What are good mp3 players for linux? I have xmms, but I want the playlist to be see through. Is that a simple window property or something, that would just require adding a flag to some function call or whatnot? If not, name some other good players.

sorry if this seems out of place, but is the most important thing in the world about an mp3 really wether you can see through it or not?? what about the ease of use? flexible user-definable hotkeys? shell integration? bitrate resampling? audio post-processing? noise reduction?

who cares how it sounds, an mp3 player should be about how it looks.

Try gqmpeg supports application transparency. For anything else you will need an X server that supports translucency like Xorg 6.8, xcompmgr and transset.

does Xorg 6.8 have transluceny enabled by default yet? Last I read you still had to manually enable it since it is still in testing.

Obviously I want it to sound good, doesn't that kind of go without saying? I don't exactly
have high tech speakers, so I don't think I need anything that does voodoo with the
mp3. I checked out Qmpeg, only the menu/current track bar are transparent, thanks for the suggestion though.

Like this? http://www.photohost.org/gallery/dat...trans-xmms.png
You first have to go and download X.org X11R6.8.1, then compile it, install it (make World; make install) (back up your old /usr/11R6 first!).. Then you have to download xcompmgr and transset. After running xcompmgr you can use transset to set the transparency, or edit the code your self.

Setting aside the eye candy aspect of it, how effective is the xcompmgr [transparency] in terms of CPU cyles??. I guess it feeds on a lot of resources..

Waiting for your experiences with it...

Xorg with xcompmgr tends to crash on most boxes. Even if it doesn't your machine will still become slow. On my box with 2.4 gig processor, 768 megs ram, and an Nvidia it still is not worth using for day to day desktop use.

The only thing I found it good for is pretty screenshots since most people see the transparency effect and the drop shadows but behind that screenshot is someone struggling to even move their windows because of the excessive bloat it adds on.

At this point it simply is not worth the hassle and in some cases may render your machine completely unusable resulting in a hard reset or have to log in and kill X with ssh.

Thanks jev-bird,


There is nothing like a first hand account of things, from a person who has tried it.
I was pretty sure that the system would be sluggish, with all that eyecandy, and from your post that seems to be the case.

I haven't noticed a slowdown... I have a NVidia 4 MX (not very good), P4 2.8@3.4GHz proc, and 512 MB ram. My X runs fine, I can watch movies fine. Everything loads and unloads fine. It (xcompmgr, NOT linux or X) crashes from time-to-time. I keep it on without noticing a difference. I also have the RenderAccel option on... that could help I think.