Re: [LAU] Decent and attractive audio player

On 27/04/08 15:23:50, Dave Phillips wrote:
>
> Loki Davison wrote:
> > Well, name says it all, what do people like for an audio player?
> >
> I've been using Amarok happily for a while, after abandoning XMMS.
> However, I just completed a review of Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy

> Heron), and I was impressed with it.

Is that a published review? Is it available online? Have they got
gapless playback to work yet?

From time to time I try rhythmbox as it seems to have some promising
ideas and has the backing of the GNOME project but have always run into
issues in the past. Lack of gapless playback was one of them and also
the time and resources used scanning for metadata has often been
another. Perhaps no-one tests players on a large collection.

I was a fan of xmms in the past but it does seem very dated now.

For quite a while I had settled on mpd. The metadata engine in mpd was
very much faster than earlier versions of rhythmbox and it supports
gapless playback. Recently though its CPU usage seems to have gone up
to the point I get loads of sound dropouts if the machine is doing
anything else, hence taking a second look at rhythmbox.

For me the important attributes are good sound quality (for example
poor resampling algorithms are no good), support for the formats I use
- mostly FLAC these days but also plenty of Ogg/Vorbis and a little
MP3, gapless playback, good performance and a usable GUI that
integrates well with the GNOME desktop.

Other things like metadata editing are less important. Of course I
need something to do that but I don't mind if this is a different
application and, for some changes, scripting the command line tools
work well too.

Regards,
Steve.
_______________________________________________
Linux-audio-user mailing list
Linux-audio-user@email-addr-hidden
http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
Received on Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:34:23 +0100