Music Players
 

I know this is the kind of question that can start flame wars...That's NOT what I want here.
I'm looking for honest opinions on various music players.
I have 100GB+ of music stored on an NAS device, and I am looking for a good music player.
I would like to be able to setup playlists as well as play songs in random order or by album etc...

I guess what I want is something similar to Itunes for Slackware....

Amarok is considered by many to be the best audio player available regardless of platform. It is part of the KDE installation.

I like VLC and MPlayer is very popular.

Clementine is pretty popular. I haven't tried it myself though.

mpd in combination with one of its many front ends might suit you.

The nice thing about mpd is it is client/server, so you can start a playlist playing and log out completely and it'll still keep playing. Configure it to use a state file, and add it to your rc.local and it'll even pickup playing from the exact place it stopped on a reboot. It's a very UNIXy way of playing music.

+1 mpd

I got used to VLC as the all in one solution.

I've heard from many that VLC is the way to go, but I've also heard licensing issues could be at the least problematic.
mpd does sound interesting, I'll have to look into it and see if it suits me.

Thanks everyone for the input...

mpd... and maybe amarok+mysql

mpd and ncmpcpp: I'm currently using them to access 290 GB of music on a samba server.

Alright, let me ask...
What is it that you like most about your setup?
and
What do you like least about it?

What is it that you like most about your setup? :
- songs load flawlessly
- local pc load and network load are minimal
- Running a search in the database is pretty fast

What do you like least about it? I haven't figure out a way to load albums cover ...

I use Banshee here. (Links to SlackBuilds and -current packages are in my signature)

I have "only" 50GB of music on my local harddrive, but it loads them flawlessly. I had to rescan my whole library last week, because I put a never-ending symlink into my music folder (what the hell happened? :O ) and that caused some problems. All songs where scanned in 2-3 minutes, good job :)

What I really like about this application:

- It scans my music player (a smartphone with usb mass storage functionality) automatically and is able to upload all songs I have rated with 4 or 5 stars. These songs get automatically added to my Favorites list. The playcount and rating information is written into the mp3 files, so its interchangeable.
- When I buy a new CD, it can rip it to MP3 and search various databases for the track names and album covers.
- When I download a song somewhere and the album/artist/etc. information is incorrect, it can scan the file using LastFM and fill in the missing or incorrect information automatically.
- LastFM Scrobbling!
- Internet Radio Functionality with stored radio stations, grouped by genre
- Suggestions of similar songs or artists via LastFM or Youtube, it can play Youtube music directly. I discovered a lot of new music using this feature :)
- Artist information, A Wikipedia page can be displayed containing more information ;)

What I don't like:

-The whole bunch of dependencies. Needs gnome-vfs for mounting devices, webkit for wikipedia support, google libraries for youtube etc. Once everything is correctly resolved, the damn thing works. But its hard to maintain.
-It often freezes while copying files to my music player. It does not crash but I can't listen to music normally while transferring new files.
-Handling of album covers could be better. When new album covers are downloaded Banshee stores them in its own settings folder instead of writing it into the MP3's. There is a perl script out there for doing this job, but it would be better inside :)

Back in the old days, I used Amarok 1.4 and was happy with it. After that, I tried Clementine. But the user interface isn't really the same. Some things I liked are missing. I don't like the way my music is displayed. I have no track information, cd rip or Youtube support and some other minor things which made me throw it away.

I personally wrote my own MPD client. That should answer what I like best about my setup.

http://duganchen.ca/quetzalcoatl-2-0-screenshot/

Having to maintain it.

I love Amarok. I just do. It's clean and convenient. I use VLC for videos and use VLC as the backend for Amarok as well because I haven't found any media format it can't handle, not to say they don't exist. I just haven't come across them.

I have my music directory shared via samba so it's accessible to any machine on my LAN or VPN, and I also serve it with apache so it's available to any machine (including my phone) anywhere on the web through the browser. For me, more than the player is just having access to it at all times. The sad truth is that if it hadn't been for the heyday of .mp3 piracy, I never would have had enough interest in computers to ever learn anything about them. Geez what a slacker I am.

@Dugan... That's pretty slick!

After looking into the suggestions listed here, I think I'll have to give VLC a try.
MPD does look good, however, my NAS is store bought and installing server-side software will be difficult at best.
Banshee defiantly has some pluses, but it looks like the minuses are too much for me.

Thank you all for taking the time to respond....

Chuck