Am setting up a Ubuntu box for my wife and need some advise on the Media Player available.

There are the features that I'm interested in:

• Easy/intuitive to use!
• Media Library
• Transcoding from FLAC music collection to iPod (don't care about lossless format on iPod)
• Replay Gain support

On my Windows box, I've been using foobar2000 for a few years, so as many of its features as are available would be nice as well.

Any and all advice welcome.
Thanks.

http://amarok.kde.org/ - Amarok first and foremost it supports a utility to synch up with your IPod although I hear there are some stability issues with it. It's not even close to Foobar2000 although it's still an excellent choice to work with on *nix.

Yep, Amarok would be it.
Though if there's no iPod involved, I'd rather use Wine + fb2k.

I will second (or third) the vote for Amarok. I'm a gnome lover and I still vote for Amarok. It's nearly the only non-GTK app that I use... It's just so much better than every other app I've tried. FB2K + Wine is okay, but I kept running into bugs with it -- maybe more recent versions of wine work better, but I haven't bothered trying any more since Amarok works so beautifully. In fact, there's now some things that Amarok does that I wish FB2K did as well.

+ 1 for Amarok (I run Xubuntu on a laptop).

Amarok is unbeaten featurewise but I don't think its UI is intuitive.
So perhaps you might also want to check out Banshee and Rhythmbox.

http://www.banshee-project.org/
http://www.rhythmbox.org/

If you prefer to use GTK applications, the you probably would like to know that an almost-clone of amarok is being developed and it is called Exaile. It is availabe in Debian Proper and, thus, I would expect it to be available in Ubuntu (at least, on newer releases, if not as a backport).

It is still not as full featured as amarok, but it is covering its ground at a very fast pace and I'd expect it to work as well as amarok quite soon.

That being said, I use currently audacious as my media player on Debian proper. It is small, provides support natively for much more formats than xmms does and you don't have to fiddle with extra packages.

Both are highly recommended.



Hope this helps, Rogério.

Thanks for the tip. I'd checked out Exaile before but it looks like it's progressed quite a bit since I saw it before. Still has a ways to go though.

Audacious looks nice and compact but I'm not interested in winamp/xmms style players.

BTW I'm using Gentoo.

Perhaps Quod Libet is the right thing for your wife? It does all the above except transcoding.

Well, yeah. =)
But sometimes I need to play files inside archives (zip & rar), and playing wv files.
Does Amarok able to play WavPack?
If it does, then I probably the one that simply doesn't know which button to press... xD

Slightly off-topic, but can i run amaroK without KDE (under Xfce, IceWM, fluxbox or similar) or is it dependant on that enviroment ?

I'd recommend Quod Libet.

Try looking at the FAQs.
http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/FAQ#Can_I_use_A..._without_KDE.3F

I'm using Ubuntu myself, with Beryl as the window manager, so I guess it's possible.

If Song Bird were a more finished I would recommend it. But do keep an eye on it. It has strong momentum and good potential.

I hate self-promotion, but I just posted a write-up of various GNOME players. I concluded that Amarok is still the best (I use it in Ubuntu w/ GNOME, no problem), but there are still a lot of good players.

GNOME Audio players

Thanks everyone. This is great info - now I don't know here to start :-)

Seriously, from what I gather from this thread and Heliologue "gnome-audio-player-shootout":
- Amarok and Rhythmbox should be the fastest
- Quod Libet doesn't do transcoding
- Banshee, Exaile, Song Bird are still "beta"
- Audacious: website documentation is a bit lacking, screenshots look a bit intimidating for my wife (she's not a big fan of fb2k minimalism :-)

Guess I'll take the easy path and first take Rhythmbox (Ubuntu's default) for a ride.

Of course it's simple enough to install a few via synaptic and try them all out; none of them take long to set up at all.

I tried more or less the same players as heliologue two days ago and I'm too using amarok at the moment, but for different reasons.
I don't like media libraries at all, it took me several minutes in amarok as well as in quod libed to create a simple playlist that contains all my files.
I find those media libraries unnecessary complicated.
Number one priority for most players seems to to be cover fetching, ipod integration, song voting, lastfm support and similar stuff,
while none of them seems to be able to do replaygain scanning and writing (only very few are able to read replaygain info),
very few are able to transcode files, some have usable tag editing.
So in my opinion the useful features are very rare while there's a lot of stuff I don't need at all.

I use amarok because it seems to be the most complete, it's at least able to read replaygain infos and transcode via third party scripts
and plays back more or less gapless via the xine backend. It's still far from from foobar2k.

If you know of good solutions for replaygaining and transcoding, please let me know.
I'd prefer gui-based solutions for multiple formats over console-based for specific formats.

Does using foobar2000 via Wine count as a solution?

It is a solution for me anyways. I'd love to use a Linux program for tagging and replaygaining, but foobar2000 is just too damn good.

I use MPD as a player though, because I've had problems with foobar2000 skipping when multitasking.

I vote for Listen Audio Player.

Though it will take some extra work to get it installed because you'll have to compile it, Aqualung is another good option. It is particularly good if you are looking for something simple and straightforward. It won't overwhelm your wife with unneeded "features"; just a simple layout and gapless playback. It is uses a library, and supports many formats. It won't transcode for you; I haven't found an acceptable solution for that yet, and unfortunately, it dosen't support replaygain either, but not much in linux does... Good luck, and let us know what you (and your wife) think of the different options.

MPD for gapless LAME playback (without having to compile anything - in the ubuntu repositories) and low memory usage

A minimalist player like Muine or XMMS should be the fastest, certainly not Amarok.
Neither nominally nor really is Banshee a 'beta'. Exaile is 'new' but works absolutely fine. One reason for this is that audio players in Linux all use the same, existing libraries for their main functions. Nobody re-invents the wheel by implementing MP3-decoding from scratch.
Good choice. If your wife doesn't like it you could just install a couple of players and wait which one she ends up using.

Forgive me if I do say that is a very disgusting thought.

I hear really good things about AmaroK, but I haven't had a chance to try it. Mostly because my E-MU 1212m does not work under Linux.

I use and love Banshee

I just compiled Aqualung (my first compile )
It isn't mature imho but it looks promising.
Their Relative Volume Adjustment System irritates me, the prescription quite fits replay gain
but I'm not sure if it's the same.
They have a separate setting for replaygain tags in .ogg and .flac, so I guess RVA is something else.
The 'music store' media library is a bit inconvenient too, but you don't need to use it.
I'm not sure about unicode, it looks like the playlist can handle them while the music store ignores those tracks. I might be wrong on this.

Well, it has some other features too but I didn't try everything yet,
all in all it looks like they are focusing on the imho more important, audio related features.
I definitely keep an eye on Aqualung

Edit: I tried version 0.9beta6 and will try the SVN version as soon as I manage to compile it ^^;

Edit2: There are quite some improvements in the SVN releases (tested R555), building the music store is now possible in different ways, by different file structures and by tags. Tag editing may still be buggy due libtag bugs but I haven't tried it yet. The german translation is still funny, I may offer them some help on this. Anyway, it's very slim compared to amarok and also very usable.

Hi,

New to this forum and wondering if someone might offer some insight on having a media library on a network drive under Ubuntu 9.04. The media library consists of Wavs ripped from CDs - no MP3s or other formats. My network drive appears in the file browser, behaves normally for other purposes and I can play an audio track by right clicking and "Open With" various players but can't get any of them, including Amarok, to import the media library or play a track by selecting from within the media player.

BTW, I DO NOT want to copy the library to the local drive. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a network. I just want the player to know where the files are and play them.

Probably something obvious but I'm new to Ubuntu and still dealing with the ollllde learning curve.

Thanks

Might be on the wrong track here, but is it a Windows share? If it is this works for me: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

Hi,

1st thanks for the input but I guess I'm a little lower on the Ubuntu/Linux food chain than I thought.

Went here
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
and was ok until the "root privileges" part.

Detoured here for instructions >
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

uh, uncanderstand.

By using the file browser to right click and edit with text editor results in not being able to save the file.

Do I invoke the edit /etc/fstab from the terminal window? And will it then prompt me for my user p/w - rather than the "root" password?

TIA

PS, its a stand alone network drive - NOT a drive on a windows computer. It shows up as part of a windows workgroup.

enter in terminal: gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

gksudo = you want to open a graphical program with root privilege. it will prompt for your user password.

gedit = the gnome text editor.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo#Graphical%20sudo