Hi, I'll soon be dual booting on this machine, with an XP install and a Linux distro - Mandrake 9.2 with KDE.

As I want to continue using the 3.90.3 ICL 4.5 compile of LAME to encode, this isn't an issue - I'll just boot to Windows when I want to encode, as I rarely do it these days. But I would obviously like to be able to play MP3s when I'm using Mandrake. So...

What is the best Linux player? I'm using Winamp 2.xx on Windows at the moment. I have no requirements apart from bugless MP3, WAV and FLAC playback. I'm sure there are quite a few libraries capable of decoding MP3 on Linux but I'm obviously after pointers from a "quality" point of view... any advice from Linux users appreciated.

Thanks...

Wine + Foobar2000. Do some searching...

If you are comfortable with Winamp2, you will like XMMS. It's the most widely used and supported player on GNU/Linux and should be included in Mandrake's default install. There are PlugIns for most formats (including Musepack and FLAC) and it performs basic playback tasks just fine. Its mp3 decoding engine is based on mpglib, so you should be on the save side with that, even though there are libmad based PlugIns available.

PLF is a good adress for RPM's of multimedia software for Mandrake, if you are afraid of building things from source and don't want to mess up your system by installing non-mdk RPMs.

KDE's own media player Noatun is rather limited and unstable, I can only advise you to stay away from it.

Another interesting project, especially if you like iTunes, is Rhythmbox, which utitlizes the GStremer Media Framework for playback, so it should play back all formats you have GStreamer filters installed for.

mplayer and vlc are general purpose media players, which should handle most audio files just fine, but lack some features common for audio players like easy-to-use playlists etc.

Other players to look at would be ALSA player or cplay, in case you like console apps.
(hint: the cplay source is incredibly easy to work with - even for a non-programmer - so adding new decoders often takes less than an hour)

dev0

I would hardly reccomend this as a new users audio player. Yes, you can get it running in Linux, but it looks ugly, some features don't work, and it can be a pain to set up. The ONLY time i personally use it under Linux is when i am playing an album that is gapless and i wan't to listen with no gaps. Any other time, as just an mp3 player, there are many better solutions available, already listed!

Each to their own though!!

Kristian

there is a lot audio players on linux distros (linux is just the kernel), just do some googling and you will see.. also you should read in rarewares part of this site and you will find some good audio player

Thanks a lot dev0, that's really helpful. I already use VLC on Windows for video playback so I expect I'll have a Linux version of that installed.

I'm a bit confused at some of the other replies, "do some searching", bearing in mind I'd already said "I'm sure there are quite a few libraries capable of decoding MP3 on Linux but I'm obviously after pointers from a "quality" point of view...". My reasoning behind asking was that I know if you Google for "quality MP3 encoding" then you'll get a load of pages telling you that 192cbr forced stereo is optimal. Thus I didn't want to just Google for "Linux MP3 player" or whatever. I wanted to ask here because I trust people's opinions and know that their way of thinking is the same as mine.

Still, no problems, I don't want to start a fight. Cheers again dev0.

Maybe ciber-fred was just trying to point at his own "little" player - LAMIP?

Foobar + Linux : http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....=16230&hl=linux
You can't learn anything if don't try to. The first thing I did after installing my Slackware 9.1 (you heard right!) was to start tweakin' Mplayer.

The GStreamer framework has been making waves. I hear it is getting integrated into latest Gnome releases.

I use Zinf (nee FreeAmp) myself. I like the music library and there are some nice, clean and compact skins available for it. All in, it's a great player. If you like Winamp 2, then try XMMS, but I find it a bit feature lean.

Foobar under WINE is a pain in the ass. It crashes, it's slow and a lot of the cooler features are broken. There are native Linux programs that do anything Foobar can do, just probably not in the convenient little package.

You seem worried about the quality issue. I can't ABX Zinf's decoder versus Foobar's, so I don't think there is a major problem with quality. A much bigger issue is your soundcard drivers. For instance if you have a Live steer clear of the current ALSA drivers - in my opinion they are crap.


Why? There are ICL versions for Linux and I can't find anything wrong with the GCC compiles. A much bigger problem is the lack of real competition for EAC. However cdparanoia and it's various frontends work just as well if you drive isn't evil.

if you compile lame natively for your processor, you might actually get even better results. oggenc here is running 10x under linux, 9x under winxp, and a downloaded oggenc binary compile goes as low as 8x... (athlon xp1800+)

and yes, eac is unreplaceable at the time. cdparanoia sometimes just finds errors where there are none, and locks up (using -Bvz) consequently in some places where eac goes smooth. i've heard that eac under wine works better than cdparanoia (!) though...

[solid]

Yeah I'm not worried about the quality to that extent, for example, I use the MAD decoder with Winamp at the moment, and according to a lot of reliable sources there can be some minute problems when listening under certain conditions. They don't bother me (although I recognise the importance of those tests).

I want to use that compile of LAME primarily because I'm used to it and I'll be keeping Windows anyway (i.e. for reasons not relevant here), so it's no bother at all, especially as I very rarely encode these days.

Sorry if some of this is already answered. I wrote this earlier but am just now able to post it:




I could be wrong but to my knowledge the libs used for decoding are usually the same on Windows and GNU/Linux, e.g. mpg123, MAD, mpg321 (based on MAD?). Well, on Windows you'll usually have decoders from Fraunhofer available as part of an MP3 ACM codec. So, if you want to find out about the quality of said decoder libs, then search the forum with examples given above.

For XMMS there are Plugins available which either use mpg123, mpg321 or MAD. Further there's a crossfade plugin (can resample to 48KHz, if needed) and more, e.g. disk-writer. You can use any output plugin with crossfade plugin (ALSA, OSS, esd, arts, disk-writer ...).

Decoders for FLAC should too be the same for GNU/Linux and windows, as well as any other platform supported by FLAC. Decoding of PCM Wave or other kinds shouldn't be of any problem on any given platform.

You didn't ask for Ogg Vorbis support but for the compliteness, I don't think there're much players anymore on GNU/Linux which don't support it.


I personally prefer Rhythmbox and XMMS for audio playback. Another useful player could be Peep Media Player, which is based on XMMS but is a GTK+ 2.X port of XMMS with some customizations added. AFAIK, gstreamer and Rhythmbox are part of GNOME 2.4, so if Mandrake 9.2 comes with GNOME 2.4, Rhythmbox should be part of the distribution. I don't know where to get beep media player from, I use Debian Sarge and could install a binary package of it using apt-get. XMMS or LAMIP is only a must-have if you want to play Musepack encoded files, although I think it could be possible to decode .mpc if an application has the option (plugin) to use command line tools for deoding.

And for EAC and cdparanoia, don't worry, if you don't trust cdparanoia you can still use EAC through WINE. IIRC all you should need to do, is to configre WINE and copy an wnaspi32.dll from Ahead into EACs install directoy. There're some threads regarding this topic to be found on HA.org too .


Regards, David