Re: Recommendation
Christian Weisgerber
> I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what/where is the best playlist
> driven audio player with a graphical UI ...
IMHO, multimedia/xmms still beats all its successors.
--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber na...@mips.inka.de
Martin Tournoij
> I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what/where is the best playlist
> audio and multimedia dirs) for any reasonable manual search, and since I'm after
> a good graphical UI for it, I couldn't even construct any sort of automatic
> search I can think of, the pkg-descr files aren't that reliable. My audio,
> which I do via spdif, already works fine (using mplayer so far) so don't give me
> directions how to *do* it, I'm just looking for a port name which offers me a
> good interface for playlists, maybe even helping me build playlists (because
> I've already loaded all my CDs to my disk).
>
> Thanks. I'm asking for opinions, so don't hesitate to offer me your own
> favorites, I'll go look at every one suggested, and I'll really appreciate it.
IMHO using audio/musicpd gives you a very flexible solution, the mpd program
runs in the background, and you can use several clients to connect to it. You
have commandline, curses, GTK, QT, whatnot, clients. You can mix and match as
you prefer and the music will keep playing even if you quit the client ...
--
Martin Tournoij
carpet...@rwxrwxrwx.net | (+031) 621 991 576
http://www.carpetsmoker.net | http://www.daemonforums.org
QOTD:
Fortune and love befriend the bold.
-- Ovid
Max Laier
> I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what/where is the best playlist
> driven audio player with a graphical UI ... there's too large a selection
> (both audio and multimedia dirs) for any reasonable manual search, and
> since I'm after a good graphical UI for it, I couldn't even construct any
> sort of automatic search I can think of, the pkg-descr files aren't that
> reliable. My audio, which I do via spdif, already works fine (using
> mplayer so far) so don't give me directions how to *do* it, I'm just
> looking for a port name which offers me a good interface for playlists,
> maybe even helping me build playlists (because I've already loaded all my
> CDs to my disk).
>
> Thanks. I'm asking for opinions, so don't hesitate to offer me your own
> favorites, I'll go look at every one suggested, and I'll really appreciate
> it.
I still love audio/amarok (the pre-KDE4 version), it indexes your collection,
offers "smart" playlists, and last.fm integration. There is the KDE4 version
in ports as well, but I think the developers have fallen into a classic 2nd
system trap when they did the relaunch.
Cheers,
Max
Giorgos Keramidas
> I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what/where is the best
> playlist driven audio player with a graphical UI ... there's too large
> a selection (both audio and multimedia dirs) for any reasonable manual
> search, and since I'm after a good graphical UI for it, I couldn't
> even construct any sort of automatic search I can think of, the
> pkg-descr files aren't that reliable. My audio, which I do via spdif,
> already works fine (using mplayer so far) so don't give me directions
> how to *do* it, I'm just looking for a port name which offers me a
> good interface for playlists, maybe even helping me build playlists
> (because I've already loaded all my CDs to my disk).
>
> Thanks. I'm asking for opinions, so don't hesitate to offer me your
> own favorites, I'll go look at every one suggested, and I'll really
> appreciate it.
Hi Chuck,
Amarok is a featureful and nice program, offerring custom playlists,
dynamic playlists, and a very good interface for organizing and -- most
importantly -- *reorganizing* your collection based on IDv3 tags. It
also sports last.fm support and lots of plugins/extensions, but there is
_one_ catch: Amarok developers seem to haven fallen for the "second
system" trap, and the latest versions are buggy, bloated monsters when
compared to the original Amarok I loved.
Exaile is a much lighter and nice player for Gnome fans. It doesn't
have all the features of Amarok, but it has a large subset and those
features that work seem to be mostly "ok". It doesn't have as many
developers as Amarok though, and it seems to be lagging far behind.
I've been trying Rhythmbox too lately. It also recognizes IDv3 tags,
has playlist support, podcast download and archive support, last.fm
integration and online streaming radio support. Some bits of the UI
are, to put it mildly, "dumped down". This is a common problem of many
Gnome applications these days, it seems. I've only used it for about a
week or two now, so I can't really say if I _like_ it yet.
There are, as you noticed, far too many players out there. I'm afraid
there's no way out of the paradox of too many choices. You'll probably
have to try a few players and decide for yourself which one suits your
taste better :-/
Charlie Kester
>Exaile is a much lighter and nice player for Gnome fans. It doesn't
>have all the features of Amarok, but it has a large subset and those
>features that work seem to be mostly "ok". It doesn't have as many
>developers as Amarok though, and it seems to be lagging far behind.
>
>I've been trying Rhythmbox too lately. It also recognizes IDv3 tags,
>has playlist support, podcast download and archive support, last.fm
>integration and online streaming radio support. Some bits of the UI
>are, to put it mildly, "dumped down". This is a common problem of many
>Gnome applications these days, it seems. I've only used it for about a
>week or two now, so I can't really say if I _like_ it yet.
I've been trying Exaile and Rhythmbox too. I think I prefer Rhythmbox,
because it handles my .m3u playlists in the way I like. It immediately
lists them in the sidebar under Playlists, and they persist there from
session to session. Exaile seems to load them only temporarily; to get
them into the sidebar, you have to explicitly save them as a custom
playlist. (It's a minor point, I know, but I dislike what seem like
unnecessary steps.)
A more serious problem is that I can't seem to get either of them to
work with any of my favorite podcasts. It always complains that it's
unable to parse the feed.
One tool I've found that does work with podcasts is PenguinTV. So that's
what I'm currently using.
What about mixers and/or equalizers? What are people using for that?
Giorgos Keramidas
>On Tue 02 Feb 2010 at 14:34:42 PST Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>> I've been trying Rhythmbox too lately. It also recognizes IDv3 tags,
>> has playlist support, podcast download and archive support, last.fm
>> integration and online streaming radio support. Some bits of the UI
>> are, to put it mildly, "dumped down". This is a common problem of many
>> Gnome applications these days, it seems. I've only used it for about a
>> week or two now, so I can't really say if I _like_ it yet.
>
> I've been trying Exaile and Rhythmbox too. I think I prefer Rhythmbox,
> because it handles my .m3u playlists in the way I like. It immediately
> lists them in the sidebar under Playlists, and they persist there from
> session to session.
Yes, that's a really _nice_ feature of Rhythmbox :-)
When I am trying to 'enter the zone' and code for 3-4 hours without jumps
from one context to another, I often load a large m3u playlist to Rhythmbox
and let it repeat itself forever. Then I start writing and lose myself in
the process of creating things instead of going back and forth between my
terminal and the player in an effort to "keep the playlist filled with nice
music".
The context switch from the work I am going to the player is always hurtful
for my concentration, so persistent playlists help me avoid it as much as
possible.
Charlie Kester
OTOH, if I want continuous random playback of a playlist without the
overhead of a graphical music manager, I go with
mpg123 -C -Z -@ playlist.m3u
in a terminal window. To make it easier to launch this by clicking the
m3u file in a file manager like Thunar, I have a desktop settings file
for it. ~/.local/share/applications/mpg123-random-usercreated.desktop:
[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Name=mpg123-random
Exec=mpg123 -C -Z -@ %F
MimeType=audio/mpeg
Then either I associate this with the .m3u file type in the usual way,
or I leave .m3u associated with something else and use "Open with other
Application" to select mpg123-random.
When I'm deeply immersed in my work, I don't need to see the album cover
and other info the graphical music managers show me about the currently
playing song. mpg123 gives more than enough such info, but I almost
never look at it. (The only reason I run it in a terminal window is to
make it easy to shutdown and to be able to skip past a song I've decided
I no longer like -- hence the use of the -C option.)
Chuck Robey
I asked for all opinions, but I need to answer here before my thread gets
hijacked. I DON'T WANT GUI-less operation, I don't want random playback. I
really do appreciate your response, but what I'm after is the best possible mp3
player GUI for managing the creation and manipulation of playlist driven playback.
The only possible reason I have for replying here is to avoid getting all
thouse responses from folks who don't like GUIs. Hell, I'm usually in that
camp, but not this time. The suggestion I got for musicpd is a player with lots
of hooks into GUIs (according to the email) but my playback already works
excellently, what I'm after is the GUI, not the server.
I've had some great suggestions so far. I think I'll go try amarok first, and
maybe rhythmbox next. You folks are REALLY helpful, thanks!!
>
> Then either I associate this with the .m3u file type in the usual way,
> or I leave .m3u associated with something else and use "Open with other
> Application" to select mpg123-random.
> When I'm deeply immersed in my work, I don't need to see the album cover
> and other info the graphical music managers show me about the currently
> playing song. mpg123 gives more than enough such info, but I almost
> never look at it. (The only reason I run it in a terminal window is to
> make it easy to shutdown and to be able to skip past a song I've decided
> I no longer like -- hence the use of the -C option.)
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Charlie Kester
>
>I asked for all opinions, but I need to answer here before my thread gets
>hijacked. I DON'T WANT GUI-less operation, I don't want random playback. I
>really do appreciate your response, but what I'm after is the best possible mp3
>player GUI for managing the creation and manipulation of playlist driven playback.
>
>The only possible reason I have for replying here is to avoid getting all
>thouse responses from folks who don't like GUIs. Hell, I'm usually in that
>camp, but not this time. The suggestion I got for musicpd is a player with lots
>of hooks into GUIs (according to the email) but my playback already works
>excellently, what I'm after is the GUI, not the server.
>
>I've had some great suggestions so far. I think I'll go try amarok
>first, and maybe rhythmbox next. You folks are REALLY helpful,
>thanks!!
Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack your thread!
Amarok is very popular and is a good choice, despite what someone said
about the latest version having a case of featuritis. The older 1.4
version from ports is quite good. A little heavier in resource usage
than rhythmbox or exaile, but it's a solid implementation with no
missing features.
It handles my favorite podcasts correctly too, so there's no need to
pair it with PenguinTV. And it includes an equalizer, something I've
sorely missed in Rhythmbox and Exaile.
I had some m3u playlists with bad path info for some of the tracks. Wih
amarok, I was able to drag the track from my "Collection" and drop it in
the imported playlist. The m3u file was automatically updated with the
correct info. Now that's cool!
Lars Engels
> I've had some great suggestions so far. I think I'll go try amarok first, and
> maybe rhythmbox next. You folks are REALLY helpful, thanks!!
If you don't mind using java, you can also take a look at atunes.
Charlie Kester
>Amarok just wouldn't build, a C++ compile error. I *do* know c++, but
>I'm just no expert in it, so troubleshooting C++ isn'[t my first choice
>(hell, I truly dislike C++ for the specific reason that it's hard to
>troubleshoot, even for experts.) They've tossed in so many "features"
You're not installing amarok via the FreeBSD ports system? I just
installed the port again myself the other day, after reading this
thread, and I didn't encounter any problems with the compile or the
install.
Re your other questions about sound drivers, I'm afraid I can't help you
there. It's beyond my expertise. But FWIW, I usually use OSS.
Michiel Overtoom
> Chuck Robey <chu...@telenix.org> wrote:
> > I'm having a hard time trying to figure out what/where is the best
> > playlist driven audio player with a graphical UI ...
>
> IMHO, multimedia/xmms still beats all its successors.
I use XMMS too, for years now, but I still don't like its 'skinned'
appearance.
Greetings,
--
"The ability of the OSS process to collect and harness
the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across
the Internet is simply amazing." - Vinod Valloppillil
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween4.html