Monthly Archives: August 2009

>Music Player Review: Heavyweights

Posted by on August 24, 2009 4 comments

>Exaile has some features I really like. Here is a screen shot to get you started

Some of the features which rock.

  • Blacklists – put a song/artist/album on the blacklist and have it not play while randomizing your whole collection
  • Dynamic playlists additions – adds new songs to playlists automagically
  • Has significant plug-in selection

Exaile also has an Equalizer, Radio support, Album Art Collector, smart playlists, and more. It can also bring your music collection together from multiple locations. Some plugins include Alarm Clock, Desktop Cover (Displays the current album cover on the desktop), and HTTP Server Control.

My previous post details why Exaile is being removed from ths review.

Ubuntu Users, Get Exaile

Exaile is inspired from Amarok. Amarok uses the most memory of those that remain by more than double, it’s around 70 mb on my machine and it almost lost on my CPU review, so it gets to be in the heavy weight category with Exaile. It seems like every time I try Amarok, I end up wanting to try KDE again (I’ll try in Karmic, KDE 4.3 should be stable, right?).


Amarok really rocks the “Internet” with Cool Streams, Jamendo, Librivox.org (free audio books), magnatune, Opml Directory, Shoutcast Directory. Also available are Ampache and mp3tunes.

It definitely has dynamic playlists but doesn’t appear to have blacklists or plugins. It does however have Random that well.. let’s you make it not Random. Random that favors tracks that have higher ratings, etc, which is honestly how most people would actually like “Random” to work.

The heavyweight champion of the music player review is….. well…
Amarok if you use Kubuntu (KDE)
Exaile if you use Ubuntu or Xubuntu (XFCE)

Of course depending on your needs this changes completely and I really can’t tell if I like Blacklists more or Amarok’s “Random”.

Who’s left? Banshee, gmusicbrowser, Quod Libet, Rhythmbox
Read more of my reviews

>Music Player Review: CPU Performance

Posted by on August 12, 2009 16 comments

>

  • The task: playing 7 minutes of a FLAC file.
  • The tester: Phoronix test suite – specifically “MONITOR=cpu.usage phoronix-test-suite benchmark idle”
  • The tested: Amarok, Banshee, gmusicbrowser, Quod Libet, Exaile, Rhythmbox


This chart is neat, the indicator in the middle is where the average lies (out of 7 minutes) and the bottom of the line is where the low is, top is where the high is.

If you want to, you can look at their exact charts below. A bit about the results, followed by some possibly relevant tech details.

Amarok
It is the premier music player on the “heaviest” open source desktop KDE. Btw, I was using Xine. Qt.

Exaile
Being one of the most CPU intensive it is concerning to me that Xubuntu is considering moving to it. Python, gStreamer.

Banshee
4th Place but quite close to the lead. Mono, gStreamer.

gMusicBrowser
Low of 1.01%, High of 9.00%. Perl?, Direct to libs/mplayer for playback?

Quod Libet
Biggest range, but also lowest average. Odd. Gstreamer, Python.

Rhythmbox
Low and High tied with gMusicPlayer. .15 less average. Nice low usage for the default player. C, Gstreamer.


You should be able to use the phoronix test suite’s idle and monitor mode to get similar results. So, the question is, am I kicking someone out for this? For now, Exaile is out.

(but I plan to look at this in more detail specific to Exaile and send my results to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Specifications/Karmic/DefaultMusicPlayer, as well as doing an indepth goodbye review like usual)

Amarok is close to the line as well, but it will stay in for now. Disagree? Please do comment.

Please do attempt to reproduce, preferably on low end hardware so the variations will be more pronounced (as soon as Jaunty is available on my OLPC, I will rerun these on it).

>Music Player Review: VideoLAN – VLC Media Player

Posted by on August 8, 2009 No comments

>VideoLAN Client (VLC) is quite an amazing and powerful program. You can play DVDs, stream things from here to there, do about 50,000 other advanced (and simple) things. In recent versions they added a media library.

To access the media library you actually have to go Playlists -> Show Playlists. Also any settings for randomness or repeating appear to disappear every time you close it.

Some more awesome VLC capabilities:

  • Shoutcast audio/video – Under Playlist -> Additional Sources
  • Streaming video from one source to another (or to a file)
  • Viewing your webcam (and streaming it elsewhere)
  • Playing DVDs
  • Playing practically any video/audio file

VLC although awesome, really doesn’t belong in a music play review. I left it in just to test out the new features in the 1.0 series (or close enough). I’m going to be watching a lot of the shoutcast items in the near future. Also available for Windows and Mac. Yes I realize this is a very short review, but it shouldn’t have been here anyway.
Get VLC Ubuntu Users.

Who’s left? Amarok, Banshee, gmusicbrowser, Quod Libet, Exaile, Rhythmbox
What’s Next? Performance.

>Music Player Review: Music Player Daemon Explored

Posted by on August 6, 2009 7 comments

>So, two Music Player Daemon (MPD) clients made it through my first review waves. Which was then followed by a “face off” or two. I generally try to make my reviews geared towards people who don’t want to have to do technical things to make music play. Music Player Daemon likely requires editing 1 text file and possibly restarting a service or two. If that scares you, read at least the next two Q&As before running on your way.

What is a daemon?
A daemon is an application that runs without a user directly seeing it (in the background) but that other applicatins the user can see ask it to do things for them.

So… What is a Music Player Daemon?
An application that organizes and plays your music, that can be controlled through various applications that you can actually see and use. All MPD clients get to use the same music library and control what is currently playing (yes you can open more than one client at the same time!)

Wait.. What about the applications that I can see?
Sonata – “An elegant music client for MPD.” Here is the info screen. It seems to follow a KISS (Keep it simple, stupid) philosophy. Sonata works (or should) out of the box if you have MPD locally set up and working.

Ario – “GTK Client for MPD” – Yes they have a technical tag line, bah! However it does win on features. Here is the Ario info screen:
The “Currently Playing” can always be shown in the bottom pane. Here is where Ario wins.. umm.. some cake:
As well Ario has a bunch of other cool features (more than Sonata).

Memory Usage (just so you saw wow compared to some others):
MPD – 11.1 MiB (which really should be added to the one you are using)
Sonata – 16.6 MiB (respectable – 27.7 in total)
Ario – 4.8 Mib (wow…)

Of course MPD clients require a bit more config. Let’s get you installed and running Ario!
First install mpd
Then install Ario || or install Sonata

Hold ALT with F2. Then Copy in: gksudo gedit /etc/mpd.conf
Change the 8th line

music_directory “/var/lib/mpd/music/”

to point to wherever your music is stored, such as

music_directory “/home/your-username/Music”

Then save it. By default all users on the machine will get access to play music from the collection. (You can also enable remote access)

Then, hopefully just start up Ario and get playing :)

The music applet (add to your gnome panel) can also control MPD directly, so you can actually close all the other MPD clients after setting up a playlist and just control it through that!

But still, I’m not sure if MPD is ready for the non-technical user, so I am going to exclude it from the rest of the review, for now. Please do share your thoughts if you think otherwise. If you are a non-techie and love, I’d love to hear that.

Who’s left? Amarok, Banshee, gmusicbrowser, Videolan Client, Quod Libet, Exaile, Rhythmbox