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

Sounds like you might have made a decision already, but let me chip in.

I think the answer depends on what you want to do. Amarok, Banshee, mpd and other are music libraries. They scan your music library and make playback easier by storing the meta data and making it available.

VLC, xine, mplayer and so on just play music (and video). If you don't want to have your music library indexed, then these are usually the better choice.

Personally, I have Amarok index my music collection. However, if I just want to listen to a single song, podcast or an album that is outside my music collection, I use MPlayer on the command line or my favourite front-end smplayer. VLC is also very good, but I prefer smplayer's interface to VLC's.

Surely XMMS (which is the entire reason Slackware still includes GTK1) and Audacious (which is looking more and more like Foobar2000 or the later versions of WinAmp) deserve to be in that list?

That's what I do too.

from my original post...
From this I gather VLC is not going to do what I want?

I checked slackbuilds for Amarok and it came up with clementine, which is a fork of amarok. It has far fewer dependencies than VLC, so the build will be much less time consuming.

Anyone have hands-on experience with it?

VLC can play playlists and play songs from that playlist in random order, so it is still a valid choice for what you've requested. Instead of building VLC, you can get precompiled packages from AlienBob's website.

Amarok is part of the base Slackware install, so you won't need to go to Slackbuilds. Clementine is an attempt to recreate Amarok in its 1.x form. The 2.x versions of Amarok look quite different and some people don't like the new cosmetics.

It sounds like you might want to give both Amarok and VLC a try and decide which fits your needs the best.

Is Amarok a KDE dependent program?

I ask because I did a full install (13.37 64 bit) except for KDE and it's libs and I do not have Amarok installed. All I have is audacious, mplayer, XMMS, and Xine.

I didn't look at AlienBob's site for VLC, but slackbuilds shows 27 dependencies at a minimum...

I believe Alien Bob's VLC packages are self-contained, i.e., if you did a complete install of Slackware, the packages should run. The dependencies list at SlackBuilds.org are only needed to build the packages (from that particular SlackBuild script).

BTW, the current version of VLC is 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 is due out soon.

See: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/vlc-2-0-1/

As cwizardone already correctly stated, my own version of Slackware package for VLC does not depend on anything but Slackware. The alternative approach as shown by the the slackbuilds.org version, i.e. building a dynaically linked version, requires that you also compile and install all those 27 dependencies, but my own package has all of those already statically compiled in.

Eric

Amarok is a KDE program.

As mentioned, AlienBob's VLC build is nice because you don't have to go through putting together the 27 dependencies first. Let me add, that for playing MP3s only, there is little that VLC can do that MPlayer, XMMS or Audacious can't already do as part of stock Slackware.

Amarok (installed with KDE by default on Slackware) and Eric's VLC package as well as his phonon-vlc package are an awesome combination. For large music collections Amarok and it's library functions are great and VLC is incredibly capable of handling just about any file type. With the above packages installed you can use VLC as the backend for Amarok which is just beautiful in it's simplicity.

You can use conky to display info on what track mpd is serving plus you can display album art too - I've done it once and it was quite cool :)

Haven't got the link for a howto on display covers but I remember it was a thread on the Arch Linux Forums, so you could try search there...

Clementine is worth trying if you need music library. I like it very much. It's very useful and yet quite minimalistic. Note that you need gst-plugins-ugly for playing mp3's

I mostly use deadbeef. X-foobar2000 user. ;) 230GB+ of music, mostly in .flac format.

@ ceh383- install a whole heap of media players. Decide which one suits you, then delete the others. ;)

Last I checked, Audacious hasn't got half the modability of foobar2000. I might give it another spin though, its been a while since I used it.

The 'library function' on amarok was part of why I hated it. Stupid thing would rescan my collection _every_time_I_started_it. Stupid media player, I know when Iwant to rescan my collection, and its not everytime I start the damned thing. Maybe I missed some setting that would let me decide when I scanned?

All the common files, yeah. Theres a few file types around that VLC wont play, but they are mostly stupid, pointless codecs like .tak.

Nice listing. Personally, I've never been one for the whole 'does everything' media players (VLC is the exception, but I only really use it for video). I'd rather use a really good ripper (eg rubyripper with linux, or EAC with windows) over ripping from a media player.

Doesn't virtually every player support lastFM scrobbing? Not that I do anymore, it wasnt much use for me. The stuid thing always recommended junk, and when it was sold to CBS had then they wanted payment for playing tracks, I deleted my lastFM scrobber, never to return.

IMO album covers should be written once to the folder containing the files, not to a settings folder or into the MP3 ID tags.

Just to add, there's also MOC in the default Slackware install, which could be a lighter alternative to MPD (if you're not doing playback over LAN.)

I have it set to "watch folders for changes." It doesn't scan every time I open it, and when I tell it to update the collection it generally takes less than a minute, closer to 30 seconds on my particular machine with a 97GB collection. It's less than three when I start from scratch, which happens quite a bit because I follow Eric's KDE packages pretty close and I always delete my .kde folder when I update.

I'm a big fan of MPD. I grin like an idiot whenever I layback on my bed and use my smartphone as a front end to the music playing on my desktop (and out my surround sound speakers). It also integrates well with conky so you can have information displayed on your desktop pretty easily.

Amarok is a hellova music player, but it is a KDE program and doesn't play as well in Openbox or XFCE. I've also had it crash a few too many times for my personal tastes..

Banshee can do this. But I prefer it embedded into the MP3.

Another good ncurses player is cmus.

I like MPD + ncmpcpp, and some tweaks for make it works with the multimedia keyboard.