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Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com)
Linux.com has posted a glowing review of Banshee. "Banshee is perfect for managing your entire music collection, and particularly items stored on iPod music players. The software allows you to carry out many tasks in ways similar to Apple's iTunes, including playing music directly from the device and creating playlists with your songs. Banshee supports a wide variety of codecs, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and MP3. The player read ID3 tags perfectly for my music collection, and sorting through the tracks -- comprising several file formats -- was incredibly easy."
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Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 16:39 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] AFAICT Banshee doesn't do internet radio. Is there any program (other than the eternally unstable Rhythmbox) that will both maintain a library of MP3s and play internet radio?
I *still* use XMMS as my primary music player because it is rock stable, plays all my local music (including flac), and plays internet radio stations. Pretty simple! Why can't I find a newer music player to replace it??
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 17:03 UTC (Wed) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198) [Link] Try amarok...it has that and many other features. I don't understand why people likes to keep using the 90's audio players :)
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 17:24 UTC (Wed) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Maybe because it's light weight, stable, unlike the 00's music players.
I tried AmaroK, looks good, "sounds" nice, but can't get it to mix two songs, and is not audio stable when using both CPUs on my dual machine for other tasks. For some reason XMMS does.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 20:58 UTC (Wed) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] for the "lightweight" music players, JuK is really quite good. it has asimilar UI layout to banshee (or vice versa, i suppose; or both to iTunes ;) and does a rather great job of Just Playing Music.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 23:37 UTC (Wed) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link] Amarok tends to behave better and be more responsive when the Xine engine is used. Many distros set the Gstreamer engine by default. I like the idea of Gstreamer but the real-world stability and performance just haven't been there. Amarok also had severe issues on hyperthreaded machines. Recent builds seemed to cure these. I used the following script to start Amarok before the SMT issues were fixed. It may also cure your SMP issues:
#!/bin/bash
Don't run it if Amarok is already running. It is also forcibly cleans up Amarok zombies that are laying around. The taskset line forces Amarok to run on one processor virtual or otherwise. Again, recent versions of Amarok are much much better in this regard. The latest stable Amarok release (1.3.8) also cures some threading issues on startup; it has addressed all of my historical complaints with Amarok.
If by "mixing", you are speaking of smooth crossfading then the upcoming 1.4.x releases of Amarok will address those. The feature is already in CVS. They expect to start preview releases of 1.4.x in April.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 20:05 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] Thanks for the information.I tried it again yesterday, and since I got a newer version, it had to rescan the complete audio library I have, which was quite slow. Gladfully, it was done in the background, and audio did not seem to suffer at all. It sounds like those problems are gone now.
I can't wait for the crossfading option to come up.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 9:53 UTC (Thu) by philips (guest, #937) [Link] I wonder what you will call my usual setup of xterm + mpg123/mpg321/ogg123...At some time it was only combination which properly supported UTF-8 tags. I wonder if XMMS was updated to support UTF-8. Internationalization was always blocker for me.
PS I think Linux has more of an issue with video player... While VLC & Mplayer do at times Okay, I still sort'a miss all the bells'n'whistles of dxshow DivX/MKV/OGM filters/splitters developped for Wind0ze. E.g. Linux' players support for subtitles at best can be described as "rudimentary". (And I'm still getting issues with video files with AAC/MPEG4 audio too. But it's probably only me...)
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 19:57 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] No, the root of the character encoding problems lies outside of XMMS, in id3lib. Programs need to switch to saner libraries, like TagLib or Mutagen, before they will handle UTF-8 properly.
Programs using these libraries (Quod Libet, amaroK, JuK, as well as Rhythmbox which uses GStreamer's ID3 parser) will properly support UTF-8, though of that group only Quod Libet is any good as a tagger as well as a player. Most people are still using EasyTag, so it's a bit of chicken-and-egg problem, since it writes busted frames.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 24, 2006 13:18 UTC (Fri) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] Hey... I use EasyTag from time to time to clean up tags, what do you mean it writes busted frames? What's a busted frame and what should I use instead to edit tags, that Quod Libet thing?
thx
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 24, 2006 18:41 UTC (Fri) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] ID3 tags are divided into "frames", each frame containing a string, or a URL, or sometimes a bit more. id3lib, the ID3 library used by EasyTag, is really buggy especially when it comes to writing non-ASCII tags. It also won't read the "new" version of ID3 (which is several years old by now); since it's the closest thing ID3 has to a reference implementation, that really blows. By contrast, Mutagen is much more compliant with the standard, has a huge automated test suite, and works with the latest version of the standard.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 19:28 UTC (Sat) by gravious (subscriber, #7662) [Link] muchas gracias for da headz up dude
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 17:27 UTC (Wed) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591) [Link] You can try quodlibet or amarok. Both players feature flac support and internet radio. I think both are pretty stable.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 19:42 UTC (Wed) by sjj (subscriber, #2020) [Link] Am I the only one having problems with Amarok stability? It crashes regularly for me on two separate clean Kubuntu installations.
Quodlibet is pretty nice - but often I just want to quickly play a file from my home directory without importing it and all that. XMMS still r00lz!
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 23:39 UTC (Wed) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010) [Link] The 1.3.8 release of Amarok solves many stability issues. The Amarok page has apt sources to install those into Ubuntu. The version that comes with Breezy is really unstable compared to recent builds.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 22:22 UTC (Wed) by hal9000 (guest, #27639) [Link] Try BMP, it's a fork of XMMS. BMP never got the Internet Radio browser built into it, but that has already been done in BMPx (the development branch of BMP, and which is EOLing BMP). BMPx is somewhere around 2/3 complete and the SVN snapshots are somewhat usable. BMP/BMPx also have crossfade plugins.
MPD is also another player that has crossfade and Internet Radio browsing.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 3:01 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] There is this XMMS plugin for maintaining a media library.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 22, 2006 22:40 UTC (Wed) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] Banshee is real bloatware.
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 23, 2006 0:45 UTC (Thu) by whitemice (guest, #3748) [Link] Yes, all the features you expect in a modern music player plus stability. I guess that pretty much defines 'bloatware'.
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 23, 2006 1:19 UTC (Thu) by sylware (guest, #35259) [Link] Well, then we don't have the same definition of a piece of bloatware...
Anyway, till we have the freedom not to install it, I don't have a pb with it...
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 23, 2006 2:31 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] So what's bloaty about Banshee? I don't use it because it's missing streaming support. Other than that, it looks like a great setup.
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 23, 2006 3:18 UTC (Thu) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] I'm not familiar with the program, so I don't know whether the media library functionality is part of the main program or is a plugin. (The site does say that there is a plugin interface.) If it isn't a plugin, then it should be, IMO.
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 23, 2006 19:47 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] Making the media library a plugin, rather than the center of the program, kind of misses the point, IMO.
If you want XMMS, there are plenty of versions of it. :)
Re: bloatware. Posted Feb 24, 2006 3:17 UTC (Fri) by rqosa (subscriber, #24136) [Link] It should be possible for a plugin to be "the center of the program", because plugins can interact with the main window. In screenshots like this one and this one, the "Library" is an entry in the upper-left pane of the main window. Looking at the example plugin, I would guess that the "Sample Source" created by the plugin would be displayed as an entry in the upper-left pane, but I'm not sure.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 9:13 UTC (Thu) by eskild (subscriber, #1556) [Link] In a way I agree: On my box it's 96MB VM; 56 MB RSS seems like a lot for a music player...(I'm guessing it's because it's keeping the music DB resident (?), and is a Mono app. So there are "valid reasons". It just still seems like a lot.)
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 19:54 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957) [Link] There is also substantial memory overhead in GStreamer. However, I wouldn't classify it as "bloat" (at least not without profiling it). Music players these days need to deal with half a dozen backends and a dozen file formats, with all sorts of things users want (per-application volume, crossfading, ReplayGain) in between the two, not to mention network-awareness for *casts. They also need to be designed extensibly, so when the stupid Big New Format comes along in a year, it'll be easy to make them play that.
The days of manually configuring an SB16 emulation layer over our cheap ISA soundcard and tweaking IRQ numbers is gone; the price we pay is another dozen megabytes of memory overhead. Personally, I welcome our new user-friendly overlords.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 21:00 UTC (Thu) by pbardet (guest, #22762) [Link] So basically, that Banshee is like AmaroK, but for Gnome, and apparently less features already supported. I suppose that if I want to try it properly, I'll have to install all the gtk/gnome libraries, and maybe the gnome desktop.
Among Linux music players, Banshee really wails (Linux.com) Posted Feb 23, 2006 21:59 UTC (Thu) by vdHummes (guest, #36092) [Link] There is no player that satisfies my needs as much as mp3blaster: adequate and fast playlist creation, rodent-free, id3-tag support, even for koi8-r, and streamed audio too. Full access to your soundcard from within the application, without any bloat. Only flaw: no ogg-streaming support YET. For that, I humbly revert to mplayer.
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