What Music Player Do You Use?

[Zorian144]

Which music player do you use? I for one, use Rhythmbox as it supports my keyboard shortcuts.

[phishie]

mplayer!

[bowens44]

Amarok 1.4

[The Funkbomb]

banshee

[LP3]

amarok, and rythmbox

[steve161]

Right now it is Audacious and exaile. I like the ability to simpy drag and drop files from my music folder. Audacious also has an equalizer and some plugins that make the sound out of my tiny, cheap laptop speakers passable.

[spillin_dylan]

Started with Rhythmbox in 8.10, switched to Banshee when I got a new laptop and put 9.04 on it. Still working on getting all my song ratings back, though... :(

[pwnst*r]

foobar

[Zorian144]

Hmm, I've been hearing good things about Banshee. I'll download it and give it a go!

[dragos240]

mplayer!

Same mplayer. Love it. :D

[kk0sse54]

mpd/ncmpcpp

[hoppipolla]

Amarok :)

I also like Banshee and Exaile :)

[Roasted]

Exaile.

I like my music player to look at my music "as is" in my music folder. I fricken hate it when programs try to organize my music based on ID tags and all of that BS. It always turns into a mess unless you reset all of the ID tags yourself, and uh - no thanks.

I used to be a big fan of Amarok since Amarok did this, but after the new release of Amarok was a let-down, I switched to Exaile - Which I love.

[Zorian144]

Before I installed Ubuntu, I found all my music info and cover art ect, so all my limewire downloaded music is nicely organized.

[RPG Master]

I love Songbird and all of its add-ons! :D

And I use VLC for listening to random files.

[Greg]

mpd+ncmpcpp.

One of the two programs (well, in this case it's a pair) that I'm a fanboy of.

[amazingtaters]

Banshee!

[natedawg]

On Ubuntu is use Rhythmbox. On Windows I use Songbird

[virusiidx]

banshee

[Dekkon]

banshee

Songbird so far, but I am need of something different but the addons are nice. :P

[bonfire89]

I think after trying all the players listed so far I have finally decided on songbird... (This has been a very big process for me) heh

[Veteropinguis]

Quod Libet here, simply because it plays nice in GNOME without any tweaking and has a composer field.

I don't understand why, in an OS as customizable as Ubuntu, you can't have a composer field in Rhythmbox.

[bigbrovar]

mpd+sonata+mpdscribble Seriously There is nothing better when it comes to music management. lite, simple, gets out of your face, flexible, yet powerful ... very POWERFUL

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2616/4097733508_7854abe52a_d.jpg


http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2773/4097742934_c550e900df_d.jpg

[bigbrovar]

Quod Libet here, simply because it plays nice in GNOME without any tweaking and has a composer field.

I don't understand why, in an OS as customizable as Ubuntu, you can't have a composer field in Rhythmbox.

Because not everyone needs it. And does who do can always install Quod Libet

[Ms_Angel_D]

I use the latest Amarok that came with Kubuntu it suits me fine.

[cariboo]

I use a combination of mpg321/randomplay

[gnomeuser]

I am very happy with Banshee.

[murderslastcrow]

Me, too- Banshee does everything I want it to. Great with everything I've thrown at it, not too heavy, and constantly improving. Banshee should be funded by the Gnome crew XD.

But really, I think Banshee deserves a bit more attention. The others aren't bad, of course, but I've never really felt that good when using them.

[Ampi]

If it hasn't been a year than it has been more to make me finally decide a music player. What a horrible process :)

I have been with Amarok a couple of months and I quite liked it but not enough so I kept on looking.
Now I am stuck with Songbird and as for now I do not feel the need in looking. It does pretty much everything I need except for scrobbling stream radio in last.fm, but I think many players don't yet. Songbird has this feature in their todo list.
For the rest I like it very much!

Wouldn't it be a good idea to make a poll out of this?
That you can give a first and second choice or something similar. That would give a nice overview/summary of this entire thread..

[la3r]

I use Audacious. What I want in my music player is a playlist, a repeat button and the ability to stream a single netradio... That's it lol, so things like songbird, rhytmbox and amarok are all way too boated for my taste :popcorn:

[Mornedhel]

MPD with the Emacs EMMS frontend.

That's right, Emacs is my music player.

[Tibuda]

MPD with the Emacs EMMS frontend.

That's right, Emacs is my music player.

No, Emacs is your operating system.

EDIT: On topic, I use QuodLibet.

[pwnst*r]

=]

http://i38.tinypic.com/egvl8j.png

[Pott]

Gmusicbrowser. I can control it through my media keys and everything works pretty well. It's got some issues reading album arts embedded in tags it seems (puts the same random Dylan best off cover on some albums :s) but otherwise it's all good.

Only thing I wish it had was Conky support. It does but I'm too much of a n00b to have understood the instructions :(

All 9,000 songs on my library are tagged, cover arted etc... so it was all a matter of scanning and everything fell right into place. Fast scanning too.
You can also really customize the screen. I like to have the entire library to the left and the now playing to the right (I don't use playlists, I just shuffle through all my stuff).

I tried MPD but it didn't work when I tried telling it my library location for some reason... Wish it had, it's supported by Conky and seems quite nice to use.

[nothingspecial]

Banshee for the family collection of ipods.

mplayer for random files and radio streams

cmus for music library playing

squeezecenter for actually listening to music. I don`t listen to music on my computer often. I`d rather have it through my stereo, controlled by my computer

[nothingspecial]

After reading this thread, I am experimenting with mpd/sonata.

What an excellent, lightweight piece of kit this is.

Next travels are to the cli clients.

Although cmus just works for me and I can control it without thinking.

Huh, that`s the flippin` trouble with linux ..... TOO much choice.

[RiceMonster]

I use Amarok 2. In Windows, nothing beats foobar2000.

[proxess]

Exaile for my collection.
Audacious for gtkpod and Tunapie.

[kio_http]

Amarok
Where's the poll?

[docus]

I've tried a few - Rhythmbox (very solid), Listen, Songbird, Audacious, Exaile, Quod Libet, Banshee... And probably some others I've forgotten. I'm sticking with Banshee for now. It's a great app - smooth, clear, and works perfectly for me... Or, to be precise, it USUALLY works perfectly - since I moved to 9.10 it doesn't recognise my ipod anymore...

I may give Listen another go in a while - it seemed on track to be a great player, but it just had a few small bugs that marred things for me. Also, I'm sure that in a year or so Songbird will be a force to be reckoned with.

All in all, choice is great and I don't miss iTunes at all!

[Zorian144]

Alright, I added a poll :)

[Cuddles McKitten]

No one else just uses Totem?

[Zorian144]

Isn't Totem mainly a movie player?

[anaconda]

Totem

[JillSwift]

mpd ftw

[koleoptero]

I have been using cmus for some time now and I don't see myself going for a glittery clumsy nonresponsive GUI player. In cmus I think about going to the next track and it goes. lol

[Simian Man]

I've tried a few - Rhythmbox (very solid), Listen, Songbird, Audacious, Exaile, Quod Libet, Banshee... And probably some others I've forgotten. I'm sticking with Banshee for now. It's a great app - smooth, clear, and works perfectly for me... Or, to be precise, it USUALLY works perfectly - since I moved to 9.10 it doesn't recognise my ipod anymore...

Yeah Banshee's iPod support is broken to the deprecation of HAL. That, and a few other iPod bugs even when it did work, keep me on Rhythmbox instead. Rhythmbox is great, but not quite as sexy as Banshee :(.

[MasterNetra]

Mostly use Rhythmbox, though I have played with banshee, its not replacing my Rhythmbox anytime soon. Also have used mplayer for music. ^.^

[Ex0suit]

Which music player do you use? I for one, use Rhythmbox as it supports my keyboard shortcuts.

rhythmbox

[Groucho Marxist]

I use Rythmbox and Songbird

[automaton26]

A great set of choices in the poll there...
...because, ATM, "Other" is the most popular :)

I still use JuK, because it's simple and my collection is already organized.

[Mornedhel]

ATM, "Other" is the most popular

Clearly, that's because of the immense superiority of mpd.

(Seriously, mpd rules.)

[hard_i]

mpd + sonata

[Barrucadu]

MPD+ncmpcpp

[harlan]

I use mpd + gmpc (http://gmpc.wikia.com/wiki/GMPC_SCREENSHOST) as client.

[Chame_Wizard]

Juk and VLC.:guitar:

[rattasongw]

i use juK.but juK has a bad habit.sometimes it will stretch itself vertically when there is a long title/artist name.does anybody knows how to remove that area (under progress track,above search bar).thanks

[gn2]

Other: Atunes (http://www.atunes.org/).

[Sunflower1970]

Since Amarok is now at the 2.x version...and I hate it (I've tried it, and it pretty much locks up my computer when I try to update my music and cover art), I've been looking around. Tried Songbird, but it feels just too bloated, and doesn't do an update to my collection when I have new music. Also tried Listen, Banshee, Rhythmbox, but they all just are missing some of the features I liked in Amarok 1.4. Exaile is the closest, but it's still missing some features I liked in Amarok.

So. for the moment I've reinstalled Amarok 1.4, and am praying someone forked it and will maintain it. (maybe add back in the option to update album covers instead of manually finding them and adding them in...I've thought about it, but I'm not savvy enough to be able to look at the code and change it myself) I'm also using Quod Liebet and Exaile--sometimes.

[BrokenKingpin]

Rhytmbox here, but I want to try Banshee as I have heard good things.

[Zorian144]

Glad to see all the posts! :)

[legolas_w]

I use Songbird.

[Wild_Duck66]

Kaffeine

[lordyosch]

banshee cos it can sync to my android phone

[SuperSonic4]

Amarok and Dolphin

(the latter for playing single tracks)

[jomiolto]

MOC. It's a nifty little audio player :)

[super breadfish]

MOC. It's a nifty little audio player :)

I've been using MOC lately too, it's very good.

I like cplay too, very simple to use.

[devehf]

banshee cos it can sync to my android phone

Very cool to know!

Anyone else syncing to Droid?

What's the best DAAP support? Amarok or Songbird? I want to set up a digital music library server for our community radio station that DJs can tap into.

[kaivalagi]

Now running Arch and have switched to using MPD again...did use xmms2 for a while way back, then a multitude of "normal" players, but I really like these daemon based music players

I use Sonata as a front end...for now :)

And ya gotta love Alive in Chains ;)

[Yvan300]

I use songbird at the moment in kde, i just hate amaorak.

[Roasted]

I like Exaile. It's the only player I've found that just views my music in its current format in my music folder. I hate it when players force you to sort by ID tag, because ID tags aren't always in the format you want, and I don't care to change ID tags + names as it is. So, Exaile wins.

[Regenweald]

Audacious, my sis prefers it, that's what I'll use. I like exaile, but its performance in recent times has been less than stellar. Back to basics for me :) drag'n'drop playlists...

[Uncle Spellbinder]

I like Exaile. It's the only player I've found that just views my music in its current format in my music folder. I hate it when players force you to sort by ID tag, because ID tags aren't always in the format you want, and I don't care to change ID tags + names as it is. So, Exaile wins.

+1

Exaile, in my opinion, is the best. The ability to add more than 1 folder is ace. Plus scanning large collections quickly is a major plus!
Amarok took nearly 11 hours to scan my collection while Exaile took all of 40 minutes. And it's a VERY large collection:

http://content.imagesocket.com/images/Exaile8cc.png (http://imagesocket.com/view/Exaile8cc.png)

[Marvin666]

I've always used vlc.

[kaivalagi]

I've always used vlc.

Always liked vlc for video, I'll have to give it a whirl for music...

Any customisation possible to provide a music player style GUI with cover art etc?

[Psumi]

totem, because I need the "repeat one track forever" and the "replace playlist with opened files" features.

Parole has these two features as well (as options.)

[koleoptero]

+1

Exaile, in my opinion, is the best. The ability to add more than 1 folder is ace. Plus scanning large collections quickly is a major plus!
Amarok took nearly 11 hours to scan my collection while Exaile took all of 40 minutes. And it's a VERY large collection:

How much RAM does it take up with that collection?

[Hetor]

Why isn't MPD included?

[hessiess]

Cmus, its one of the few that can be controlled easily with the keyboard.

[oldos2er]

I've always used vlc.

I used to use Exaile, but since the devs dropped its equalizer, I now use vlc too.

[ratcheer]

I use Rhythmbox because it lets me rip CD's.

Tim

[baizon]

Of course old style Audacious :)

[murderslastcrow]

Wow. I'm impressed that less people use Banshee. I suspect this is changing, though, although Rhythmbox is certainly a good music application. I just can't bring myself to use it. Lol.

[wewantutopia]

Armarok 1.4!!

[Raffles10]

Ncmpcpp + MPD.

If I want to download album covers.......Sonata.

[Megrimn]

I have a PPA for the old amarok 1.4.

[anonSam]

Audacious. Very happy with it.

[baddog144]

MPD + ncmpcpp. I love it, have keyboard shortcuts set up with xbindkeys and mpc. :D

[befana]

On Gnome- Exaile, on KDE - Amarok.

[Isengrin]

MPD with Sonata and mpc for my media keys.

[scouser73]

Songbird FTW

[ctrlmd]

Banshee/Rhythmbox/Exaile
Mainly Banshee and hoping for something that has great GUI
Banshee have great functions but need new gui

[HappinessNow]

Pandora one...not a "music player" but Pandora One makes the need for music players obsolete.

[HappinessNow]

Pandora one...not a "music player" but Pandora One makes the need for music players obsolete.http://ubuntuforums.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=139801&d=1260777493

[Exodist]

Banshee on Linux.
WMP on Windows.

[HappinessNow]

WMP on Windows.
ever try J.River Media Jukebox on Windows?

[Exodist]

ever try J.River Media Jukebox on Windows?
Not sure, It sounds very familiar. How long has it been out? I havent used windows up until the past week or so in over a year or so. I just got in on my PC now because of having to go back to college to get a job.. /cry :(

[HappinessNow]

Not sure, It sounds very familiar. How long has it been out? I havent used windows up until the past week or so in over a year or so. I just got in on my PC now because of having to go back to college to get a job.. /cry :(
Not sure how long it has been out but it is pretty good and free.

[Grifulkin]

mpd+ario.

[DeRRudi]

MPD with Sonata! :guitar:8)

[x33a]

I used to use amarok before, then finally settled on cmus.

[fancypiper]

VLC-1.0.4 does a great job for me

My choice for playing my local music files is Audacious2 (I miss the old xmms).

I have tried other players (exaile, banshee, rhythmbox), but they have very long launch/loading times and these two do the job and do it well indeed.

[Isengrin]

I used to use amarok before, then finally settled on cmus.

I love cmus. If I just could daemonize it, I'd say good by to MPD.

[x33a]

I love cmus. If I just could daemonize it, I'd say good by to MPD.

If you want to daemonize it, you could try using screen. though, it's more of a hack than actual daemonization.

[Marvin666]

Might as well add, my dad runs windows and swears by winamp.

[Uncle Spellbinder]

How much RAM does it take up with that collection?

Not a big foorprint at all. Though it does take 10 to 15 seconds to start up. At nearly 140,000 files, that's no surprise. But once started, it's gold.

[darkksyde]

Winamp for windows, Banshee for linux

[techguy615]

Rhythmbox. I like the features of Banshee and wish I could go to it, but the bottom line is that it is slower than Rhythmbox on loading my library at startup. Also, the Ipod support for my 120g classic is shoddy at best. I wish they would fix it.

[fancypiper]

I just discovered Miro (http://www.getmiro.com/). It's awesome!

[plurworldinc]

Songbird:guitar:

[Isengrin]

If you want to daemonize it, you could try using screen. though, it's more of a hack than actual daemonization.


Just a question, would I be able to control it while 'daemonized'?

[calrogman]

I use moc.

[RPG Master]

Songbird 8)

[Greg]

Just a question, would I be able to control it while 'daemonized'?

It would be a running process. screen -xr reattaches to the screen session and returns you to the process. And if there's any external type commands (a la assign a keybind to pause) all that would work.

[Crunchy the Headcrab]

Rhythmbox. At first the simplicity bothered me, then I found out it was exactly what I want.

[mytwobears]

Exaile, Audacious, and Rythmbox.

[julianb]

I am most accustomed to iTunes (on mac and on windows) and Windows Media Player (on windows)!

(I love linux but i haven't spent much time on it lately except to learn compiling & configuring stuff.)

[alexfish]

Xine and Rythmbox.

[Isengrin]

It would be a running process. screen -xr reattaches to the screen session and returns you to the process. And if there's any external type commands (a la assign a keybind to pause) all that would work.

Thank you, I'll start experimenting. : D

[suman_kol]

vlc.

[joes7]

itunes (with wine, of course)

[(Corndog)]

Songbird, I love it :)

[scouser73]

I'd like to change my vote, I ticked Other as I used Songbird but it was slow especially with the new release and it was doing my head in, so instead of reverting back to Rhythmbox I have picked Exaile as the music player of choice. Bloody good it is too!

[hellion0]

Xmms and cplay.

[coober85]

I tried song bird, too complex (looking). I don't need a music player thats also a browser...

Same deal with amorok. there's just too much going on, too many options that I never use, plus it doesn't look all that nice in GNOME (if that's your only KDE program).

Rhythymbox came installed with Linux Mint 8 but I just like the look of banshee a tiny bit more.

I've been using banshee for almost 2 years now, and I was considering Rhythmbox (basically the same program) because of two slightly annoying things on banshee:

Sometimes, when I try to start playing a podcast when it's not all the way downloaded (maybe like 75% done) it full on crashes. I mean the whole program goes away like I closed it. I have to start it up and wait for it to download completely, then try it, and then it works with no problems.

the Scroller on Banshee is always really small, roughly an inch and a half on my 22" screen. It's hard to pinpoint the exact point you want to scroll to on long songs (smallest increments are 2min skips in some cases).

Like I said, not a big deal, but if Banshee has some huge flaw over RBox I don't know about (and fixes my two pet-peeves about Banshee) I'm switching.

Why RBox over Banshee guys?

also I'm getting an Unlocked HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1) in a few days and wanted to know if there were any syncing issues w/ Banshee or R.Box (or I know both will work, are there any advantages one has over the other... like lay-out.

I'm so psyched 'cause I got an iPod Touch (it was free) last year, and I've been having to sync it through Itunes via Windows XP via VirtualBox - which worked fine, but was a huge pain to go through. G1 = Android 1.6 = Linux based = awesomeness = happiness

[Zoot7]

Banshee because it's the only player I've found for Linux that has a good equalizer.
Used to like Exaile and before that Amarok, but because of the removal of the equalizer in the latest versions I abandoned them.

[Mark76]

Decibel Audio Player.

Two reasons

1: It plays the songs on an album in the exact order they're in. Regardless of whether they're ripped or still on a CD.

2: Playing a CD is as easy as changing the explorer from File Explorer to Audio CD. Just remember to activate the Audio CD option and set the path to your CD player in Preferences. Which is a lot less hoops to jump through than I've experienced with other so-called "full featured" players.

[nelson2006]

Audacious!

[chucky chuckaluck]

cplay for the collection and mplayer for streams.

[knavarathna92]

songbird of course.

[Roasted]

I don't know. I'm reeeeeeeeally digging Amarok... been using that lately. Before that I was on Exaile. I only like media players that look at my music folder "as is." I hate it when they sort by ID tags.

[MooPi]

Promoe, a simple straightforward music client based on xmms2. It doesn't try to sync, combine, alter or sort my music collection. That's my job.

[chucky chuckaluck]

whoa! i didn't know vlc had an ncurses interface (vlc -I ncurses, h for help).

[ve4cib]

I'm typically a Rhythmbox user, but I decided a while ago to try Banshee out since I've been hearing good things about it. Banshee's got its nice features, but Rhythmbox feels more polished. Especially on the UI front.

What's with all the wasted space at the top of the window in Banshee? And that tiny, nigh-useless seek bar. And why do I need to open up gconf-editor to set a custom library folder format? If your application is going to support custom formats add a "custom" option to the menu.

But since most of the time my music player stays hidden in the tray I don't really see the UI all that often. And Banshee's icon in Gnome-Colors is much nicer to look at then Rhythmbox's. And both applications seem to play music and deal with my multimedia keyboard without extra configuration, so I can't complain too much about that front.


EDIT:

I forgot to mention that I also went through an Amarok phase for about a year. The only reason I switched back to Rhythmbox was because... well, no good reason, really. I just got lazy and didn't bother uninstalling it and re-installing Amarok. Amarok under Gnome had some minor annoyances, especially with multimedia keys. Nothing serious, and there were easy work-arounds, but not a smooth out-of-the-box feeling like Banshee or Rhythmbox.

I will say that in terms of features and layout customization Amarok is definitely the best of the three iTunes-style media players I've used. And if I was a KDE user I would definitely be using Amarok full-time.

On lightweight systems (like my 2GB "thumbuntu" USB stick installation) I like Audacious. It's got a nice interface, and it does what one would expect of it: it plays music. No real bells and whistles, but it works.

[x33a]

whoa! i didn't know vlc had an ncurses interface (vlc -I ncurses, h for help).
or nvlc.

[3Miro]

I use Gnome and XFCE most of the time, then I use Rhythmbox. When I use KDE (less often) I use Amarok. I voted Amarok.

[grumpthehermit]

Surprised to only see 3 people saying they use moc / mocp

Music on console is awesome, runs in terminal, it's simple, can create and save playlists, can play my samba shared music, can run in the background while I continue to use terminal.

I searched for ages trying to find a player that was simple, that would display my music as a directory tree and not take over everything.

I used Rhythmbox for ages because I needed a player than can play my samba shared music but I always hated the way I felt it it took over my music collection and then told me I had errors if a file was removed or deleted or moved into a different folder.

I still use Rhythmbox for ripping all my cd's to ogg's but after that it's straight into moc.

Cheers
Simon

;)

[mamamia88]

rhytmbox on ubuntu itunes on windows

[Nuzair]

rythmbox :KS:KS:KS:KS:KS

[GreyShadow]

Xmms on Linux and Songbird on the windows partition

[Rodney9]

Vlc

[boriskarloffinablender]

amarok.

[yester64]

I removed Banshee. Nice player but it did not allow me to scan more than one main folder. Once you play from more then one main folder, it moves the folders into the mainfolder. :(

I use Quod Libed now. Good player with a lot of plugins. Lightwave and simple. Is in the repositories.

[yekibud]

Just switched from Rythmbox to mpd + gmpc. How the heck is my wife supposed to pause or change the music when she logs in? You need a client/server audio player for that, as far as I can tell.

My only complaint is that it doesn't seem to be a straight-forward set-up on Ubuntu. So, unfortunately, if I did a clean install of the next Ubuntu version, I couldn't just tell my wife "hey, go get GMPC from the Ubuntu Software Center and we're all set for music." She would have to text edit the conf file, add our music directory, add the mpd group, chown the mpd user to our music directory, and restart the mpd daemon from /etc/init.d - and then I think it would work..

[quazi]

Gmusicbrowser. I can control it through my media keys and everything works pretty well. It's got some issues reading album arts embedded in tags it seems (puts the same random Dylan best off cover on some albums :s) but otherwise it's all good.

Only thing I wish it had was Conky support. It does but I'm too much of a n00b to have understood the instructions :(

All 9,000 songs on my library are tagged, cover arted etc... so it was all a matter of scanning and everything fell right into place. Fast scanning too.
You can also really customize the screen. I like to have the entire library to the left and the now playing to the right (I don't use playlists, I just shuffle through all my stuff).

I tried MPD but it didn't work when I tried telling it my library location for some reason... Wish it had, it's supported by Conky and seems quite nice to use.

I'm going to have to second gmusicbrowser. It's far and away the best GTK music player I've tried, but I'd advise to stay away from the repository version. The most recent development version (http://gmusicbrowser.org/devel.html) seems really stable despite some issues with album art. In my eyes there's simply no contest with the other music players.

[Ginsly]

Other (XMMS2 and Aqualung cos I can't live without gapless playback.....)

[super breadfish]

I've been trying out Decibel out for a few weeks now and it's great.

[MooPi]

I've been trying out Decibel out for a few weeks now and it's great.
If you like Decibel you'll like "Promoe". Nice clone of WinAmp and very light on resources. It just plays music which is all I require and not some all encompassing media player.

[chris4585]

I use Quod Libet 100%.

[blithen]

Cmus all the way.

[yekibud]

Switched from mpd + gmpc to mpd + sonata. Sonata was the only mpd client that would highlight the currently playing song in the playlist! Problem was, it wouldn't start multiple instances - so I was stuck with GMPC and Gimmix. But streams didn't work for me out-of-the-box with GMPC and Gimmix, so I decided to finally go with Sonata, and run it as different users when I need new instances.

In any case, I don't understand why people use applications like Rhythmbox. Sure, if you've just got one machine, it's okay - but it's not scalable for multiple users/machines. MPD + x-client is the only way to go, in my book.

[Roasted]

Just tried out Audacious2. Fricken loving it.

[ikt]

Songbird, was audacious2 before something happened and now it won't open :(

[sideaway]

Tried Many. Amarok 1.4 aaaaaall the way.

[scouser73]

I've gone back to basics and am using Rhythmbox again, infact I should never have changed.

[rudihawk]

Rythmbox - tried all the others. Nothing beats the simplicity of rhythmbox for me. I want a nice GUI player, that is simple and easy to use. I don't care about album art etc.

[nothingspecial]

I have switched full time to guayadeque (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8772188&postcount=1) - check it out and help develop it by testing.

[Uncle Spellbinder]

I have switched full time to guayadeque (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8772188&postcount=1) - check it out and help develop it by testing.
Same here. Having used many a player since coming to Ubuntu 5 years ago, Guayadeque is proving to be the best I've used to date.
And being in development is not a hassle in any way as I am having a blast (as are others) testing (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1380811) Guayadeque.

[Techsnap]

I use VLC.

[Странник]

I am really happy with Rhythmbox.
actually I like Exaile too, however I got used to the interface of rhythmbox

[mister_k81]

Right now: Guayadeque (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1398128) is my current favorite music player.

[purgatori]

I can't belive mpd+n/mpc/pp isn't up there. That's what I use, by the way :P

[seeker5528]

In any case, I don't understand why people use applications like Rhythmbox. Sure, if you've just got one machine, it's okay - but it's not scalable for multiple users/machines. MPD + x-client is the only way to go, in my book.

How do you define 'not scalable'?

http://coherence.beebits.net/wiki/RhythmBox

Sure there are situations where MPD shines and would be preferred, but I expect more commonly people would want some kind of DLNA support in their player of choice for sharing and accessing shared music.

If you don't use a player with built in support Rygel (http://live.gnome.org/Rygel), Mediatomb (http://mediatomb.cc/), and djmount (http://djmount.sourceforge.net/) have their attractions.

Some of the HD TVs have DLNA support built in, not to mention the many media boxes you can get to hook to your TV if the TV doesn't include it or you want something more flexible/feature rich than the TV provides.

MythTV can share content to DLNA clients, XBMC can serve and consume content with DLNA.

Later, Seeker

[MacJack]

I use

on MacPro - VLC - and iTunes about once a month. tho there's a whole lot going on in iTunes lol

on Kubuntu - VLC

I tried XFCE some years ago and very much liked Quod Libet.

[no2498]

i use the 1 aol uses wife sent it to me clicked it it come on ok fine on 804 this box and on 910 on a dell 6400

[Ozitraveller]

I don't use a music player.

[Daisuke_Aramaki]

mpd+ncmpcpp of course.

[bededog]

I use Amarok 2, it has improved a lot. I like how you manage music in Amarok, I don't feel right using other players now.

[yekibud]

@seeker5528:

Thanks for the tips - I'll look into coherence and DLNA. I can't tell off the bat if that will allow me to connect to a central media server from two Rythmbox clients - and I don't think it will solve the problem of starting two clients on different screens in the same user session (which GMPC and Gimmix can do).

If I can get Rythmbox to behave like MPD/Sonata then I'll switch to it for it's richer GUI/features.

[Roasted]

Been using Audacious2 lately.

Sleek, small, does the job, no BS.

[khelben1979]

I use mpg123 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpg123) for mp3:s and Songbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29) for radio stations.

[saif_held]

Banshee

[rimshot4]

Mplayer caused my laptop to hang about five to fifteen seconds whenever I used the keyboard volume controls. Banshee doesn't have that problem, and I find it prettier.

[kelvin spratt]

I use Atunes it does it all except tranfer to ipod syncs perfect with my mp5 player also use it on win7. If want to rip CD with Ubuntu you have to check the wiki bugs bottom line, directs you to a work around it says icedax is broken in Ubuntu the work around certainly works with Mint Linux, Not as well as in Arch/win7 but not bad.

[Grifulkin]

mpd+ ncmpcpp or ario or gmpc, whatever I feel like, I like gmpc because it works with my media keys.

[yekibud]

@seeker5528: DLNA just enables music sharing between devices/applications. I don't see how this is much better than having clients that can read shared music directories.

So I'm sticking with MPD+Sonata so that I can control music from any computer/screen in my house. Now I just have to figure out how that music player set-up can integrate control with a Boxee media center...

[arnab_das]

atunes looks really good. is it open source (coz i want to try it out and its not in the repos)?

has youtube integration. that seems awesome!

[VastOne]

Guayadeque - G-Que

Great out of the blocks with a hands on developer

And it improves hourly - literally

svn and PPA available

I have wiped out any other player I have used since latching on to this playa

[HalfWord]

I use Audacious. I follow a tradition of using Winamp, then XMMS 1 and this is a logical continuation. I like that kind of light, no-fuss, audio only players with a similar layout.

[teKro]

Songbird
I've been using for a while on Windows and tried it on Ubuntu and works just as fine. Plugins are great, it's easy to install themes, and automatically adds any music I add to my music folder in the library. The only thing that is bugging me at the moment is that the iPod plugin doesn't work with the current version.

[n0dix]

Mpd + ncmpcpp. FTW!!!

[Lunx]

Mostly VLC, occasionally mplayer, rarely rhythmbox.

As a uni student, I also have a heap of audio lectures to listen to, and I have found Miro to be a good way of handling them, 'coz I can keep them together with a heap of video lectures I need as well.

[Arkitekt]

Songbird and XBMC

[Khakilang]

The vote is over. But I would have vote for Rhythm Box anyway.

[DubyBreaks]

After a test drive through the seemingly endless array of media players available, I was most satisfied w/ Banshee and have been using it for about 4 months. It is also the one I voted for, however I am currently giving Guayadeque a test run for a while. I have to admit like it alot, It is quickly winning me over. Love the layout, Loaded my fairly large collection rather fast, lightweight, Has great potential.

[Henry Flower]

GMPC/MPD, supplemented by Audacious for when MPD is having gremlins. Most of the music players available for Linux are thoroughly mediocre clones of iTunes: bloated and inflexible. These two are honourable exceptions.

[mojo2012]

On Mac OS X I use Songbird with Gonzon Kreeger Edition to make it look native.
On Ubuntu I use Rhythmbox most of the time because it looks native and it is supported by Gnome Globalmenu (menu in the top panel). I'm unhappy with the lyrics plugin though. I'd really like to use Songbird because of the better lyrics plugin but it just looks so ugly, regardless of which feather is used.

[futz]

Amarok 1.4
Yup. I've tried em all and nothing is as good as Amarok 1.4 for HUGE collections of psychedelic trance.

Amarok 2 is probably fine for other music, but it sucks for my collection.

[Vignesh S]

Songbird FTW :D

But I might end up going back to Rhythmbox in 10.04 after having a bit of a play around with it in Alpha 3 :).

[KyoShibamura]

Is there any music playing for linux ubuntu 9.10 that will be able to sync an iPod Nano 5G?

[Paqman]

Poll needs multiple choice!

I use Banshee on my desktop, but it's a bit heavyweight for my netbook, so I use Rhythmbox on that.

[Cope57]

Qmmp

[alexandari]

AmaroK ever since I started using linux.

[andrek]

Spotify

[kevin11951]

Banshee is the best ever!!! IMHO

I love its video library feature, although I really wish it was more like iTunes (video thumbnails instead of text lists)

[nothingspecial]

Is there any music playing for linux ubuntu 9.10 that will be able to sync an iPod Nano 5G?

See here (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8886333&postcount=229)

[RabbitWho]

The only ones I've tried are Amorak, Rythmbox and Listen (because they're the defaults with each Ubuntu flavor), but listen is by far my favorite, handsome lay out, and I assume because it came with XFCE it's light, which is cool because it does everything I could want it to.

Is banshee Irish? Bean=woman sí=fairy

[cokicd]

gmusicbrowser rules :)

[Baneblade]

Another vote for Banshee here.

[SilverDrake11]

I've tried Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Exaile. The only one I've been fully satisfied with is Exaile.

[tjwoosta]

ncmpcpp

[t0p]

From the poll, I chose "Rhytmbox". LOL! But, as is often the case, reality is a bit more complicated.

If I want to play a single audio file, I will right-click on it and select to open it with Totem. I do this because if I right-click and choose to open with Rhythmbox, the app will open but won't actually play the file. Bloody annoying. But Totem will play the file if selected in this way.

If I want to play a number of files, I use Rhythmbox. I find Rhythmbox much better than Totem in this case.

Sometimes I will use vlc to play audio files. Why? Why not? vlc is great.

[The Toxic Mite]

Rhythmbox because it rocks :D

[nvsbl]

I was a very loyal Foobar2000 user, when I was a victim of the Windows virus.

On Ubuntu, I started out using Amarok, and since then I've been from Songbird through Rhythmbox, and currently I'm still with Banshee. Perhaps this will change in the future, only time will tell.

[weresheep]

I used to use Rhythmbox but found it to be really slow and the lack of gapless playback was annoying. I then tried CMUS and quite liked it but found it a bit too complicated. I then moved to MOC and have not had the desire to move since.

I find MOC suits my usability model better than anything else I've tried. I love how easy it is to add tracks and directories to the playlist and combined with the incremental search MOC is just super fast to navigate. Plus, being a CLI application means I can use the same program on my desktop as on my (headless) server, which is cool :D

I think the only feature MOC doesn't have that I miss is Replay Gain support, but I can live without that.

-weresheep

[dosox]

I use songbird

[Vostrocity]

I used to be a Rhythmbox user, but Banshee has a far and away better interface and a few better features.

[PC_load_letter]

Voted Exaile. I was always a big fan of small (gui wise) and to the point music players. Was never an iTunes, Rhythembox, Songbird fan, well, maybe Songbird gets some use, sometimes :D

I was using Amarok 1.4 since Feisty, and it was great, but since Amarok 2 still has some way to go to get where 1.4 was, and since I'm a Gnome guy, Exaile was a godsend.

The only problem I used to have with it was absence of EQ, but not anymore. I'm using v.0.3.1b and the equalizer is working like a charm (even though I ditched PA). Add to this the nice offering of plugins, and I think it's already an AWESOME player. With a plugin to browse the LibriVox free audio book online library, I'm in heaven.

EDIT: Oh, and it's written in Python, how cool is that.

[Maupertus]

Used to use Amarok, but then came 2.0, then I used Rhythmbox a lot. I still do, but it lacks the power to keep my files organised for me (I know, media libraries should make this not necessary, but I'm a clean freak in real life and on my pc) So now I use gMusicplayer a lot, and it rock. :)

[pwnst*r]

Foobar.

[Richard85]

I started out using XMMS on gutsy because I had just switched from Windows to Ubuntu and I was used to winamp. Then when I bought my new laptop with 8.04 on it, I started using rhythmbox because of its similarity to itunes but stopped after a while because of ID3tag issues. Then I switched to Amarok (because it read my tags correctly!) which I've been using for the past two years. Recently, I updated to 10.04 from 8.04 and with it Amarok updated to its latest release. The new layout was a bit confusing at first but I figured out how to access my collection after visiting the amarok website. It took only a short while to realize that the newest amarok release WAS NOT ****ING READING MY TAGS CORRECTLY.
Now I'm looking for a new musicplayer. I just downloaded Exaile but really I'm looking for anything that will read my id3tags correctly.

[Shazzam6999]

Ncmpc... uses basically no system resources, extremely simple, and does the only thing I want my music player to do... play music. It helps that my mp3 player just requires me to drag and drop file so there's no syncing involved.

[gemmakaru]

Exaile, as I like the county music radio stations.

[nerdtron]

I use windows media player 12, oops sorry i'm using iTunes, oops sorry again.

[Lachinchon]

I haven't found one yet that I like, but sure wish I could. On Windows, Mediamonkey rules and I tend to boot into Windows a lot just to use it.
On Ubuntu, here are my gripes about the choices:

Rhythmbox: aside from the GUI being dull and boring, the single thing I detest about it, is that it will not stop playing! What I mean, is that if I set up a temporary playlist, populated by whatever random songs strike my fancy (lets call that a 'dynamic playlist'), when the last song ends, R-box starts playing whatever was last highlighted in my collection list. Super annoying! It also has to be selected from the Apps menu twice before it will open up.

Banshee: the "play queue" apparently intends to be a dynamic playlist, which I like, but it has the opposite problem of Rhythmbox - it will not keep playing all the songs in the queue unless they were all placed there at the same time! You cannot add songs to the queue while another is playing - well, you can add the songs, but Banshee will not keep playing through the list.

Amarok: always crashes in Gnome.

Exaile: very plain, but would be serviceable if it had a simple mechanism for creating a queue/playlist just by dragging to it whatever song(s) I select at any given moment. No such function.

QuodLibet: too basic; lacks too many functions (like the dynamic playlist I have been referring to).

Maybe I am missing something on all of these, but they have all frustrated me in one way or another. Mediamonkey is windows only, and Songbird has abandoned Linux. Someone please tell me that the Holy Grail of music players has just missed my notice.

[Shazzam6999]

I use windows media player 12, oops sorry i'm using iTunes, oops sorry again.

Hey, whatever works for you. It's not like listening to music through iTunes instead of Rhythmbox takes away from your listening experience. Well, at least it's never really mattered for me.

[WinterRain]

Vlc

[sxmaxchine]

i mainly use rhythmbox when I'm multitasking but if im just using pc for music and video i will use banshee.

[elliotn]

Guatema

[luceerose]

Amarok
Always Amarok

I hate KDE, I love Gnome

I've never had much trouble running Amarok under Gnome, (nothing that wasn't easily rectified anyway).
I just wish someone would make Amarok for Gnome, so all those kde libraries didn't have to come along for the ride.

[HermanAB]

Well, the trouble is that most music players make it more difficult to play your music, rather than easier. So I mostly use Xmms, otherwise Mplayer.

Things like Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox and the like are fine if you have about 10 albums, but once you have 100 GB of .ogg files, they don't work anymore, since they insist on scanning all ten bazillion files - god knows why - and connect to obscure web sites to download junk cover art. So these players become slow, clunky and unworkable.

For me, the best way to play music is to select it in a file browser and click play with Xmms or Mplayer, or to right click in Xmms and play a directory.

[Tweep Cat]

I use Rhythmbox. It is easy enough to use and I am just getting to grips with Ubuntu.

Actually, does anyone know of a media player that allows you to broadcast - such as Winamp (although a plugin is required)?

[sica07]

cplay for the collection and mplayer for streams.

mocp for the collection and mplayer for streams.

[luceerose]

Things like Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox and the like are fine if you have about 10 albums, but once you have 100 GB of .ogg files, they don't work anymore, since they insist on scanning all ten bazillion files - god knows why - and connect to obscure web sites to download junk cover art. So these players become slow, clunky and unworkable.

Actually, I own so many albums I can't even give you a number.
According to Amarok it's 4953 tracks. Never been slow for me.

[Paqman]

I use Banshee, and I just found out the other day it now has support for the U1 Music Store. Nice!

I do use Rhythmbox on my netbook, but only because it doesn't have enough smash to run Banshee.

[seeker5528]

Well, the trouble is that most music players make it more difficult to play your music, rather than easier. So I mostly use Xmms, otherwise Mplayer.

If you just want a simple music player you might try QMMP, but the version available in Lucid might still be too much of a work in progress.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/qmmp
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/libqmmp-misc
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/qmmp-plugin-projectm

Later, Seeker

[jaminthorns]

I use to use Banshee but eventually got sick of its tolls on my memory and the fact that it compressed all of my album art, which made everything look real crappy. Because of this I switched to Rhythmbox which is leaner, more native, and faster.

[Linye]

Actually, I own so many albums I can't even give you a number.
According to Amarok it's 4953 tracks. Never been slow for me.

5000 tracks it's like 1/4 of what he's saying.

[ubunterooster]

Exaile and Xnoise for me. Simple and lightweight

[Maupertus]

Well, the trouble is that most music players make it more difficult to play your music, rather than easier. So I mostly use Xmms, otherwise Mplayer.

Things like Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox and the like are fine if you have about 10 albums, but once you have 100 GB of .ogg files, they don't work anymore, since they insist on scanning all ten bazillion files - god knows why - and connect to obscure web sites to download junk cover art. So these players become slow, clunky and unworkable.

For me, the best way to play music is to select it in a file browser and click play with Xmms or Mplayer, or to right click in Xmms and play a directory.

One of the reasons why I actually like Rhythmbox is the fact that you can turn of crap like the album art window. Apart from that, I've made a June-project of encoding all my cd's to mp3 (alas I got an iPod for my birthday) and with 90Gigs of Music, Rhythmbox hasn't even blinked.

Rhythmbox has a much cleaner interface then all the other musicplayers I've tried. I don't like the fact that Banshee wants to be a vid-player as well and I think it's interface wants to give me too much information, where I only want to listen to music. Exaile just looks horrible, claims to be like Amarak 1.4 but does not in any way offer the cool things Amarok could do except the basic window lay-out.

I like gMusicplayer, as it can keep my files organized in the music folder (something I loved in Amarok and the only thing I liked about iTunes and miss in Rhythmbox) but it's interface needs a lot of work, it doesn't have the same level of integration that Banshee and Rhythmbox offer in Ubuntu and it has a quirky approach to playlists/library with which I still wrestle a bit. It is however THE best music manager I have used in ages. It has replaced Amarok as my Gnome music manager because it can not only order my physical files, but it has great tagging and editing options that make it a snap to keep everything in order.

I know it's a bit outdated to have this approach to the filesystem and structure, but hey, us neat-freaks need to get their daily dose of order from something. :)

(Now if only I could limit my music player install to 1, I would be enormously happy)

[Bapun007]

I am using mplayer.

[ubunterooster]

Exaile just looks horrible, claims to be like Amarak 1.4 but does not in any way offer the cool things Amarok could do except the basic window lay-out
I can not disagree but really don't care how anything looks

[Maupertus]

I can not disagree but really don't care how anything looks

I agree that looks aren't very important in a music player, but it does if it detracts from the user experience and makes things more complicated then they need to be, which I found to be the case with Exaile. It was my major beef with Amarok when I had it installed next to Rhythmbox just to do tag editing and file management. I wouldn't use it because I was annoyed by the clutter where rhythmbox just did what I wanted it to do with a couple of simple buttons. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Legendary_Bibo]

Rhythmbox was just there when I used Karmic and I really liked it; it was fast, and did the basic things I wanted it to do like organizing and indexing my music and it had a shuffle feature, and it wasn't resource intensive. I find it better than iTunes as a music player personally. I like the layout pretty much as well.

[olzak]

I use Rhytmbox, but I like also Amarok. I don't want install Amarok because with it comes lot of KDE stuff and I'm Gnome user. I don't want all those KDE stuff.

[bruno9779]

Guayadeque

[GlazedDonut]

MPD :biggrin:

[Bapun007]

From the beginning i m using mplayer and not change that yet . But rhytmbox is also good .

[nothingspecial]

Well, the trouble is that most music players make it more difficult to play your music, rather than easier. So I mostly use Xmms, otherwise Mplayer.

Things like Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox and the like are fine if you have about 10 albums, but once you have 100 GB of .ogg files, they don't work anymore, since they insist on scanning all ten bazillion files - god knows why - and connect to obscure web sites to download junk cover art. So these players become slow, clunky and unworkable.

For me, the best way to play music is to select it in a file browser and click play with Xmms or Mplayer, or to right click in Xmms and play a directory.

You should give Guayadeque a whirl Herman, it has all those album art features and stuff BUT it`s main purpose is to be fast and use little resources even for huge collections. Anything that gets in the way of the prime directive (as it were) is out. Plus, you tell the developer about any bugs and he`s usually fixed it in an hour or so.

[gnomeuser]

I love its video library feature, although I really wish it was more like iTunes (video thumbnails instead of text lists)

It is likely to be using the grid view in the future, it hasn't really been touched in a while so maybe the time has come to polish the many views we have to take advantage of all our new functionality.

Right now though the push is to get the new hardware layer tested and merged. This will bring with it amongst other things improved mtp and iPhone support. A PPA should be available shortly to help test this.

[L4U]

aTunes all the way.

[arsenic23]

Amarok to manage and create playlists, mplayer to play them.

My media PC can switch between any set of speakers in the house, so I just start up playlists over a terminal in mplayer and then switch my music to whatever room I'm using.

[samalex]

I haven't tried Amarok in 10.04, but on 9.04 it was horribly unstable for me crashing quite often. I've used Rhythmbox both on 9.04 and 10.04, and for streaming audio, podcasts, playing local stuff, and now with Ubuntu One, it leaves little to be desired. Also it's quite stable (never crashed on me anyway), so that's a plus.

Sam

[pinguy]

I really like aTunes, but its so clunky to use and it looks awful.

http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/6840/spiralrobertnickson100b.th.jpg (http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/6840/spiralrobertnickson100b.jpg)

Really wish it had a GTK+ GUI and wasn't written in java. This could be such a great player with all the functionality it's got.

[Redo]

Foobar2000

None of the linux native players come close, and it works great in Wine. If Exaile gained a few more features and stopped glitching on me I would consider switching.

[ssri]

Mediamonkey. In my linux install I use a compiled amarok 1.4.10 and compiled xine-libs. Mediamonkey is fast and I feel that I have a lot more control over my large music collection than any linux players I've tried. I can display any field (usually comments) in my sidebar a la amarok's context menu. The number of options I could use to organize my collection is surprising for a windows program. Granted amarok 1.4.10 (with mysql) beats it for query searches, but the speed of smart playlist queries are pretty close. Also, for managing a smaller local collection, the only player that comes close to foobar2000 is deadbeef. Deadbeef is missing some playlist binding functionality I liked using in foobar2000 though. Hopefully the devs will take a look at my feature request for it.

[ubunterooster]

Foobar2000

None of the linux native players come close, and it works great in Wine. If Exaile gained a few more features and stopped glitching on me I would consider switching.
When exaile got to glitchy for a while, I escpaed to Xnoise http://code.google.com/p/xnoise/

[SoFl W]

I don't really care about a music player that much so Rhthymbox was fine. However I wanted an equalizer, so I started using Guayadeque (how do you pronounce that?)

I wanted to give Banshee a try but when I used the package manger it gave me a warning about downloading the software... which is strange because I was using the package manger to try and download it. Said it was unsupported or something?

[aviedw]

I use banshee but I've been hearing great things about songbird. Many insist that its very similar to apples itunes. Last time I used it, it was so buggy. And I could only compile it. I think ill give it a shot tonight. But there is one thing that I would hope all these players would improve on is album look up feature. Its such a pain added album art work and track names.

[nmaster]

songbird. i don't mind that it doesn't have linux support anymore. i really like how it organizes my directories.