Choosing a Linux Music Player

Everyone loves a good media player. In Userland, managing your music library is more important than kernels, ASLR, ACLs or any of that lame stuff. Thus I see no wrong in going full obsessive-compulsive crazy and Synaptic shopping for a player you'd want to get all snuggly with.

I've been using Banshee since...well, forever, but I went hunting for a potential replacement and ended up trying out 15 programs. Sure I weighed features, style, stability and such things, but I also took a look at their RAM and CPU usage to sort out the "bloated", the "hogs", the "small", the "lightweight" and other such vaguely defined words.

Here I write to you having emerged from Userland with much perspective and I invite you to partake in the snuggliness.

http://www.thesimplecomputer.info/articles/linux-music-players.html

 

tnx for the review m8!

my favorite of the bunch is Audacious.

it's simple.
one of the big point for me is the Extra Stereo plugin.
i set it to 1.5 to give me a little extra widening since i have near-field monitors.

helps a lot.

 

my favourite is Guayadeque and clementine.gonna try Beatbox now.

 

I'm with moontan. Audacious is small, simple, and gives me the best sound. And I set the extra stereo plugin at the same level. Good equalizer too.

 

Thanks for the article, much appreciated.
Banshee is the player I always come back to (boo-hoo for all mono-haters). It's just the gawdawful album cover art pane that's maddening.
One can only have cover art sorted by 'Album Title' instead of the more sane, logical and obvious sorted by 'Album Artist'.
You have to monkey around with a hexeditor for a dirty hack or download the code, edit as below and compile.

The idea that the programmers behind Banshee apparantly have their books at home sorted by title instead of writer is beyond me.

 

i just use Nautilus/Nemo with Cover Thumbnailer.
works good for my needs,

and it allows me the flexibility of using that with any music player.

 

Thanks for the code snippet. Most cover art methods of browsing I saw were like you describe. Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Gmusicbrowser, and Clementine all did the same. That's kinda how cover art browsing 'works' but Beatbox was the exception. It would be nice if the other players had an option to sort by artist.

Correction: Rhythmbox with the cover art plugin sorts by artist name but realtime seeking only works by album title.