[LAU] Decent and attractive audio player

[Steve Fosdick]

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.