Solid Block of Ise

I’m a big fan of Linux and Open Source. I abandoned Windows back in January, and haven’t looked back since. In fact, the only machine running Windows in this entire house is the acting-HTPC, due to having an ancient graphics adapter that refuses to display through TV-out under Linux. Whenever that gets upgraded, Mythbuntu will be the OS of choice there.

But there’s one area that seems to keep annoying me within the Open Source-community. That particular area is the area of MP3/Media-players. I don’t have very high demands as far as playing movies go, but I do have some fairly specific wishes when it comes to playing my MP3’s.

What is it that an MP3 player has to fulfill in order to qualify for my use?

At the bare minimum it needs:

* A not too retarded library function. This needs to have some kind of quick-search functionality
* Smart playlists, i.e. I set a parameter (Artist = Radiohead, for example) and it automatically fills the playlist with songs matching those criteria.
* Support for scrobbling songs, either through plugin or built-in.
* Inotify-support. Inotify is a mechanism where the kernel can report changes in a directory to inotify-aware applications. With a music-manager this means it’s automatically aware of songs that are added/removed from watched directories, or changes in those files (such as tag editing).
* Support for GNOME’s multimedia-keys function. I hate having to click around in a music-player - I want to easily play/pause and change songs via my multimedia keyboard.

Additional features which in my humble opinion should exist is:

* Notifications of song-changes and such. Preferably via libnotify, but I’m not picky here. Also, it would be nice if it’s aware of virtual desktops and always notifies unless a full-screen application is running.
* Support for Shoutcasted internet-radio. Doesn’t need to be brilliant, but should be there.
* Preferably a built-in tagging system that doesn’t suck. It doesn’t need to be very advanced since I would only use it for occasional mistagged songs - I use EasyTag for my more serious tagging needs.
* A notification area icon. That’s the “tray” to most people who are still damaged from Windows.
* The ability to remove songs from disk without having to use another filemanager.

Bonuses:

* A decent plugin system with a somewhat generous amount of plugins.
* Neat things such as automatic downloading of covers or lyrics, wikipedia-links, etc.

The default music manager in Gnome is Rhythmbox. This is the one application that I keep coming back to after trying others. Not because it’s the best (because it isn’t) but because it has most of the features I like and manages to annoy me the least. Among it’s positive sides is that it’s very fast even with a large library such as mine, has most of what I want, has most of the absolute requirements (even though some of them are half-working) and does the job. Minor amusing part about Rhythmbox is that it’s quite unstable and has a tendency to suddenly die without any warning, likes destroying ID3-tags and seems very whimsical about listening to inotify - there’s a lot of times when it just ignores any changes made.

I’ve tried a whole lot of players, and it didn’t take long for me to find something I disliked about them.

* Listen: Weird and unwieldy interface, no inotify as far as I could tell, didn’t respond to keyboard.
* Quod Libet: Too minimalist, didn’t respond to keyboard, various others.
* Muine: far too primitive, almost no features to speak of.
* Banshee: Not too bad, but there’s no inotify-support which makes managing your library a huge pain. Even worse, there’s no built-in function to remove “dead” entires in the library. Add to this that it’s slower than molasses on a cold day (Thanks, Mono!)
* BMPx: Bloated interface, didn’t respond to keyboard and seemingly doesn’t want to scan my library by it’s own volition. Add to this that I can’t find the magic button to make it start the scan…
* BMP: Too winamp-like. No inotify, horrible library management, didn’t respond to keyboard.
* XMMS: Too primitive, no inotify, too winamp-like. Decent plugin system, if it wasn’t for the fact that half the plugins don’t work as advertised. Didn’t respond to keyboard.

EDIT: Gave Audacious a go. Fairly nice, but the dealbreaker was the non-existent library function as well as no plugin for multimedia keys. I did find a plugin, but requiring me to compile it, then figure out how to install it (not a word in the documentation) was a little too much for me to stomach.

(Yes, I’ve also tried Amarok, which everyone is raving about. Since it’s a KDE-application it didn’t recognize my keyboard shortcuts and in addition I find the application UI so badly designed that it hurts when using it. Essentially I prefer to have things native to Gnome, unless they’re really spectacularly brilliant in every way - and IMHO Amarok isn’t that.)

The only player that’s better than Rhythmbox is Exaile. Essentially it’s a Gnome-clone of Amarok with some UI improvements. It’s very good - except for the fact that it’s written in python and thus runs at a snails pace whenever you want to work with more than ten songs at a time. Also, if there is any inotify support I haven’t seen it yet. The lack of speed and inotify-support is why I keep going back to Rhythmbox - it’s blazingly fast despite it’s many shortcomings, and have at least 75% working inotify.

So, I ask every Linux-user or -fan out there to help me out here. Is there a music-player for Linux, preferably available in the Ubuntu repos, that doesn’t suck? So far my search has turned up that there is none, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.