Simple audio player with a decent library feature or fast filesystem browsing
 

I'm looking for a decent audio player for my netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA running CrunchBang 9.04.1).
On my fullsize notebook I use Amarok 1.4, with the "files" tab open. I keep all my music files in the format "artist - album - tracknumberifany - title.ogg", and all in one folder, so all I have to do to find a specific song is to type the first few letters of the artist's name and scroll down.
On the netbook I've tried the following:

Rhythmbox: removes tracks from the playlist as it plays them, which is extremely irritating and, so fas as I can see, not avoidable; also, typing in text for some reason searches track titles and not artists. Confusing keyboard controls.
Amarok 2.0.2: locks up when scanning the music library. Which wouldn't be a problem if it let me use filesystem mode like the old version did, but it doesn't - it insists on scanning everything whenever I click on the music folder, and promptly locks up. It also requires A LOT of stuff to be installed, totalling about 170 megs, and is heavy on system resources.
Amarok 2.1.1: doesn't seem to work, for some reason. Doesn't add files to the playlist from the filesystem; adds them from the library, but then doesn't play them. Also, very system-heavy.
Listen 0.5: bugged. Parts of the interface vanish for no clear reason.
Listen 0.6.3: the library browser is all kinds of broken. It doesn't load all the songs, and if I tell it to rescan the library it ends up with lots of doubles. I'd use filesystem mode, but it's ridiculously slow, requiring about a minute to load before it lets me browse. I presume this is because of the huge number of files in my music folder, but then Amarok 1.4 didn't seem to have a problem with them.
Vlc: it has a rudimentary library feature, but selecting files involves A LOT of very accurate dragging and dropping, and you can't have it play by order of addition - it defaults to alphabetic, and will always queue them like that whenever new ones are added.
XMMS: hopelessly unstable, crashes all the bloody time
Winamp under wine (yes, I got desperate): way too much CPU hogging

I've spent the last three (edit: now four) hours trying to find some way of playing my music right, and utterly failed. I'm on the verge of insanity. Please help.

Sad to say, but my favourite gui audio player under linux is Foobar2000 under wine. It's a no-nonsense player that is extremely customisable, with a fantastic media library. Under linux, the ipod support is lacking, but works great in Windows.

Now, I rarely use foobar2k in linux because I found a beautiful cli app called plait. You type "plait strav fire 1919", and it pipes Stravinsky's Firebird Suite 1919 version to my cli audio player of choice (mplayer). Had I multiple matches (say, CSO vs LSO), it would play one, then the other.

I also have come across Herrie, a nice cli media library/player, but I haven't been able to use plait and herrie like I want. I'd like to have plait queue files on herrie's active playlist. I'm sure there's a way, but I'm content enough with plait alone. The great thing about herrie is vi style bindings.

Another thing that works really well for me is plain ol bash + mplayer. All my music is tagged nicely (in part thanks to Picard. Rip to flac, convert to lame, tag and rename with Picard). Screen gives me all the ttys I need.

moc (music on console) is a full-screen player designed to be powerful and easy to use.

I major advantage: don't need to move my hands off the keyboard to use it, intuitive controls, very lean on memory :D

(Ubuntu package "moc" -- executable "mocp")

I second moc. If all you want is something that can easily navigate the fs and can be easily handled with a few keystrokes, moc fits well. And it's incredibly light, fast and customizable. A neat feature of moc is that it can be closed once you are playing the music, a daemon will stay on the background, and you can reconnect to it with mocp -y.

After a LOT of attempts, I might have found what I'm looking for in Exaile. It's the one I've found so far with a quick filesystem browser and playlist the way I intend it. It uses more CPU than I like (constant 15% playing Ogg, occasionally fluctuating a bit), but by now I'm desperate, so it'll have to do.
SongBird also seems like it might satisfy, having what seems to be a decent library browser, but it hogs even more CPU (about 25%), so I'll stick with Exaile for now.
Mocp surprised me by hogging more CPU than Exaile (about 23%), which I wasn't expecting considering its nature. I'll pass.

Any other suggestions are welcome, of course.

How are you managing to make moc do that? (Come to think of it, moc *might* reach that level of CPU usage while initially scanning your newly added files. I just used it to play some OGGs and MP3s, and couldn't make it exceed 5% CPU usage.

(spec: Celeron 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, Linux Mint 7 Gloria, Kernel 2.6.28-15-generic.)

It's strange indeed, I suppose you tested all the players playing exactly the same file, because when it comes to codecs, each file can waste a very different amount of cpu time. In any case, if you found that exaile works for you then it's a legitimate choice as any other.

mocp -> select ogg file -> press enter.

The high number is not really moc's fault here; my netbook has an Atom processor that's energy efficient but that gets owned, performance-wise, by pretty much anything else on the market today.
It's a relative thing; on the same processor exaile manages to eat less cpu power...

Yep - "Knowing me, knowing you" by Abba. First one I saw and clicked. :p

Well, I thought I'd tell you how I solved this.

After screaming at Exaile's stupid interpretation of the concept of "alphabetic order", I gave another chance to moc, and it turns out it ain't so bad. The search function sucks HARD, but I found a file manager that doesn't choke on large folders (pcmanfm), so I just use that to search and add songs (I set the action for ogg and mp3 to "mocp -a").

One thing I really like about moc is that I can have my playlist on the right tab, and the whole folder on the left, so I don't have to erase the playlist when I want random play on the whole music selection.

One thing I don't much like is that I can't add albums easily, I have to go down-enter-down-enter-down-enter in pcmanfm until I've added all songs in the album. Oh well...

Oh, and CPU time is now 10%. What changed from before is that I'm running Debian Squeeze now (instead of Ubuntu 9.04). Don't know exactly what's responsible for the increased efficiency, but I like it better this way. :)

I am not sure if this helps, but in moc you can use shift+a to add the contens of a given folder. If you have your collection organized by author/album/files.mp3 you can add the whole album or even author on a single keystroke.

have you tried http://mpd.wikia.com

:)