It’s been close to two years since I wrote GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a visual and textual comparison of some the best available audio players for the GNOME desktop.
As is usually the case in the world of free software, a lot has happened since then (and yet, in a strange way, things have stayed exactly the same). I decided to revisit some of those players and see how they’ve progressed. Some of them listed last time haven’t seen any appreciable development, and have been left off.
I realize that I am totally ignoring the daemon-based players (read: Music Player Daemon, XMMS2); this is by design, since those players open up a whole new can of worms. Suffice it to say that if you’ve decided on and XMMS2 or MPD-based player and successfully configured it, you probably don’t need any advice on choosing software.
The following programs will be covered in this review (development versions):
- BMPx (0.40.14)
- Rhythmbox (0.11.6)
- Exaile (2.99.1-svn)
- Banshee (1.4.1)
- Quod Libet (2.0)
- Decibel (1.00)
- Songbird (1.0)
- Listen (0.6~svn1044)
All of the testing was done on a fresh install (and update) of Ubuntu 8.10 in VirtualBox, using a small representative sample of my music collection (some modern, some classical, in Vorbis, MP3, and FLAC).
Fantastic reviews. Can’t say I have much experience of any of these players, largely sticking to Amarok and foobar2000, but I’m tempted to take some for a test drive after reading this.
Incidentally, the layout is really nicely done, the multi-page breakup works particularly well (though there’s a slippery &m[d]ash; on the 9th page).
Fixed, thanks.
I know I’m late on commenting (came from google search), but I’d like to add that while with other players adding/saving your favorite internet radio stations is a pain, in Exaile you can just open the downloaded *.pls file and save the streams into a playlist. Does any other player work well (multiple streams per station, pls file importing) with internet radio?
I’m not sure about multiple streams per station, but Banshee has
.plsimporting abilities (and other formats, as well).