhythmbox is just more intuitive on the media library angle and for this reason alone I've gone back to Rhythmbox. While you can do the same on Amarok it takes several additional steps and is far less elegant.

Banshee is getting better (but there are still issues with compilations, depending on how you saved track info).
I will definitely switch to Songbird as soon as they get my keyboard multi-media buttons working on the 64-bit version (there is a plug-in for 32 bit users though).

[<moLe>]

Just want proper better support for my 3g nano Ipod!!!

[neobyte]

I'd use xmms...

[MyWorld]

xmms is not a good idea, it is full of security holes and development on it has stopped. So far it doesn't even look like xmms2 will be going anywhere soon either.

[PseudZ]

Winamp works in wine :rolleyes: lol
Haven't had a problem with it yet except I can't get my multimedia keys to work

[MyWorld]

Now why on earth would you want to use winamp?????

Try audacious, afaik it can use winamp skins and plug-ins?