Updated: June 03, 2008 (Created May 18, 2008)
Amarok 1.4.9.1
Amarok
is a very widely used player for KDE. Among the many features it ships
with, the notable ones would be a very powerful collection management
system, scripting, Last.fm song submission, Magnatune shop, lyrics,
cover and Wikipedia information fetching, cover manager and statistics.
I must admit I just love this player and I have been using it for two
years now. It’s improving with every version, and, as the official
release announcement says, ‘there are no more bugs in Amarok 1.4; it is
perfect, like a lotus flower.’ It is, indeed, very stable. I think
Amarok is the audio player of choice for an audiophile using Linux, or
at least for one using KDE.
Banshee 0.99.1 (aka Banshee 1.0 Beta 1)
Banshee
is made in GTK and this last version features Last.fm integration,
providing the user with his personal statistics at Last.fm, as well as
recently played songs by neighbours or members of the Last.fm Banshee
group. Other features include music and video library, and plenty of
extensions. The version reviewed here is still a beta one, so there
were some bugs present, however Banshee stands as a pretty good player
for GNOME with a lot of potential.
JuK 2.3.5
JuK
is part of the KDE multimedia package. When JuK first starts, it will
prompt you to select the folder in which your music collection resides,
then it will scan the directory for all the audio files. JuK is a KDE
application, lighter than Amarok, but also more poor in features. ‘top’
shows that JuK uses about half of the amount of memory which Amarok
uses, but this comes, of course, at the expense of features. This light
player can be embedded in system tray and can be successfully used by
persons who don’t really care much about audio collection management or
advanced features. It does a perfect job for its purpose.
Beep Media Player 0.40.14
Beep
Media Player (or BMP for short) used to have an interface similar with
the older XMMS. However this changed, and now BMP features a solid
interface, more appropriate for a player which includes Last.fm support
and a Jamendo music shop. The first impression when I started BMP was
quite a good one. Its interface is simple, clean and intuitive with
category tabs in the left and artists, albums and playlist at the right
side.
Adding audio files to the collection may be a bit
confusing at first, since it is done via the Preferences -> Library
tab. The Preferences dialogue can be found in the BMP menu. BMP became
unresponsive when I hit CTRL+A to select all the available albums in
the collection and I had to kill it. Overall, BMP made me a good
impression, however it has some stability problems. A good player
nevertheless, and a plus is that it is very fast. As for the homepage,
it looks like BMP is only available for download via SourceForge.
Audacious 1.4.6
Audacious
is a GNOME player which resembles XMMS, but using newer GTK libraries.
It features everything XMMS features, like support for Winamp 2.x
skins. Very rich in options, Audacious can be expanded through various
plugins. It’s small and has a different approach than the players using
a collection manager.
Exaile 0.2.11
I
even now remember an immortal thread in UbuntuForums announcing Exaile
when it was a brand new audio player for GNOME, about 2 or maybe 3
years ago. Though I’ve never used it more than 5 minutes, I took it for
a test especially for this review.
It will prompt for the
collection directory as soon as it starts and scan all the files in it.
It has a clean and (almost) ordinary interface, with tabs layout on the
left and playlist on the right of the main window. It features a file
browser and smart playlists, providing automatic playlists for top 100
songs, highest rated, most played and several other categories. The
on-screen-display and built-in Last.fm song submission are also two
features which are not to be neglected. A good player I’d say, which
makes me put it in the same category as Banshee. They look similar, at
least to me. The official website describes it as a player which aims
to be GNOME’s counterpart to Amarok. Although not yet there, Exaile
will definitely evolve into a top audio player for Linux.
Rhythmbox 0.11.5
Rhythmbox
is the official GNOME audio player. It comes as the default audio
player in many distributions, including Ubuntu. It features Jamendo and
Magnatune music stores and organises your music by artist or album. It
also has a comprehensive help system. I found it slower than the other
GNOME players though. A good feature is the ability to download torrent
files from Jamendo and get the whole album freely using a BitTorrent
client. Rhythmbox includes many plugins, including a Last.fm song
submission one.
Listen 0.5
Formerly
promoted under the slogan ‘Lecteur de musique’, Listen is yet another
GNOME player, made in Python. It can fetch album covers from Amazon or
Google Images, has Last.fm support, can retrieve artist, album or song
information from Wikipedia, it can fetch lyrics for the currently
playing song. Listen also benefits from OSD (On-Screen Display) and it
has some handy options like ‘Start minimized’ or the option to watch
the library for modifications. You can also change the colours used to
display the lyrics. Bottom up, Listen easily competes with most of the
other players included in this review.
Quod Libet 1.0
Like
Listen, it’s made in Python using the GTK library. It comes with over
30 configurable plugins, which can turn it into a powerful audio
player, and the Audioscrobbler (now Last.fm) submission is available
via one of the plugins. It automatically detects the cover in the
album’s directory (tested for the name ‘cover.png’) and allows browsing
of the library. Can retrieve lyrics too.
Songbird 0.5
Yes,
another good audio player. The first thing that jumps into attention is
the integrated web browser, which resembles Firefox. It allows you to
enter any web address, making it easy to search the web for song
information or lyrics from within Songbird. This definitely is a big
plus for Songbird. The library looks exactly like the one of Listen’s,
showing artists and albums, and replacing the Genres section with a
Years one, so that you can browse your entire collection by year. You
can choose 1973 for example, and the playlist will automatically show
only the songs released in 1973. Songbird takes advantage of the
integrated browser to include links related to the project, like the
Developer Center or the very useful Report a Bug link. This definitely
makes it easier to easily file a bug report when you encounter
something wrong with Songbird. A great approach, if you ask me. The
idea to use a completely integrated web browser into an audio player
can prove very useful if well done. This, of course, comes at expense
of speed, Songbird being very slow, and this can be observed in the
delay the interface is responding. One more advantage Songbird has is
that you can download the binary from the website, so there’s no need
to compile it, but run it directly.
[Source: http://vivapinkfloyd.blogspot.com/2008/05/10-audio-players-for-linux-review.html]
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