I’m getting ready to do my 12.04 Music Player Review! I do one about every 2 years or so. For the purposes of this review I’m ignoring MPD/XMMS2/WinAmp style players, just because they don’t interest me. Also they need to be free software available in Ubuntu (or Fedora, Debian).
This review will cover:
- quod libet
- banshee
- gogglesmm
- exaile
- Decibel-audio-player
- rhythmbox
- musique
- listen
- juk
- guayadeque
- gmusicbrowser
- clementine
- amarok
Excluded because they haven’t had any development since I last reviewed them:
- alsaplayer
- bluemindo
- pygmy
- glurp
- gbemol
- minirok
Among various user testing (I hope to eliminate some based on that), I hope to test:
- CPU Usage [Like this]
- Memory Usage [Similar to this]
- Load testing (at what point does it start skipping)
Any suggestions of other players or other items to test?
How about deadbeef – deadbeef.sourceforge.net/about.html
More audio players: audacious (a GTK+ GUI is the default), Abraca, lxmusic, and gxmms2 (clients for XMMS2).
I suggest also testing how well they cope with remembering your “session”. kill -9 the player, then start it again. Does it remember the playlist you were on, which song, approximate position etc.
One problem I have always had in the past is players being completely unreliable with network streams. If anything at all happened to the network they would decide they had reached the end of the stream. There would be no retries, reconnects etc. In many cases even if I restarted the stream I couldn’t get them to skip to a certain position. You can test this by suspend and then result of the machine, and possibly just ifdown/up of the network interface.
It is also worth testing if they remember your position in multiple different items (audiobook/podcast style).
+1 on the remembering playback position.
I listen to audiobooks on my netbook, and it’s a pain when the player doesn’t remember the position. Some players don’t even remember the last played track…
miro?
NOISE / BeatBox – elementary styled music player…
pogo: https://launchpad.net/pogo
Tomahawk-player is also a good candidate http://www.tomahawk-player.org/
Pragha http://pragha.wikispaces.com/
Nightingale — It picks up where Songbird left off.
http://getnightingale.com/
In my oppinion Deadbeef is the best. Everything else it just seems like bloatware to me.