Groove Basin: Quest For the Ultimate Music Player 87
An anonymous reader writes "Andrew Kelley was a big fan of the Amarok open source music player. But a few years ago, its shortcomings were becoming more annoying and the software's development path no longer matched with the new features he wanted. So he did what any enterprising hacker would do: he started work on a replacement. Three and a half years later, his project, Groove Basin, has evolved into a solid music player, and it's still under active development. Kelley has now posted a write-up of his development process, talking about what problems he encountered, how he solved them, and how he ended up contributing code to libav."
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people like to keep their interests neatly divided.
Personally, when I open my music player, I want to see only songs, not videos or what have you. And I want to see them divided by folders, not by artist, by album, genre or whatever. Folders are way easier to organize - at least for those of us that kept a fairly organized selection from the start. So my (admittedly retro) software bundle of choice is Dolphin > Totem. Extremely simple and with a fairly clean interface, just the way I want it. I think I'm in a small niche, though.
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I prefer it the same, and to the point of building my own software to do it properly.
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I prefer it the same, and to the point of building my own software to do it properly.
I've gone one better - I whipped up a little tcl/tk (wish) script that uses the locatedb to show me my music files*, so I never have to click "open" or "import" or any of that crap. I simply type parts of the filename that I remember into a box and it only displays the matches :-)
* and mpg123 to play them
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MIne's also done in tcl/tk (8.6), but it's a full blown graphics job which has playlist capabilities. At the cli I usually just call a pre-made playlist.
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Yes. Totem for audio, Rhythmbox for streaming, VLC for video.
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My music is also organised by folders, but Musicbrainz Picard does all the heavy lifting of sorting stuff into the right folders.
I use Amarok and do use the library feature most of the time but every now and then I drop back to folder view for certain albums that confuse Amarok (Age of Wonders 3 OST...)
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Yes, REALLY (Score:1)
That's really an outdated way to do things. A song or artist could be categorized across multiple genres. What about collaborations? What about "Walk this Way" with Aerosmith and Run DMC? Do I make multiple copies if I sort folders by artist/genre etc?
The file system is terrible for organizing music. My music is sorted into folders, too, but it lacks. The music player has to make up for the short comings.
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People like me who like to play music in the background while doing other work/play, and so don't want some wonky code in VLC making it chew up a whole core to play an MP3?
(I still swear by it for videos, though)
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Why use my phone when I'm at home? Clementine on my desktop won't drain my phone battery.
Winamp (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:aimp winamp (Score:4, Informative)
You got the bad one, Winamp 2.95 was the good one.
When they upgraded to 3.0 it go too bloated and slow. I can start up that Winamp and its footprint is so small you would be surprised, running with an 8MB MP3 loaded and it still took up less than 10 MB. I can run Solitaire on my PC and listen to music and the card game is a bigger resource hog.
It was around 3.0 when AOL bought it and required they throw in everything but the kitchen sink and bloat it that it died.
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In Linux and Mac OS X? :P
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I only need to find the right file to load
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Same here. I did not like XMMS2 thing.
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Audacious isn't bad. I also fire up QMMP if I want the ProjectM visualizer.
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Agreed (Score:1)
Winamp classic got it right. It looks like a tape player, it works like a tape player, only it plays mp3's. It doesnt eat up my whole system to do it, even when i put a 1000+ song playlist in it. And it doesnt try to be my all encompassing multi-media front-end / librarian.
Well it does.. but you can turn that shit off.
VLC is great too... except it chokes if you throw more than a couple dozen files at it.
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Clementine (Score:5, Informative)
Genres (Score:3, Funny)
Whelp, at least we know what kind of porn you're not watching.
:-P
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Clementines are very good fruits.
You simply have no taste.
It's also a cute French first name.
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Stupid name. Reminds me of an old lady or a fruit. Neither is very appealing.
Clem will remember that.
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I am so confused... (Score:3)
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It is only barely relevant, but I fully agree with this AC. FOSS programs, if they're ever going to garner sufficient usership needs to have easily pronounceable names because, like it or not, word of mouth is the most trusted form of marketing.
aaaannd... there it goes (Score:1)
Server fall down, go boom.
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Everything libav supports.
Thank you OP (Score:3)
Sweet (Score:1)
I can't wait until someone re-invents the wheel. Again.
Foobar2000 for Linux (Score:3)
The Ultimate Music Player would be a solid port of Foobar2000 to Linux. Groove Basin...not so much.
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Foobar2000 runs perfectly under WINE on Linux and OS X [github.com]. I have been using it for years without any problems. So far, the only flaw I have found is that it does not find new music placed into your media folder after it finishes scanning for new files during start-up, so you have to restart the thing to help it find music just added.
For values of "perfectly" that include pops, clicks, distortion, and lack of 24-bit support, in my experience.
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Can you tell me what makes it superior to MPD?
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Foobar2000's big win is in its music library handling. You can view it by folder, by genre, by artist, by album artist, or make up your own sort criteria (including sorting by any tag that you might define). Nothing else I've tried even comes close.
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Regarding your base question, foobar2000 is simply an extremely powerful, sufficiently minimalistic, extremely easy to use and extremely configurable music player with a clean interface and support for every format I can think of, including esoteric Amiga tracker stuff. In it I can also organize and control music by superior means to any other program I know of, by the virtue of its easily macro-able tagging and renaming functions. In pure functionality and usability in a single-computer environment, MPD, o
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
What about DeadBeef?
http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
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The Ultimate Music Player would be a solid port of Foobar2000 to Linux. Groove Basin...not so much.
OOh it's annual piss on someone's parade day, same as every day!
The poster posted a long, interesting article about building a good (as defined by a list of features, including things like lack of glitchiness and UI responsiveness), solid music player using open source software. The article covered in quite entertaining depth almost every layer of the stack from libav to web interfaces to automatic volume adju
Web Based? (Score:1, Interesting)
So its web based? Thanks, but no thanks.
Call me old fashioned, but I like my web browsers and music separate.
I do web development for a living, and I've even built my own front end to mpd in HTML5 (and a backend controller, so technically not a front end to mpd the daemon, but it handles the UI part). Its integrated into my HTPC software. I moved to a WD TV live about a year ago, for Netflix, but I've since got netflix working on my HTPC (via Pipelight) so I'm moving back when I can get some new, more effic
XMplay (Score:1)
288kb of optimized, "true to original" playback.
http://www.un4seen.com/ [un4seen.com]
Only downside? No scaling options for dpi :(.
Amarok (Score:1)
Actually it would be better, because lots of other people could use it without the need to change players.
The one thing I miss for Amarok is a good Android remote control with a widget, there is one at the Play store but it is old as hell and doesn't have a widget and the source code is not published.
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He liked Amarok 1.4, not the direction they went with the 2.0 rewrite. Why develop plugins for abandoned code?
Sounds interesting, need an XBMC client plugin... (Score:3)
Where's the Beef (Score:2)
DeadBeef thats is http://deadbeef.sourceforge.ne... [sourceforge.net]
tomahawk (Score:1)
If you use windows, tomahawk is really cool. it can play from pandora etc..., connect to Gtalk etc....
on Linux I prefer mpg123. just kidding!
Re:No thanks...dev making decisions for the user (Score:5, Informative)
eedjit.
The player analyses each track so that all songs are uniformly loud, not that it alters your volume setting. This is so, if you have 2 tracks playing next to each other - the first quiet, the second mastered to be loud - you won't hurt yourself if you turned up the volume to hear the first one ok.
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It's called Replaygain and it can be disabled if you don't like it.
Eedjit.
This is an awful Ultimate Music Player (for the re (Score:2)
I'm sure it works for the author and I'm all for 'if you can't find what you want, build it yourself', but I'm also sure he's the only person who will appreciate it.
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VLC (Score:2)