Linux Music Player

[eelixduppy]

I have tested many music players for linux (on Ubuntu) and I have not found a single one that is close to functioning at the level that itunes functions at. There are two things that I'm looking for...

1) The music player should not scan my music directory at program start up. This is not the case for some, but others ALWAYS have to scan my external HD, where I keep my music. When the music is on my main HD, there seems to be no issue. But when the music is kept on an USB external, it must re-index it before it will play correctly. This is a big problem for me.

2) There must be little to no bugs in basic operations. "Banshee" is the closest to something that works for me, but there are way too many bugs to even care to count. Probably the most noticeable is sorting by Play Count. It increments the play count before it goes onto the next song, so when sorting by play count, the next song is not the same as it was when the song first started playing.


So my question is, what music players, if any, are out there for linux that are even close to meeting these needs? Or which one do you use?

I am considering taking one of these open source projects and just coding my own music player, that's how annoyed I am at this whole ordeal.

[graeme_p]

The most popular is Amarok. I used to use it, it was OK, and some people love it.

I now use Quod Libet. Its the best for classical music, has a UI I like, and keeps changes to info in the music files, not in its own DB (so if you copy some files elsewhere your corrections are copied too).

I do now know how any player behaves with regard to your first criterion, but neither of these have any bugs that I find annoying (I think there are some in Amarok's handing of podcasts, but its a while since I used it), but I am not a heavy or sophisticated user of music players.

The problem with an external HD, is that the player has no guarantee that it is the same external HD each time, so rescanning sounds like the right thing to do.

I do not think you need code your own: a patch to fix the rescan behaviour a better way (say recording disk labels and checking them first) would probably be accepted - even just a feature request might be, if you explain your use case for it.

[eelixduppy]

>> so rescanning sounds like the right thing to do

This is costly procedure if there are thousands of songs to index. If I mount the device the same way every time, then IMO it shouldn't have to reindex anything.

[surrealillusions]

I use audacious music player. Its like a winamp clone for linux - looks and performs in a similiar way which is good for me as i used winamp alot before i switched over to linux.

It doesn't scan your drive, although you do have to manually enter each song you want into it, although if you do it once, save it as a playlist, and if you need to reinstall or it loses it, then simply load up the playlist.

:)

[caribguy]

Have you looked at Rhythmbox? It comes pre-installed with Gnome.

[graeme_p]

@eelixduppy, what happens if you have two external HDs with different music on each?

If you have the space, then syncing the external hd with the internal one (e.g, using , instead of playing directly off the external would solve the problem.

Otherwise the best alternative would be to just use whatever rescans fastest (if there are differences).

You should also definitely request this as an enhancement for the best of the music players you have tried - if they devs know you want it, then they might add it. If you can submit the code to fix it, so much the better.