Media players: hunting for fatty

[directhex]

The choice of media player is mentioned fairly frequently on this forum. For your viewing pleasure, here are some numbers to occupy you to help spot the most heavyweight option. Bear in mind that whilst hard disk space is cheap, space on the LiveCD is at a major premium - every fraction of a megabyte needs to be argued for. I'm trying to include all the options here that I've noticed people on the forum suggesting

Remember, Rhythmbox is the baseline. Numbers for AMD64 Jaunty.

And I'm not discussing features or usability here - only size. Obviously a featureless player is a poor choice for default, even if it were tiny.

Player     | Version                     | Disk space incl unique deps | Resident memory - playback, 19-track test library
-----------+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
Amarok     | 2:2.0.2mysql5.1.30-0ubuntu2 | 221 MiB                     | 145.5 MiB
Banshee    | 1.4.3-4                     | 12.3 MiB                    | 61.8 MiB
Exaile     | 0.2.14-0ubuntu2             | 78.2 MiB                    | 68 MiB
Quod Libet | 2.0-1ubuntu2                | 9327 KiB                    | 56.6 MiB
Rhythmbox  | 0.12.0-0ubuntu4             | 18.4 MiB                    | 50.1 MiB
Songbird   | 1.1.1-0ubuntu1~fta4         | 42.6 MiB                    | 98.5 MiB

So now you know!

[Mehall]

Given how featureful and complete Rhythmbox is, and that it has the lowest memory footprint, (and that it's dependencies are maybe more shared than some of the others, though i don't know for sure) I think it's the perfect choice. (Quod Libet, I admit, is a not bad second based on these stats, but not a player I have tested)

[Tibuda]

I prefer Quod Libet because of the tagging features and the clean interface. The only thing I miss from Banshee/Rhythmbox is Last.fm, but I can use the web interface for that.

[gnomeuser]

It may be interesting to examine how the different players scale in memory use and responsiveness as collections grow.

[directhex]

It may be interesting to examine how the different players scale in memory use and responsiveness as collections grow.

I'm at the office, so don't have access to my music. hence 19-track collection (from archive.org)

[directhex]

Given how featureful and complete Rhythmbox is, and that it has the lowest memory footprint, (and that it's dependencies are maybe more shared than some of the others, though i don't know for sure) I think it's the perfect choice. (Quod Libet, I admit, is a not bad second based on these stats, but not a player I have tested)

That's what "unique deps" means - excluding dependencies shared by all other apps on a Jaunty install, RB and its RB-only dependencies came out in third place. QL was smallest, Banshee second.

[Skripka]

That's what "unique deps" means - excluding dependencies shared by all other apps on a Jaunty install, RB and its RB-only dependencies came out in third place. QL was smallest, Banshee second.

OTOH, Banshee has the highest number of dependencies of any audio player I know of.

[Mehall]

woops, missed the "unique" bit =[

[gnomeuser]

I'm at the office, so don't have access to my music. hence 19-track collection (from archive.org)

For what it's worth. 1 video, 941 podcasts and 7648 songs as well as mirage loaded in banshee leads to 78megs of memory used. I am very pleased, and it remains responsive

[castrojo]

OTOH, Banshee has the highest number of dependencies of any audio player I know of.

PURE AWESOMENESS comes at a (small) cost.