Ubuntu One Music Store is Coming to Rock Your World

I dislike almost all of these open source music players sadly, especially Amarok, because I don't want all that online services crap. I understand this is the direction Ubuntu has to go to become big. I use foobar2000 through Wine and its one of the few close source apps I'm never going to give up because it doesn't come with the online stuff.

They need to give Rhythmbox are a more attractive interface if they want people to use it and buy songs. However, Ubuntu is changing the Human theme to Light and will get a revamp on version 10, so I figure its part of the plan.

The biggest thing Rhythmbox should improve on is space management, all the toolbars take up so much space. It need to be able to display as much song on a screen as iTunes. Also fix the ID3 tag reading, so it will display categories that start with lower case and upper case as the same, instead of separate. I will begin using it when they fix these problems.

I haven't found a software music player yet that isn't a bundle of tiny fonts and confusion. Like Playlists. I don't want a playlist, I want to play a CD or an audio file. Which it seems are against the rules, because you have to jump through hoops to do those.

That's pretty old school, I play music through playlist since I have thousand of songs on my computer, but that sound like Totem movie player. Also some of these player has a minimal mode that show only the buttons.

I remember when I used to use Windows Media Player 5.0.

Quoting:I haven't found a software music player yet that isn't a bundle of tiny fonts and confusion. Like Playlists. I don't want a playlist, I want to play a CD or an audio file. Which it seems are against the rules, because you have to jump through hoops to do those.

Well said.

No, not well said. Spoken like a grouch, and I should know - I am pretty grouchy.

Use VLC. It works well for just playing files, despite the multitude of additional features you need never see. And Zinf/XMMS/BMP with a non-tiny-font theme of your choice also would suffice.

Is Sonata still active? That might even work better for you. Basic functional GTK interface.

Seriously, any number of music players can meet your "software music player [-yet] that isn't a bundle of tiny fonts and confusion" requirement.

Mplayer from the command line should meet the requirement as well :)

I still use totem. It's just sooo simplistic. Lovely.

On a more related note, wouldn't it be better to have the music store separated from the music player? If the store made its catalogue browsable in some sort of open format, then any music player could add support for it.

Otherwise it feels a tad like lock-in.

But then I don't know all the details, perhaps they will end up having their store open to all.

> I haven't found a software music player yet that isn't a bundle of tiny fonts and confusion. Like Playlists. I don't want a playlist, I want to play a CD or an audio file.

Preach it, TC. They all want to be your "music (or media, in some cases) managers". I can manage my own music quite fine, thank you. Just play the **** file I want you to play.

Yeah, preach the lies, sigh.

There are plenty of audio players that are there to just play files.

MPlayer and ???123.

Is the horror that is Rhythmbox's popup volume control yet fixed? Haven't used it in a while so I don't know if it's been fixed?

I second VLC. The interface is intuitive and allows you to quickly do what you need to do. Other players are annoying, but VLC is a good one. Even my wife, who is a Windows user, has me install VLC on any Windows machines she uses. She cannot handle the complicated nature of media on Windows.

> MPlayer and ???123.

Mpg123 and mpg321 are good command line players, yes. And that's what I use when I want to play a single audio file.

I think both Xine and Mplayer also work fairly well. I haven't tried VLC, as it's always been a pain to install on Slackware, but it works really well with Windows. But thinks like Banshee, Rhythmbox, and I believe Amarok all seem to start by wanting to catalog all of my music first. :(

VLC is really good, but the interface could use some improvement. It doesn't auto-detect any CD drives, or find the drive with the disk in it, so I have to configure that manually. It's never a simple insert-CD-play operation, I always have to fiddle with it. Though it is good for playing files on local hard drives or network shares.

@jdixon

It's true that VLC has a lot of dependencies. I usually just use smplayer on Slackware because I don't do a lot of multimedia on work machines anyway.

Nonetheless Eric Hameleers has a VLC package with everything statically linked so that there are no dependencies. Package and SlackBuilds (depending on 32-bit or 64-bit) can be found here:

http://connie.slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/

Edit: Of course it is also available through the standard slacky.eu repo, but in that case you will pull in a ton of dependencies.

Suddenly, I'm glad Rhythmbox is my preferred GUI-based music manager:

http://lwn.net/Articles/377314/

(Even if I've left GNOME, it's good to see freedom projects supporting one another.)

Bigg:

Thanks, I'll download it and check it out when I get back home. I'm travelling this weekend.

what ever happened to good old xmms

What happened to XMMS:

XMMS was good. Except for the skins - locations of buttons were hardcoded. And the code was a mess. Basically XMMS was closed - except for the source. People blamed the project 'not being open'. And sometimes XMMS and ALSA wouldn't cooperate.

Then came the Bleep Media Player - an XMMS fork. But Bleep Media Player was rewritten without XMMS code. Then came Audacious, a BMP1 fork. It was pretty decent though.

Nonetheless I switched to Amarok. 2.0 was workable, but then came 2.1 and it was different. Apart from it being slooooooow to start.

So I longed for something else.

Tried cmus for a while, a kind of 'CLI XMMS / Winamp'. It just plays your file, but as it's ncurses, it's not that user friendly.

So now I took a more radical approach:

I use Youtube as my music-on-demand media player (much easier to use than Amarok, starts faster and larger playlist), and when Flash + FF eat 100% CPU again, I just get rid of sound on my computer altogether and fire up my Pioneer Receiver - which isn't connected to my computer at all. 4 sec start time, but then it works, never crashes and because I only have to push 1 button to start the music it can be considered user friendly.