Which audio player in Linux?
 

I thought I will never ever use anything else than Winamp. It seems though I will have to look for a replacement as there is no Winamp for Linux (there is one old version but users report too many problems with that to be worth trying...).
What program is best close to Winamp that I could use in Linux ?

I would say XMMS.

This has been asked countless times. Use your search engine to find out.

definatly XMMS. I think you can even use Winamp themes?

XMMS is not maintained anymore AFAIK so I'd suggest Audacious as it has the Winamp look as XMMS but it's more modern.

ya i too suggest XMMS, it is the best player, you will find RPMS..

For streaming try some of the suggestions in this thread:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=549328

I still miss Winamp too!

JP.

The last stable XMMS release was in 2004. It's not even part of Gentoo anymore. Go for Audacious.

P.S.: Do you insist on having an XMMS look-alike? Why not give something like Amarok/Quod Libet/whatever a try? Or heck .. try one of the CLI ones .. CMus always seemed cool to me.

XMMS is the closest to Winamp that I've seen so far.
But I would recommend you try out amaroK as well, while you're at it. I was thinking as well that I'd never want anything else except Winamp back in my windoze days. Now, I think I'll never want anything except amarok :D

I used windamp in windows too, then I found out how awesome amarok is - especially with the resume and search features - I turn on my pc and it starts playing stuff. I have recently switched to banshee, because I love the "recommended artists" - and online information stuff (it connects to last.fm and searches for similiar artists - and you can listen to them through podcast if you want). And my ipod stopped working with amarok recently, and I have to use gtkpod. I think the new version of banshee should be able to handle ipods too, but I haven't tried.

Amarok and Rhythmbox are pretty good as media library type players. Rhythmbox is the most like iTunes, if you're a fan of that. If you're after a Winamp clone, I strongly recommend you ignore XMMS and just use Audacious. It's a far nicer written and better looking player in my opinion.

Whenever i need software to do a task as popular as that i look at the Member choice awards:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...splay.php?f=76

It's a whole lot easier than everyone posting "i like x, i like y" pick the most popular and give it a try, if not, move onto the next :)

Thanks everyone... and in particular for "Member choice awards" tip

Sorry to take this somewhat offtopic, but it seems the OP got his/her answer so...

Everybody says this. Everyone says "xmms is old and busted, audacious is the new hotness". Well sir, after Gentoo yanked xmms out from under me, I tried Audacious. I hate it. Is there something wrong with me?

It is bloody slow, and constantly freezes on me whenever I scroll the playlist and it reads the meta-tags to display. It often crashes on me. Why does the current version of audacious underperform a crufty old version of xmms from 2004? WTF!?

And yes, I have tried others like Amarok as well, but they are even worse. I do not need a full-screen app to play Oggs. I do not need an app that organizes my music. I have written python scripts that organize my music and create playlists.

Truly, I just wish someone would step up and take over maintaining xmms. It is perfect at what it does. I hate audacious so much I just removed xmms from my world file (so portage doesn't complain) but left xmms installed, so I can clandestinely use it..

Sorry, I'll stop ranting now.

@ bulliver: Well perhaps the reason people are saying "XMMS is old" is because it really is. Audacious has a similar look, so that's why *I* have recommended it. I used it, on various Window Managers and Desktop environments and did not experience the problems you were talking about (perhaps using ~x86? :) ). As for Amarok.. it's even worse? Says who? You? And why does that matter to anyone else but you? Some people enjoy it's features, and I am one of them. I use Amarok together with XFCE and have used it together with wm2 (how's that for a combination of lightweight+heavyweight?). I like my files being organized, I like my collection automatically updated, I like the lyrics search features, etc. etc. etc. If you are desperate for something which will simply let you play music .. why are you even going for XMMS? That's complete bloat compared to mpg123/cmus/etc.

And what about XMMS2? Although I can't blame you if you never heard about it, it's only available from Debian and a few other distros afaik.

I know. I said it too. It _is_ old.

And it's a good reccomendation. It just doesn't do it for me, hence my rant.

Then either you are lucky, or more likely, I am not. No I am not using ~x86. Are you suggesting I should?

Yes, I did say it. It's plain as day up there in my first post.

Someone other than me would have to answer that.

Good. I'm happy for you. That was sort of my point. Everybody seems to be doing good with it except me. I am wondering what _my_ problem is. Trust me, I would _love_ for Audacious to serve my needs. It just doesn't.

Pretty good I guess...

So do I, that's why I wrote python scripts that create html pages and m3u playlists automatically.

Don't think I would use that personally.

Because I like it, it does what I want, I have not found another app that does what I want, and I am set in my ways.

I have not heard of this cmus, but with mpg123 you seem to be assuming all my songs are in mp3 format. They are not. I have Oggs, Mp3s, Wavs, Flacs. mpg123 cannot play all of these. xmms can. Also, I do like the ability to scroll through the xmms playlist and play a particular file when the spirit takes me.

Look: You are probably taking me too seriously. It was just a bit of a rant is all, I am not really expecting help/advice from you or anyone else. It just seems no matter where I go people are getting on fine with Audacious as an xmms replacement except me, and it makes me feel in adequate.

I'm strong, I'll get over it ;)

XMMS2 is apparently some sort of "client/server" system, whereby the server would make your music available (locally or over a network) to various clients which would presumably handle the actual playback of the music.

I will certainly try it when they have something stable, and get an ebuild in portage. If there is a client with a similar look and feel to current xmms, I am sure I will be happy, though it does seem excessive for my purposes to need a server running to play music

More info:
http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Main_Page

@ bulliver: Your post was a very enjoyable read, humorous, sarcastic, and none the less honest, things I really enjoy :)

Now..

Nope. I use ~x86 when I desperately need a package and there is no "stable" version of it. I wouldn't recommend ~x86 to anyone. I was asking because many people think that "living on the edge" makes you popular with the ladies, and because of this they end up with very bad packages from a stability point of view. (you've said audacious crashed a lot, was thinking perhaps you're using ~x86 versions)

Thanks, I thought so too. I'm a walking talking paradox and I like my system to be the same (yes, walking, talking, paradox).

I'm waaay to lazy to do something like that. But it's good that you're developing tools that are geared towards *your* needs. More people, including myself, should do that. But like I've said, I take pride in my sloth. I think.

I'm not a native english speaker, every now and then I have a problem "intercepting" everything the "artist" (ha!) is saying. Steady text is easier to comprehend.

It's a pretty cool CLI client. Check it out (screenshots included!) at : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cmus

I'm sorry if I've ruined the "friendly" atmosphere with my post, it was really not my intention.

Well .. you should see if there are some XUA (xmms users anonymous) meetings in your town. I've been to a similar FBUA (freebsd users anonymous) meeting in my town and it has helped quite a lot overcoming my impression of the superiority of FreeBSD, and my need/desire to run FBSD on my systems.

--

I've tried XMMS2, pretty cool.

Glad you read it that way, as that is exactly how I intended it. Well, except for the honest bit, that's an unconscious product of my strict upbringing.

Nah, the only time I impress the ladies is when I shut up. Though, I misunderstood you. See: I thought you meant I should try the ~x86 version to see if it fixed my problems.

Paradox is cool. I especially like this one: (paraphrasing Epimenides) "All bullivers are liars"

Mmm. The one I use is tailored for my collection, but I am working on a more generic one. Mostly functional but I still need to work out some wrinkles before I go public with it. Basically it recursively spiders your media (audio, video, images), and creates an html page with clickable links, and a playlist for each directory it finds. It is skinable, in the sense that it contains hooks for writing CSS stylesheets. The working name is PIMP, for Python Indexed Media Project. Pretty clever huh?

Could have fooled me. I would say that either you are a quick study, or have many years experience with English nonetheless. That said, I am a native English speaker and I can't understand 95% of the lyrics out there so don't feel bad...

Yep, yep. I like the looks of this. I will try this out tommorrow.

No, that was my bad. I was so confused by all the dry, cool wit going around I thought maybe we had come full circle and really were mad at each other.

There used to be a bunch of crusty "take the xmms out of my cold dead hands" sort of folks on the gentoo-user ML for a while but they seem to have all quieted up. Presumably they are all using Audacious with much success.

There's a saying out there: "FreeBSD is for those who love Unix, Linux is for those who hate Microsoft". I fit in both categories, so appropriately I run both ;)

If you use KDE (or install the KDElibs), then AmaroK, does everything. If you like the way winamp looks, then try noatun (part of a default KDE install) as that has support for loading in winamp skins.

@ bulliver: I just like you more and more, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Ouch :( I usually impress them with my math skills. No, really, srsly! I tell them a certain body part of mine, given it's length in inches, is the multiplicative inverse of the square root of 169, in the set of real numbers, with the regular number multiplication operation.

As for shutting up .. that's what I usually look at in a girl. (hm hm hm)

-- PIMP

Can't even imagine the amount of chicks you'd get if you publish a program with that name. Imagine going to a FOSS convention, going to the microphone and saying "Hello, I am the creator of (smooth voice) Piiimp". You could dress accordingly.

The thing is, I wish you good luck with further development. Does it have an apache+mod_python back-end? Ah; and let me just congratulate you on the very fine choice of the programming language. Thank god you didn't go for that other lang which shall not be name (blblbl evil!)

I do, indeed, have a bit of experience in english .. unfortunately I'm not as good as I should be. (14 years, started when I was 5, not intensive training). As for the songs, I like that every now and then I hear a new expression/slang terms/etc. which I enjoy learning and later using during English classes haha.

I was not aware of the project myself not so long ago. Last summer (or something) I had a "CLI only" phase, so I started looking for alternatives to mpg123/mpg321 .. and found that. It dazzles me how this project is not as popular as mpg???.

You know I could never be mad at you.

--

The Gentoo ML sound like a fun(ny) place to be. I'll surely have to subscribe in the near future, if not for anything else, I'll do it for the lulz.

I think there was a longer version something along the lines of : "Run Linux if you hate Windows, run FreeBSD if you love UNIX, run OpenBSD just because you can.".

I agree that audacious is rather slower to start than XMMS, although this can be helped a little by disabling unneeded plugins. Apart from this (admittedly annoying) problem I've had a lot more luck with it though. In my experience, it reads id3v2 tags much better than XMMS and BMP, as well as looking prettier, and supporting album art when you hover over a song. As for stability problems, I've never had any with it, but I stopped running Gentoo before Audacious found its way into portage so I've never had any experience with it on that distro. I'm surprised to hear there are problems though, because I think that nenolod (the author of Audacious) uses Gentoo. Have you tried filing a bug report on the Audacious bug page? They're usually very quick at fixing problems.

Of course you're entitled to your opinions, and user experience clearly does vary, but for someone who hasn't tried any media players and doesn't know what to expect I'd recommend Audacious first, with BMP and/or XMMS as backups if that doesn't work, if for no other reason than that the most recent and currently maintained program seems like the most sensible to start out with. Like many people, I used XMMS for a long time, it's a good program, but my personal preference has changed since those days. That's all, I wasn't intending to bad mouth XMMS particularly!

See, my experience is exactly the opposite. Everytime I scroll the playlist the interface freezes for 3-4 seconds while it loads the tags. Xmms has never even flinched on me. The crashes seem to happen when I load some lists with > 1000 songs.

I will try the bug tracker, or perhaps see if there is an Audacious ML, as Audacious _is_ the player I want to replace. Xmms. It does have the interface I like, It's just this freezing issue is a dealbreaker for me.

PS: love the sig ;)

XMMS-4-life

I've used others and overall XMMS is the best choice especially if you've used winamp. BTW, Audacious may be another alternative but it sucks for listening to inet streams or mpd for the command-line-techie

But if you're looking for the iTunes for Linux then no doubt, amarok.

Well I've used others and overall CMUS is the best choice. So there.

And I can't believe noone has mentioned VLC yet!
http://www.videolan.org/
It can do video, but it's also great for just a lightweight audio player.
Plus it has equalizer, normalizer and that headphone spatial thing.
I think it's awesome... I only haven't used it recently because the default players did what I want.

I love VLC as a video player but i find other audio players have an interface better suited towards music players.

As for xmms, i didnt even know development had stopped. Although i use it on my old laptop (arch, PIII 700, 200MB RAM)as KDE is a bit of a mouthful to use/have installed. It does everything i need, in a small package with few dependencies, to me it's a great example of an application that reached its full potential, and requires nothing more.

Having said that, Amarok is my player of choice due to it's plugins (last.fm, ipod mounting, iriver clix libs etc. etc.).

It's all about the choice, and your requirements :)

I was fully prepared to write a storiming post in defence of XMMS, but as it turns out the graphic equaliser in Audacious actually works on my system - so kudos to you, fine Audacious developers!

Other than that, for anyone with a fully functioning install of XMMS, a quick look at Audacious will tell you that it's just XMMS with new socks.

Anyway, I'm happy with Audacious for the aforementioned reason, and I can still control it with a few key bindings. Fortunately for me the Audacious crew have even included exactly the same mappings for skip, stop, pause, etc, so I only needed to change the program name for my key bindings to work. Amazing coincidence! Though they are obviously hard at work, because the --help info has changed slightly. :rolleyes:

In short, if you are using XMMS and it does the job then don't bother changing. XMMS might well be a few years since last update, but that is because it rocks. The bleeding edge Gentoo people didn't even notice that they were using something so old until it disappeared from portage. Now all of a sudden we are told that Audacious is the golden cow.

Of course Gentoo people should just have set the appropriate mask and lived with XMMS goodness, but heck they waste bandwidth like no ones business, so what's another few thousand instanaces of a 6MB download? :p

Audacity all the way. You can load it with codecs. It plays anything you want, anyway you want and on top of it, it converts any format to any other format.

What I like is that I can drag a folder into it, and it will show as a folder. I almost only have full albums organized in folders, and when my collection is sorted by id3 tags some tracks are messed up. - Especially with cd's I ripped that couldn't be found in any online database - which are quite alot.
That's why it is still my favorite player in windows.
I'm currently jumping around between amarok and banshee.
What I'm missing in both players is a view option that shows me a tree view of artists/albums like in a real life cd collection.
And a compressor/normalizer would be great for some bootleg live recordings That's what I still use vlc for.

But I got so used to the last.fm, wikipedia, ipod, searching and updating features that I couldn't imagine using a minimal audio player for every day use.

inspired by this thread I searched for other players, and found this:
http://www.listen-project.org/gallery

It was in the ubuntu repos, so I tried it...
I really like the layout so far. - And the lyrics thing actually works.

The most awesome part is the dynamic playlist, and that the playlist always stays in view unlike in amarok, where you have to click your way back to it.
What it does when it's activated (checkbox on the left bottom corner) it will automatically add new tracks, and I think it's doing it via the last.fm database. I'm not shure yet, but the songs it adds seem somewhat related to the last ones played.
For example, It's now playing Mike Stern - The next ones are Hancock, Cobahm, Vital Information... and Billy Holiday - well it has to end somewhere.