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Last time I tried the Aqualung music player (probably on Ubuntu 8.04 or 9.10), I couldn't get it to work. But the version available in the 10.04 repository actually looks pretty good. It appears to do gapless playback (something that nearly all other Linux music players botch to varying degrees) properly, and with the addition of the swh-plugins package seems to have a quite functional graphical EQ as well.

So far, it hasn't done anything to seriously piss me off. If it continues to impress, it may replace Audacious as my preferred (and recommended) music player for Linux.

It's scary how bad that interface looks. Personally I would find that list style library viewing and the split window design a much bigger issue. Have no use for EQ and I'm not sure what gapless playback issues you're talking about. None of the music players I've come across using Ubuntu have been very good. Banshee is about the only one I can stand using. Minitunes is about the best interface I've seen, but it sorely lacks in features. Interface quality and podcast support are by far my two biggest concerns.

Gapless playback refers to the ability to play tracks which run one into another seamlessly. Otherwise, albums which don't have a gap between tracks (live albums, certain Pink Floyd albums, etc.) have an annoying "hiccup" in the sound at each track transition.

I don't have high-end speakers or headphones, so some sort of EQ is necessary to allow me to tweak the sound until it sounds right.

I have very mimimal requirements from a UI standpoint. As long as there's some sort of bare bones playlist management (load/save), and the ability to assign a global hotkey for pause/play, I'm happy. The global hotkey was sort of looking like an issue at first, but I was able to find a workaround.

The newest version of Amarok isn't bad.

What's wrong with ogg123 and mpg123?

bthylafh wrote:

What's wrong with ogg123 and mpg123?

Spoken like a true CLI geek!

I guess this would make sense given Android's status at being at the back of the pack for media.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

I guess this would make sense given Android's status at being at the back of the pack for media.

IMO Linux has long suffered from too many different competing audio APIs; this has held it back when it comes to multimedia. The fact that many of the common codecs (e.g. MP3) are proprietary hasn't helped either.

The major distros finally seem to have more or less standardized on the PulseAudio API; and while there are still arguments regarding whether PulseAudio is actually a *good* solution, at least it's a standard.

just brew it! wrote:

Gapless playback refers to the ability to play tracks which run one into another seamlessly. Otherwise, albums which don't have a gap between tracks (live albums, certain Pink Floyd albums, etc.) have an annoying "hiccup" in the sound at each track transition.

I don't have high-end speakers or headphones, so some sort of EQ is necessary to allow me to tweak the sound until it sounds right.

I have very mimimal requirements from a UI standpoint. As long as there's some sort of bare bones playlist management (load/save), and the ability to assign a global hotkey for pause/play, I'm happy. The global hotkey was sort of looking like an issue at first, but I was able to find a workaround.

I'm aware of what gapless playback means, I'm not aware of the problems you stated nearly all other players had. I haven't encountered any issues with Banshee regarding gapless playback.

Skrying wrote:

I'm aware of what gapless playback means, I'm not aware of the problems you stated nearly all other players had. I haven't encountered any issues with Banshee regarding gapless playback.

Well, I haven't tried Banshee (maybe I should). The default Rhythmbox music player doesn't support gapless playback or EQ, Audacious' gapless plugin was horribly unstable (kept hanging/crashing), Amarok was just generally unstable (as of the last time I tried it, maybe 6-8 months ago?), and 2 or 3 other I tried (I forget which ones) either claimed to have gapless support but still had very noticeable glitches at the track transitions, or had no EQ.

My music library is already tagged and organized into folders by artist/album, so playlist management is not very high on my list of priorities. I'm willing to sacrifice some UI functionality to get what I want... though I'm not willing to go as far as bthylafh suggested!

Ahh, Banshee actually was one of the players I tried a while back; the version I tried did not support gapless playback. Looks like they added that feature sometime last year.

Guess I'll give it a spin, and report back on my final decision.

Weirdness. Banshee apparently does not support gapless playback on any Ubuntu distros older than 10.04 LTS, even if you install the latest bleeding edge Banshee release from the Launchpad PPA. I'm in the middle of setting up a new system with 10.04 LTS for home anyhow, so this isn't a big deal... but as of right now my home desktop is still at 9.10.

My desktop at work is already running 10.04 LTS (migrated from 8.04 LTS a few weeks ago; my work desktop has leapfrogged my home one), so I guess I'll give the latest Banshee a spin at the office tomorrow morning.

Early impressions of Banshee: Yes, it is very full-featured, but the UI seems rather unintuitive. I should be able to queue an album or track simply by dragging and dropping a folder or file onto the list of currently playing tracks. Pretty much every other player lets you do this; is it too much to ask?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like it *requires* you to explicitly create playlists for everything?

I'll continue to play around with it some more, but quite honestly this feels like a step backward in terms of usability.

just brew it! wrote:

Early impressions of Banshee: Yes, it is very full-featured, but the UI seems rather unintuitive. I should be able to queue an album or track simply by dragging and dropping a folder or file onto the list of currently playing tracks. Pretty much every other player lets you do this; is it too much to ask?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like it *requires* you to explicitly create playlists for everything?

I'll continue to play around with it some more, but quite honestly this feels like a step backward in terms of usability.

I'm really confused by what you're saying here. You can queue music by dragging anything in the library browser (be it the band from that list, the album from that viewer or individual or multiple tracks from that list) to the "Play Queue." That's not even required. You can double click any artist, album or track in the library browser and it'll automatically start playing. There's no requirement to make playlists.

Yeah, didn't realize that you had to import your entire music library first; I'm accustomed to managing my collection simply by organizing it into folders by artist and album, and dragging/dropping folders directly onto the player to queue them. Once you've done the import, things behave a lot more sensibly.

I do find it slightly obscene that the thing has a 722MB memory footprint, but hey swap space is cheap...

Final verdict on Banshee: meh.

It sounds good... when it works. Over three days of use, it hung (requiring a manual kill to un-wedge it) or outright crashed multiple times. I also still find its method of managing the playlists and play queue to be slightly counter-intuitive; but I'm willing to admit that this is more a matter personal preference (i.e. what I'm accustomed to).

I think I gave it a reasonably fair shake, but at the end of the day I shouldn't need to fight with my music player. File Banshee under "tried it (again), still don't like it".

Edit: In other music player news... I bricked my Sansa Clip trying to install the Rockbox firmware on it. Hey, at least they're cheap, and it gave me an excuse to upgrade to a Clip+ (to get the SDHC slot). Clip+ also seems to do gapless properly with the stock firmware... woo-hoo!

Can you hold your nose and run FB2k in Wine?

Some other suggestions:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1488706

bthylafh wrote:

Can you hold your nose and run FB2k in Wine?

I tried that a while back, and wasn't entirely happy with it. Might be worth another go, since Wine has gone through a few more iterations since then.

Some other suggestions:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1488706

If Aqualung really pisses me off, I'll start looking again... aside from the flaky gapless plugin, I was actually pretty happy with Audacious (maybe that'll be fixed soon).

Edit: Egads, the home page for one of the players linked from that Ubuntu forum thread is in Russian!

After using fb2k through wine for a long time, I settled on Audacious. The 2.5.x version finally gave me enough features to sort my music properly.

Also, do you use the ALSA output of Audacious or the Pulse one? It usually defaults to ALSA, and I would recommend changing to Pulse.

Thanks for reminding me, I should've posted another update to this thread a few days ago. After much futzing around, I've actually come full circle back to Audacious again. Installing the latest version from the webupd8 PPA fixes the issues I was having with it.

Haha, that's a little funny. I wish they could foobar for linux. Maybe we should all get together and write a simple, foobar-like media player for Linux.

crabjokeman wrote:

Also, do you use the ALSA output of Audacious or the Pulse one? It usually defaults to ALSA, and I would recommend changing to Pulse.

Yeah, it is set to Pulse. I had it set to ALSA back when I used Ubuntu 8.04, since Pulse wasn't quite ready for prime time yet.