XMMS development & plugins
 

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

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

DNA
AKA mrascii

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

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.

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.

me too.
audacious is a good alternative.

Have you tried Clementine as a replacement of Amarok 1.4?

I liked Clementine a lot but after some upgrades towards Slackware-14 I couldn't get it to work any longer. It segfaults immediately upon start up (bug report here). I never got it fixed but have since switched to i3 tiling window manager so I now prefer to keep-it-simple™ and use moc.

I also use xmms. It works. All I want is a player that plays my mp3s and gives me an equaliser and the ability to create playlists. It may not have had any development for 4 years but it still works. I might give audacious and vlc a try as well.

At the time I tried it, Clementine has few annoying bugs (can't remember what exactly) and cannot play audio CD. I'm compiling it right now to see how far they got, but I'm already hooked to MPD with my music "server" and xmms or VLC for local playback. But maybe I'll keep Clementine around, just in case.

I'm curious to hear if it segfaults on you as well. I have the problem on two separate pc's (both -current).

I didn't run -current back then and as far as I remember, Clementine haven't crashed. Those bugs were rather missing functionality, like menu entries which didn't do anything (just popped up some generic error message). Maybe it was due to early development state or something similar.

So far Clementine won't compile on -current (Slack 14 RC 4), maybe it will with RC 5.

Clementine needs to be patched in order to compile with the current liblastfm. See here
http://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/ca...pathrev=277765

I have attached the patch in case you care to try it.

i use Clementine to organise my music library and keep xmms just in case
the gtk1 used to bother me, but not anymore since i install the gtk1 industrial engine

Thanks! I can finally give it a try.

I went to audacious a long time ago and I love it (playing some Tchaikovsky on it ATM). It's written for modern systems while still being xmms-style simple, and I can keep using my favorite winamp2 skin. Yes, it has occasionally suffered from bugs and regressions, but for the most part it seems to have stabilized, in my experience. Even when a bug does appear it just generally only means I have to hold back on upgrading until it gets resolved.


@Ilgar: Audacious includes several plugins for defining various keyboard shortcuts, as well as the audtool command-line controller for interfacing with a running instance.


Incidentally, check out qmmp for a qt-based player that's almost identical to audacious:

http://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/index_en.php

I used xmms for a long time and like it's design for the playlist, the way it uses a format string that you can customize any way you want. It also handles huge playlists very well. I never really liked the way the xmms gui looked, but since it worked well I didn't mind it too much. Something xmms lacks is multiple tabbed playlists unless it is some hidden feature I never found.

I also used for a long time, foobar2000 under wine. It's a really great windows music player and has some of the best features for writing the tags on the files. I still use fb2k for tagging. I think the sound quality of playback thru wine can have some issues that degrade the quality, so I stopped using it as a player. But, if the sound is okay, it is a great player with extremely good GUI design with multiple tabbed playlists and perfect tag writer.

Now audacious has a blend of features like xmms and foobar2000, but I do not use it to tag (I think it can but have not looked at that feature). It has multiple tabbed playlists The playlist can use a custom string like xmms and foobar2000 can. Now, for sound quality, audacious has a great plugin that makes it my preferred player: output->effects->sample rate converter (method: best sinc interpolation) to rate: 48000 Hz because that is the rate my S/PDIF-connected equipment is designed for. So, with this setting, I get very high quality high frequencies and stereo image of fine details, where I have my equipment configured for a direct full-level signal with no biases/equalization changes on any frequencies straight to the amplifier and speakers. On a pc, I've had lots of software and equipment bugs trying to get good sound, but it is not bad now.

Thanks for the information, David. I gave it a try. audtool is OK but unfortunately audacious refused to play many of my mp3's with the error "snd_pcm_hw_params_set_rate failed: Invalid argument" (my computer is an EEEPC with an ICH 7 Intel chip). And in the majority of the ones that it could play, it was unable to seek (this is version 2.4.4). I'd like to retry with the newer version in 14.0, but the current situation is very disappointing.

I have an older PC that I wanted a light-weight music player, that could handle a library with a few thousand songs. The solution I settled on was MPD (music player daemon) and the Sonata client for it. No bloat, and it handles my huge collection without any performance cost.

OK, I played around quite a lot on a few machines, and I think I have a winner: Audacious 3.2.4, the "legacy" version for GTK2, which runs very nice on Slackware 13.37 (Audacious 3.3.x needs GTK3 to build).

There are some significant improvements over the 2.x version I tried a long time ago. Especially handling playlists is much improved. I can now export an M3U playlist and simply hand it over to Brasero without any hiccup.

Tried various formats (audio CD, MP3, OGG, WMA, WAV, FLAC, MPC) and everything is handled OK.

Plus, it fits nice into Xfce.

Conclusion: a highly recommendable GTK audio player.