Potamus for 12.04 or an equally high sound quality player?

**R4zd7NX** · September 1st, 2013

Hi All,
I recently had to upgrade from Linux 10.10 to 12.04. I was in LOVE with the very high sound quality of the Potamus audio player. Potamus does not seem to have a version for 12.04 that I can find. Is there a version of Potamus that will work on Ubuntu 12.04? And if there is not, can anyone recommend a player that has as good sound quality as Potamus? I don't need bells and whistles of fancy applications, I only want excellent sound quality, as Potamus gave me.

Thanks so much for any suggestions!

-Linda-

**kostkon** · September 1st, 2013

You could get the Potamus package for 10.04; it will probably install fine and even work fine.

For 32bit here, for 64bit here. Just select a mirror from the list.

Weird that it has jackd as a dependency. Hmmm, does it really need Jack to work? Do you remember being asked to install jack the last time you installed it?

**Yellow Pasque** · September 2nd, 2013

Packages for Lucid may not work correctly (because of libao2 dependency, which has been replaced by libao4).

I was able to build/run potamus on Precise fairly easily. First, get the dependencies. Don't install libjack-dev if you're not using JACK.

Code:

sudo apt-get install build-essential wget tar automake pkg-config libglib2.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libglade2-dev libao-dev libsamplerate0-dev libvorbis-dev libmad0-dev libaudiofile-dev libmodplug-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libflac-dev libjack-dev

Code:

cd ~/
wget http://offog.org/files/potamus-14.tar.gz
tar xzf potamus-14.tar.gz
cd potamus-14/
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

**shantiq** · September 2nd, 2013

also good on 13.04 if anyone interested

withheld

libjack-dev

from Temüjin's dependency line

then ran

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-output-jack OUTPUT_AO_CFLAGS OUTPUT_AO_LIBS

as fifth line of install command so it picks Alsa and leaves Jack out of the picture altogether

PS if you like really simple ways to play music this here might be of interest too

**Yellow Pasque** · September 3rd, 2013

--disable-output-jack OUTPUT_AO_CFLAGS OUTPUT_AO_LIBS

If you don't have libjack-dev installed, then those options are probably redundant (since it will use libao by default or fail configure if it can't find libao or jack).

Anyway, I'm curious as to why someone would think Potamus has better audio quality than other audio players.

**shantiq** · September 3rd, 2013

Hi T

Yes one would think

those options are probably redundant

and i tried with just

--disable-output-jack

but it gave on loading-up a "no output source" message

with the config line

Code:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local --disable-output-jack OUTPUT_AO_CFLAGS OUTPUT_AO_LIBS

it finally found alsa

PS as regards an excellent simple player with great sound XMMS is still the winner for me and so stable once installed

**R4zd7NX** · September 3rd, 2013

Hi All, Thank you so much for your input. I'm actually a complete newbee to working on my own Linux, and 12.04 is the first operating system, of any kind, that I've ever installed on a computer. To be honest, an ex put Linux 10.04 on my computer and I let him do all the work working out the bugs. He told me Potamus was the best sounding player, and it was much better than VLC's sound. So, I got attached to it and remained ignorant of my own computer's functioning. Now that I have no choice but to work on my own Linux, as I have no one nearby to help, I'm committed to learning slowly how to make Linux work for me. To avoid more confusion and tinkering with my new os, I'm going to give Potamus a rest and try the XMMS player. Thanks again for your help. Now I'm focusing on getting the blasted screen saver working. =]