What’s your favorite music player? I quite like JuK for doing things in a slightly more sane way than Amarok 2… (e.g. loading in the entire playlist on startup doesn’t lock the whole application up) and for offering some nice tag/sort options. The undo option makes it feel more like an editor and is quite useful if you tend to make a lot of typo’s.
Under windows I’m quite fond of Quintessential Media Player for its themeablity (somewhere in between winamp classic and the modern one) and because it has very advanced tagging/file naming functions allowing you set up templates for reading tags from the filenames and the other way around… naming files based on their tags.
So what’s your favorite, something as spartan as JuK, something as polished as Amarok 2 or perhaps something basic looking with a minimal footprint such as Audacious?
Being a KDE 4 user ever since I started using linux at the end of last year, I’ve grown to love Amarok. I loved the first version with the customization and ease of use. Plus lyrics fetching and cover fetching! It was like heaven coming from windows. It’s probably because I’ve only used KDE that I’m still sticking with Amarok, even when Amarok 2 came out and everybody was complaining about it (and some still are) I quickly got use to the new interface and now can’t get over it.
My second bet would be with Banshee. Although it’s quite slow on my computer, It’s the only other music application in Linux that can sync up with my cheap chinese-ripoff-of-an-ipod mp4 (amv) player that I have.
I use to boot into Xfce on my older computer with older hardware and I’d use JuK with that because it was fast and easy to use.
I used to like Amarok,& I may return to it. I liked 1.4 it was perfect as a music player,simple easy to use.
But they went off on a tangent with 2 trying to be Songbird I guess.
A simple music player that’s what I like so it’s Audacious for me,followed by VLC, then Songbird.
Same, liked 1.4 (aside from a hotkey bug…) and 2 wasn’t a worthy follow up… till they added the filterbar back in. Then with some customisation (drag everything but the playlist to the side) it’s nearly as good… just no columns.
It’s also why I like JuK, for normal use it’s pretty much the same as Amarok 1.4, with an added sidebar that I set to treeview and find quite useful :).
Ran out of space for options, maximum is 10
Guess I should have replaced one of them with the choice ‘other’
Really, your poll did not include my favorite player, so I went with my 2nd favorite. Kaffiene is my favorite. AmaroK is my second favorite. If amaroK could play videos, then it’d be my favorite. That’s the only thing hold amaroK back imo. I like media players that can do it all. This way I don’t need a player to listen to streaming media, and a player to listen to CD’s, and a player to listen to files on my hard drive, and a player to listen , or connect to my ipod/mp3 device, or…I hope you get the picture by now. To me, that’s crazy. One player that can do it all. Kaffiene doesn’t do ipods/mp3 devices, so that’s a detractor, but only a small one. It does every thing else.
Different people, different uses, different wishes.
I for one hate it when my audio player gets ‘defiled’ by video support. All I want to do is add a whole directory (recursively), hit play and minimize it to tray.
Some kind of search/filter function and global hotkey support and I’m set for the most part.
Leaving out Kaffeine was intentional as it was about audio players, not mediaplayers. Of course some mediaplayers could make fine audioplayers as well so I’m glad you mentioned it.
Amarok used to be my fave but with the sucky amarok 2 I now favor exaile and songbird, sopngbird overall as even though it has it has its fare share of issues I still ike it much better then amarok2.
Amarok is still the best for my tastes in music software. However I still think the new KDE4 interface sucks. Loved the KDE3 version interface, pity they had a total re-design for KDE4. It’s still the best though, I’ve tried Banshee & JuK they just don’t have Amarok’s features.
If you want simplicity try ogg123 from a terminal;)
Interesting to see RhythmBox and JuK both getting only one vote so far. Guess not many are looking for a player other than the one installed.
XMMS and Audacious both only getting one vote as well, did somewhat expect that as due to their minimalistic approach they do tend to be a bit harder to use with big music collections in my opinion.
I will put Amarok and iTunes neck to neck. It is Amarok whenever I listen songs from my personal computer. In office where I have windows I use iTunes.
I tries a few other music players in Linux like Audacious, Banshee and Rythmbox but fell back on Amarok every time.
And I must say, like all of KDE 4, Amarok is also getting better and better in every release…
I’ve tried nearly all so might as well post my findings for informational purposes.
Amarok, JuK
Both excellent for KDE4
Amarok
Looks very polished and has a good looking popup’ish message when the song changes. One annoying thing is that when I load my playlist (8000’ish songs on a NFS share) is that locks up entirely till all songs are loaded which takes like a minute or two.
JuK
Very Amarok 1.4’ish interface which is fine with me. Nice tree menu option that can group by albums/artist/genre… very similiar to what a creative Zen V Plus (media player) has.
Tagging is very easy by being able to edit a column of the selected items in the playlist… adding cover images is quite easy as well.
Loads in my playlist gradually allowing me to start playback once the first batch has been added, LOVE THIS.
Banshee, Rhythmbox, Exaile
All are excellent for Gnome, searching was a wee bit slow in either Rhythmbox or Exaile… can’t remember which.
Songbird
Couldn’t get sound out of it under openSUSE but under windows it was decent, nothing too impressive.
iTunes
This I never used, mainly since I’d rather avoid using apple products and since there is no chance I’ll ever buy an iPod there really isn’t a reason to give it a try.
Winamp
The classic one… well it’s a classic
I however prefer Quintessential Player which is somewhat of a compromise between Winamp classic and the modern one (completely different developer though)
Audacious, XMMS
Both nice players if you’re looking for a linux winamp alternative, quite a few plugins available for Audacious as well.
Instant loading of the entire playlist is nice, though you have to wait a bit for the tags to be used instead of the filename itself… at least playback can be started right away.
Perhaps the most commonly used here is the mythtv interface. Most of our CDs are on the master backend server.
Other than that, personally, I’m as likely to use vlc player as anything, although on (rare these days) occasion, I do use audacity if I want to learn a tune and play along with it.
I’ve never liked Amorak and have cursed when I’ve clicked some file that starts it and find the thing wants to keep running in the background when I close it.
