Ever since the very first Linux distributions started being developed some of the most popular applications were music players. Over time, hundreds of applications have been developed suiting a variety of needs. Some focused on one single task such as playing CDs and others tried to support as many features as possible. While the number of applications available today have grown even more, I’d like to take a look at a few that I conciser the top.
This heavyweight in the media arena comes from the KDE developers. Considered by many to be the best and sets many standards, it comes highly recommended. With features too numerous to list and more being added constantly, you’re sure to find some very hand uses. Here’s what some of the features include:
- Playing media files in various formats including FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
- Tagging digital music files (currently FLAC, Ogg, WMA, AAC, MP3, and RealMedia).
- Associating cover art with a particular album, and retrieving the cover art from Amazon
- Creating and editing playlists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic playlists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
- Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
- Displaying artist information from Wikipedia and retrieving song lyrics.
- Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
- Podcast
- From version 1.4.4, Amarok introduced the integration of Magnatune, a non-DRM digital music store, enabling users to purchase music in Ogg, FLAC, WAV and MP3 formats.
- I use Amarok mainly for it’s great handling of my iPod files. It transfers files to and from very quickly and handles playlists very admirably. Even though it’s developed specifically for the KDE environment, it still works well within Gnome.
Even though Rhythmbox does not offer as many “bells and whistles” as Amarok, it’s very capable of handling all your music needs. This has become my recent default player for several reasons. First, I use Gnome as my desktop manager of choice. Being included with most Gnome based distributions these days, like Ubuntu, it blends in seamlessly with whatever theme I am currently using for window decoration. If you are using Amarok, you have to just deal with the default blue and white or track down a theme and apply it on your own.
My second reason for liking Rhythmbox so much is the way it automatically scans my collection and updates contents like album covers. I know you can do this in other players like Amarok, but it just seems smoother in Rhythmbox to me. Instead of cramming features into it, the developers seem to have put much time into thinking through what people actually use and when and where to place buttons. Here’s some if Rhythmbox’s features:
- Playback from a variety of digital music sources is supported. The most common playback is music stored locally as files on the computer (the ‘Library’). Rhythmbox supports playing streamed Internet radio and podcasts as well.
- Searching and sorting of music in the library is supported. Playlists may be created to group and order music. Users may also create ’smart playlists,’ ones that are automatically updated (like a database query) based on a customized rule of selection criteria rather than an arbitrary list of tracks. Music may be played back in shuffle (random) mode or repeat mode.
- Track ratings are supported and used by the shuffle mode algorithm to play higher-rated tracks more often.
- Music importing from Audio CD ripping.
- iPod support (experimental)
- Audio CD burning from playlists.
- Album Cover display can display cover art of the currently playing album. However, rather than reading the embedded ID3 tags for album artwork, the plugin searches the internet to find corresponding artwork.
- Song Lyrics display can provide song lyrics of the currently playing song (as long as they are stored in a lyrics database like leoslyrics).
- Last.fm Support. You can submit played songs info to your Last.fm account (known as “scrobbling”). Since release 0.9.7 it can also play Last.fm’s radio streams.
- Jamendo Support. You can browse and play all the Jamendo free (as in freedom) music library.
- Integration as mentioned. Rhythmbox can be easily integrated into the GNOME Panel.
- Rhythmbox has been extensively integrated with a number of external programs, services and devices including:
- Nautilus file manager context-menu integration (off by default in version 0.8.8), “hover mode” playback in Nautilus
- XChat, via an XChat plugin. Rhythmbox XChat Announcer (Perl)
- Pidgin-Rhythmbox automatically updates the Pidgin user profile with details of the currently playing track
- Gajim and Pidgin include options for automatically updating the user status with details of currently playing track[1]
- Music Applet (previously known as the Rhythmbox Applet), a GNOME panel applet that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the panel
- Shuffle, a gDesklet providing an interface for Rhythmbox resembling an iPod Shuffle[citation needed]
- Rhythmlet, another gDesklet that retrieves album art locally or from Amazon.com, has configurable display strings, playback controls, editable ratings and a seek bar
- SideCandyRhythmbox, a gDesklet-based Rhythmbox control and SideCandy display
- Rhythmbox XSLT allows the music library to be viewed as a web page
- Drivel inserts the name of the track Rhythmbox is currently playing into a LiveJournal blog entry
- Rhythmbox Tune Publisher publishes the currently playing Rhythmbox track to Jabber via the User Tune protocol (used by the Jabber World Map)
- Blue Remote allows Rhythmbox to be operated from a Bluetooth-enabled phone
- FoxyTunes, a Mozilla Firefox extension that provides Rhythmbox playback controls from within the web browser
- Plugins for browsing and listening to Creative Commons licensed albums from Jamendo and Magnatune.
Last but certainly not least! Audacious got its roots from the extremely popular XMMS application. XMMS was known for being very lightweight and using very little system resources. Other features that made, and still make, this player stand out is it’s ability to change it’s appearance to almast anything by the use of skins. Customization of this player is almost unlimited due to this and the massive amounts of plug-ins and extras you can add both from XMMS, XMMS2 and WinAmp.
This little player has become my preferred player for splaying internet radio streams and podcasts. Because of its low system resource demand, playing internet audio streams seems to work so much better for me and the buffering happens seamlessly. This is great for those of us on slower internet connections. (Note: as of this post, their website seems to be undergoing reconstruction.)
Here’s some of the features:
- Decoder plugins, which contain the actual codecs used for decoding content.
- Transport plugins, which are lowlevel and implemented by the VFS layer.
- General plugins, which provide user-added services to the player (such as sending tracks with AudioScrobbler)
- Output plugins, which provide the audio system backend of the player.
- Visualization plugins, which provide visualizations based on fast Fourier transforms of the wave data.
- Effect plugins, which provide various sound processing on the decoded audio stream
- Container plugins, which provide support for playlists and other similar structures.
- Lowlevel plugins, which provide miscellaneous services to the player core and are not categorized into any of the other plugins.
Just because I chose these three, doesn’t mean the list stops there. Below are some more popular ones you can try out on your own. Now go to it and happy listening!
