Please recommend a media player for me

[Jiawen]

I want to find a media (music) player that matches my needs. I need one that:

• Is stable. Very important -- I don't want my player to crash out on me, or to crash my system.
• Has intelligible playlist management. I want playlists where I can start a new list, add a bunch of things to it, then save the list. Like XMMS, in other words.
• Can handle UTF-8 characters. I have a lot of music in Chinese, with both GB2312 and Big-5 data. I want to be able to see the Chinese characters any time I look at them (file navigation, playlist view, pop-up if any, etc.), not garbage.
• Can manage a large collection of MP3s. In "manage" I include tag editing and display, and hopefully album covers.
• Allows shuffle and repeat play.
• Isn't a resource hog. This kinda goes along with the "not crashing" thing, but it's important enough to note.

All the players I've tried so far -- Amarok, Banshee, Beep, Exaile, XMMS, VLC, Rhythmbox & Totem -- have failed on one or more of those counts. (I will detail the ways in which they have failed if anyone wants to know.) Does anyone know a player that works on all those counts?

[T-Virus]

Well, I think Amarok is just right for your needs... You can try Songbird if you haven't yet.

http://developer.songbirdnest.com/

[Jiawen]

As I said, Amarok fails several of the tests. It crashes; its playlist management is too complicated for my purposes; and is a resource hog. I seem to remember problems with Chinese characters, too.

Is there a .deb of Songbird anywhere?

[Znort_Ubern00b]

try to download .deb package from here http://www.getdeb.net/app.php?name=songbird

install .deb package using the following command

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

[Jiawen]

Actually, I tried using it from the .zip file, and it worked, but there is apparently no codec available for Songbird to play MP3 files under Linux. So that is a no-go.

Can anyone suggest some other media players that meed my needs?

[L14UX_1NS1D3]

If you want something simple I recommend Rhythembox. It comes preinstalled on ubuntu. personally I use amarok, but I can understand how amarok might give a few hiccups. Rhythembox is will handle playlist creation and will work seamlessly with a MP3 player if you have one. I don't know if it will be able to decode foreign characters. you might be able to install support for other languages.

[4tro]

Actually, I tried using it from the .zip file, and it worked, but there is apparently no codec available for Songbird to play MP3 files under Linux. So that is a no-go.

Can anyone suggest some other media players that meed my needs?

http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/wi...ingUpGStreamer

read this to set up gstreamer, mp3 support in gstreamer is easy =)

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3

[Jiawen]

If you want something simple I recommend Rhythembox. It comes preinstalled on ubuntu. personally I use amarok, but I can understand how amarok might give a few hiccups. Rhythembox is will handle playlist creation and will work seamlessly with a MP3 player if you have one. I don't know if it will be able to decode foreign characters. you might be able to install support for other languages.

As I said, I've already tried Rhythmbox and it doesn't pass my test. (For the record, its handling of Chinese characters is horrible, its playlist management is excessive for my needs and its record album handling is also less than what I want.)

http://publicsvn.songbirdnest.com/wi...ingUpGStreamer

read this to set up gstreamer, mp3 support in gstreamer is easy =)

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3

Thank you for the pointers. I've now got Songbird playing mp3s; I'll try it for a while and see how it works. (First impressions: I'd rather have a GTK interface, and the playlist management is a little cumbersome, but still better than Rhythmbox, Banshee or Amarok. It handles Chinese characters a little strangely -- it seems to alphabetize them both before and after the Latin characters -- but at least it displays them properly.) Thanks again for the help.

[esteckis]

You could also try Exaile.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

Quod Libet is kinda nice, but I won't use any player that doesn't allow me to separate out compilation albums (eg, anything but amarok).

I'm curious about your amarok problems. It never crashes on me, and, though I am on KDE, it's not a resource hog (it caches far more memory than most apps, but that's the way memory management on Linux works). And as far as complicated playlists?

I want playlists where I can start a new list, add a bunch of things to it, then save the list.

Add things to playlist, select all, right-click -> save as playlist. If you've already got one going, just drag 'em into it in the playlists tab. Is that what you were meaning, or were you going about it some utterly complicated way?