This is the one thing that has been a constant source of frustration for me since moving exclusively to xubuntu a few months ago. I came from Windows using MusicBee which is an incredibly powerful music player.
Now I am using gnu/linux it seems almost impossible to find a good music player with decent library support. It seems that almost all of them have one serious problem or another.The main thing frustrating me at the moment is gapless playback for mp3 files. It seems that gstreamer is the main cause of this, even though the issue is supposed to have been fixed.
Clementine: I really like this one, it has some nice features for me. The general workflow isn't ideal but it's ok. Doesn't play gaplessly though despite this apparently being fixed with the latest update. Doesn't split multiple genres and artists when tagged with a separator though.
Quod Libet: good library support, really nice customizable tags, generally quite powerful. Doesn't play gaplessly though.
Deadbeef: so simple, plays gaplessly but doesn't have anywhere near enough features for browsing or organising a big library.
Audacious: Plays gapless but so incredibly simple that it's pretty much useless for me unless I just have one file I want to play quickly.
Guayadeque: quite nice but doesn't split tags with multiple values and as far as I remember cannot manage gapless playback properly, despite there being an option for it in the preferences.
mpd+ncmpcpp: plays gaplessly but I'm not keen on the lack of album art and as far as I can tell you can only browse by artist rather than album artist. Don't really like the way you interact with it either.
It looks like mpd is the only one that can play gaplessly and supports browsing a large library by tags. I can't be the only person in the world who finds this frustrating though. I am thinking about resorting to foobar with Wine but I would prefer a native solution.
What do you guys use to play music? Would a different distro change this at all (like DX)?
It's ironic, I've been thinking about making an album that plays back in a mixed way so all the tracks merge in to one when played altogether but I wouldn't even be able to listen back it properly if I did make it!
Music player frustrations
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sysrqer
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Re: Music player frustrations
rhythmbox - I can't remember what put me off this one. From screenshots it looks like you can't browse by Album Artist...how do you find a compilation album by various artists if you want to play the whole album?tatch wrote:rhythmbox/banshee/gmusicplayer work for me.
banshee - I think this has the exact same problem that I can see with rhythmbox.
gmusicplayer - I like this one quite a lot, the interface is kind of awkward but in the end it also doesn't play gaplessly for me.
Re: Music player frustrations
Clementine *should* support gapless playback. Maybe it's something external like gstreamer or a weird configuration?
Amarok also is supposed to support gapless.
Amarok also is supposed to support gapless.
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Thad E Ginathom
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Re: Music player frustrations
Gapless used to be a real pain to find. It seems that many players have now caught up with that simple requirement, but, when it was painful I settled on and stuck with...
Aqualung.
Not only plays MP3 gapless, but plays mixed file types gapless. I listen to live concert recordings and classical music where track numbers are sometimes used to annotate, and I can assure you that the gapless play is really perfect.
It has library support, but I only use directory-tree/file access for my music, so I cannot say how it compares. I suspect that it is not as sophisticated as others might be.
It has a very low-key gui. That, from the days when I felt that CPU cycles were too precious to be wasted drawing fancy stuff on the screen, suits me very well.
It has built-in support for LADSPA plugins.
It supports JACK without even thinking about it.
Aqualung.
Not only plays MP3 gapless, but plays mixed file types gapless. I listen to live concert recordings and classical music where track numbers are sometimes used to annotate, and I can assure you that the gapless play is really perfect.
It has library support, but I only use directory-tree/file access for my music, so I cannot say how it compares. I suspect that it is not as sophisticated as others might be.
It has a very low-key gui. That, from the days when I felt that CPU cycles were too precious to be wasted drawing fancy stuff on the screen, suits me very well.
It has built-in support for LADSPA plugins.
It supports JACK without even thinking about it.
Re: Music player frustrations
Clementine has ~500ms crossfade by default, is it gapless with that set to 0?
It's a nice player - I use it - but it sure ain't ideal... it's pretty sloppy and bloated, tons of dependencies. I looked at the code recently. Just wanted to figure out how the Moodbar works... heh, it's 50-100 lines of code, simple at heart, smothered in 2000 lines of sloooowwww and unnecessary Gstreamer BS. The fact that a cool-but-unnecessary frill was accepted in such poor condition just screams "LOW STANDARDS!!!"
Quodlibet was my old favorite. Not flashy, good tagging/metadata system... some rough edges though.
If we could handle the metadata and organizational stuff at the OS level, music players wouldn't have to be monolithic beasts. Visualization could be modularized too. Then maybe we would see some better music players.
It's a nice player - I use it - but it sure ain't ideal... it's pretty sloppy and bloated, tons of dependencies. I looked at the code recently. Just wanted to figure out how the Moodbar works... heh, it's 50-100 lines of code, simple at heart, smothered in 2000 lines of sloooowwww and unnecessary Gstreamer BS. The fact that a cool-but-unnecessary frill was accepted in such poor condition just screams "LOW STANDARDS!!!"
Quodlibet was my old favorite. Not flashy, good tagging/metadata system... some rough edges though.
If we could handle the metadata and organizational stuff at the OS level, music players wouldn't have to be monolithic beasts. Visualization could be modularized too. Then maybe we would see some better music players.
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danboid
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Re: Music player frustrations
Hi sysrqer!
I'm much less fussy about my music players - the simpler the better for me so I usually just use VLC, smplayer or mocp. Obviously those first two are overkill if all you ever needed was just to play music files but I install both of those anyway for video playback and VLC is my main music player under Android.
As has already been suggested, I'd try Aqualung next as that has quite a lot of fans but if you don't like that then I suggest you check out one of the many other GUI's for mpd. There are 100's of mpd GUIs but the most popular seem to be Sonata, Ario and GMPC.
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients
I'm much less fussy about my music players - the simpler the better for me so I usually just use VLC, smplayer or mocp. Obviously those first two are overkill if all you ever needed was just to play music files but I install both of those anyway for video playback and VLC is my main music player under Android.
As has already been suggested, I'd try Aqualung next as that has quite a lot of fans but if you don't like that then I suggest you check out one of the many other GUI's for mpd. There are 100's of mpd GUIs but the most popular seem to be Sonata, Ario and GMPC.
http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients