Hi,

In my first years of using Linux (roughly more than ten years ago), XMMS quickly became my favourite music player app, since I had been using Winamp before. Now, in 2012 - after using a plethora of various audio and multimedia players on Linux - I've come back to XMMS. Seems to be the only player where - if you feel so inclined - you can open the whole load of ~/Music (13.000 files) and the darn thing 1) won't crash on you 2) display all the files one after another and actually start playing the first.

And yes, I gave Audacious a try, but after the first few crashes, I came back to XMMS.

Is XMMS still in development?

Is there sort of a central page that lists all the various plugins? Back in the days, I used xmms-wma (I have a little speech recording device that only spews out WMA) and xmms-xosd (liked that one).

BTW: still any XMMS users out there?

Well, i use 3 players, XMMS, Audacious and Amarok ...

In my opinion this are the best players among others. In my opinion, XMMS, is simple, but it is stronger and stable than audacious, Audacious has better plugins (little better than XMMS), Amarok, is ok, i use it because it can play the m4a files (i must confess, i like to buy music in the itunes store).

I think there is a music player that should have the strong points of this three. But XMMS is my favorite, because a have a winamp nostalgia, i used winamp since it's 1.5 version, and i love it's simplicity.

I just wanted to say that the distro Dynebolic included XMMS within it, but I used it last maybe 4 or so years ago.
All the modern Ubuntus and so forth of course, have their own players, but those, AFAIK, can't be skinned and end up looking as sexy as XMMS (I wouldn't even know how to *compile* the source for Ubuntu!)

Winamp was great, it used to have a video plugin called 'vid4winamp', it was the perfect solution for videos, as they would get listed in the winamp playlist on the right, and the video window would take up the rest of the space on the left.

There was a similar plugin for audacious, but I couldnt get it working.

Although saying that, I've got a solution now which feels just as good if not better. Its just that winamp and the vid4winamp plugin was a contained audio/video playing solution. But it wouldnt suit the way I do things now.

Wait a minute, there is something other than XMMS??? Seriously no matter what distro I end up for the month I have always found away to install XMMS.

+1 XMMS

-JJ

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I love Steve Moss' Frequency skin. Pure Heathkit from the 1960's.

DNA
AKA mrascii

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I've been using VLC for playing music. It's playlist is ok and it plays pretty much all audio formats I've encountered recently.

No, but some plugins might be.

And, uh, 13000 files? I may or may not have tested Quetzalcoatl (development version screenshot) with a load of that scale, but it does handle my very large collection (80GB at one point). I believe all other MPD clients will too.

I used XMMS for long time and I still like it for it's speed and simplicity (if you compare it to modern audio players), but I was forced to start looking for something else because GTK1 doesn't support UTF-8, which is crucial for me*. Audacious is nice drop-in replacement, but I eventually turn it down too when they removed Last.fm plugin (I know the reasoning behind this and I'd probably do the same as developer, but from user point of view I don't like it at all). Finally I ended with MPD on audio-file-etc server and MPD client on all other computers.

* I use musicbrainz for tagging my audio CD collection and many bands I have there use non-ascii characters in songs, sometimes even in band names.

yenn, could you please tell me why Amarok removed their Last.fm plugin? I wasn't aware of this at all, and now I'm very curious.

Audacious removed this plugin, not Amarok. As far as I know, Amarok can still scrobble to Last.fm, but I don't use it (I don't like Amarok 2 and it is quite tricky to run Amarok 1.4 under recent Slackware releases), so I can't tell for sure.

And if anyone is interested why Audacious developers dropped Last.fm plugin, it was buggy and hardly maintainable and besides that developers didn't like Last.fm TOS. They encouraged users to switch to Libre.fm, but at that time Libre.fm wasn't in good shape. There were big plans, good ideas, like integration with Musicbrainz database, but lot of work ahead. I don't know how much this service improved over time, but if you look at it now, it still doesn't look very good compared to Last.fm

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I'm also an XMMS user since I met Linux. It's simple and fast. Like yenn, the lack of UTF-8 support is giving me some trouble (and also the Gtk 1 file selector is not very functional) but I still use XMMS anyway. I've tried Amarok and Audacious. The former had too much bloat (visually and in the background), the latter was buggy. Well, indeed, the very last time I checked the Audacious shipping with 13.37 it seemed alright but I'm so used to XMMS. Besides, I want to be able to control the player from the keyboard, I especially use the fast forward or rewind functionality very often. With the help of xbindkeys and a simple C program that I wrote, I can easily do that with XMMS. I don't know how I would do that with Audacious (and I don't bother investigating).

I used xmms for a long time to, and i really never switched, until i found about cmus.
however after a while i just got bored with and now i just use mplayer to play mp3s. :-)
imo, XMMS is the best mp3 gui program.

I have to confess that I never got fixed on by winamp and its look The GUI audio player I like most is deadbeef (see slackbuilds.org, compiles fine with the latest source taken from the deadbeef website. The version on SBo is quite old). It has one drawback - don't expect it to immediately start playing, like amaroK it has to scan the audio fles first. After that it is fast, clean and can be nicely configured to make use of keyboard shortcuts. Simplistic interface that reminds me much more of foobar2000 than any oher player.

xmms is very much not in development anymore. Their last stable version was released 4 years ago, and cvs development stopped not long after that. xmms had a slight problem of an poorly designed codebase, which is why so many forks were released (such as the Beep Media Player (now extinct), which itself spawned Youki (also dead), BMPx (dead as well) and Audacious).

Personally, I like Audacious. It handles my library well (and is the best player I've found for my SNES music) and it's lightweight. xmms is still nice to use now and again, but I always feel a bit nervous using a dead program.