In January 2007 I published the GNOME Audio Player Shootout, a simple comparison of the options available to GNOME users for handling their day-to-day playback needs. It proved to be so popular that in December of 2008 I did a followup, excluding some abandoned players and adding some new ones. Though it hasn’t been quite two years yet, I thought it was time for another look at the state of audio players in the GNOME ecosystem.

This time around, I’ve got a heavy focus on new players, as there have been a number of new arrivals since my last shootout that show a lot of promise. This article will cover (in no particular order):

• Rhythmbox (0.12.8)
• Exaile (3.2.0)
• Banshee (1.7.4)
• Quod Libet (2.2.1)
• Guayadeque (0.2.6-svn1186)
• DeaDBeeF (0.4.1)
• aTunes (2.0.1)
• xnoise (0.1.10)
• GMusicBrowser (1.1.5-git)
• Aqualung (0.9~beta11)

All testing was done using an up-to-date Ubuntu Lucid x64 with all necessary repositories added, including some PPAs for the last versions of these players. Considered but not reviewed were Decibel Audio Player (hasn’t changed appreciably since last time), Gejengel (so unstable as to be unusable), and Bluemindo (still too simple to be useful).

Please note that this article necessarily incorporates some of my own biases. I am an avowed foobar2000 fan and you will notice that I tend to favor the utility-minded players over the media centers and iTunes clones. This article should still be useful, even if your own inclinations are different from mine.

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).

Another frontend, cdrtfe (cdrtools frontend), was a freeware project that fairly recently opened its source, and I’ve been using it ever since. It hasn’t got the best interface in the world, but it’s one of the most powerful little programs I’ve seen in a long time.

Please note that the version of cdrtfe that I use is 1.3pre1 which is not the stable 1.2x series. Any bugs which I describe should not be ascribed to the stable series, but considered bugs in development until proved otherwise.

Interface

I’m going to get my criticisms with this program out of the way, because they’re mostly superficial. One gripe that I have with cdrtfe is that the options are not organized well. As you can see in the screenshots, there is a button marked “settings” in the right pane which controls options for the entire program: you wouldn’t assume that based on the button’s placement right below the physical device options. In the “middle” pane of sorts, there’s another button marked “Options” which controls project-type-specific options—except when there are other buttons for other options like the disc filesystem…. which is, admittedly, a lot of options and probably deserves its own area. But you may have also noticed the grey or block text to the right of those buttons, which are clickable/toggleable. These are also options, and they are all also available by clicking on the “Options” button, which has both them and other options. Do you see what I mean about an inconsistent user interface?

Believe me, I love having all these options available to me. I hate programs which abstract options so much that the full potential is lost (GNOME, for instance). But I also like sane options layouts (VLC is another example of a bad options design). With a bit of cleanup work, this problem could vanish.

I would also like to see the GUI updated to take advantage of other features that Windows offers. You might have noticed that, except for the top menu bar, none of the internal fonts of cdrtfe take advantage of ClearType (font smoothing), which makes the program look dated and unattractive. I see this every so often, especially with install wizards, and it still rather galls me: ClearType’s been around for 6 years now, and there’s really no excuse not to have your GUI look like it belongs in this century.

Those of you who have used BurnAtOnce will appreciate the spartan output view for cdrtfe: there are no fancy progress bars or animated widgets here: the bottom pane of the program outputs text data about the current operation, and that’s it. For me, that’s just fine: I personally don’t think that widgets are necessary for a good burning program.

Projects

cdrtfe is organized by function with tabs. Unlike programs like InfraRecorder, which have a more or less singular look and one toggles between functions (e.g. audio disc, data disc, &tc.) with a menu click, cdrtfe likes to clearly separate each mode into its own area. For people who never use anything except the Audio Disc and Data Disc functions, this may seem a little much, but rest assured that you never have to click on tabs you don’t need.

Data

The data disc view is fairly self-explanatory: there is a tree view in the left pane, a file view in the middle pane, and device options in the right pane. There’s an option to tweak the filesystem, which you will likely only have to do if (a) you’re a power-user and have specific needs or (b)> you have deeply-nested directories in your project and need an ISO-4 filesystem.

As you can see, cdrtfe also includes a verification option, which has grown to be a must for me: until I switched to Taiyo Yuden optical media, I sometimes had issues with bad burns, and with the verification switch, I would at least know about it.

Audio

The audio disc function is one area where cdrtfe has surpassed Infra Recorder by leaps and bounds. As you may have noticed in the corresponding screenshot, I have three different types of encoded files in my project, namely MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and FLAC. cdrtfe comes with support for all three right out of the box. It doesn’t rely on written plugins like Infra Recorder, but instead comes bundled with codecs (easily swapped with the latest versions, if you like) which handle the files prior to burning.

The playlist interface is another area where cdrtfe has surpassed Infra Recorder, because as of version 0.42.1, Infra Recorder didn’t have support for playlist reordering: when I tried to drag items in the list to a different position, the program would exit silently. cdrtfe has no such problems.

As a warning: I’ve experienced—only once—an event where cdrtfe would error out when trying to decode some mp3s for burning. My guess is that this has to do with the madplay decoder and not the program, but it might still be something that you run into every now and then. I was able to decode the files manually using foobar2000 (one could theoretically use just about anything) and then they burned just fine.

XCD

I don’t have much to say about this function, since I never use it. It’s likely that you never have, either. Ostensibly, it’s a way to squeeze more space out of a regular CD-R by remove a data correction layer. See the Doom9 thread for more details.

CD/DVD-RW tools

This item should be fairly self-explanatory, though I admit I haven’t had to use rewritable discs in quite some time: optical media has become so cheap that I don’t mind making a few coasters. But that’s beyond the point: cdrtfe fully supports erasing rewritable media in both modes: Table of Contents only, and complete (similar to a “quick” or “full” format for hard drives).

CD Info

The underlying libraries of cdrtfe can also give detailed information about both your optical drive and your disk. You can opt to view any of these on the “CD Info” tab, which can be useful when trying to figure out if a disk is a dud or not.

DAE

DAE stands for “digital audio extraction” and it’s a fancy way of saying “CD Ripper.” This is the only part of the program which didn’t work for me, as I was treated to an application error and couldn’t proceed. Hopefully, it will be fixed in later versions, although I must admit that I would likely never use it anyway, as better tools exist for such like (e.g. EAC).

CD Image

Another very useful feature, the CD Image tab gives users the ability to either make ISO images from physical CDs or DVDs, as well as burning both ISO and bin/cue images. If you work with a lot of esoteric file formats (Nero’s NRG, Alcohol’s MDS/MDF, &tc.), then this isn’t for you. But if, like me, the majority of formats you burn are ISO, this is a perfect solution.

(Super) VideoCD

cdrtfe has the ability to burn three different formats of VideoCD (like DVDs, but with regular 700MB CDs): v1.0, v1.2, and SVCD, which requires a differently-encoded MPEG2 file and is of a higher resolution. In all honesty, the age of this format has passed, and it was always much more popular in Asia than it was in the states, but it’s nice, anyway, that the option still exists. Most likely, you’ll be wanting the next option.

Video DVD

This is just what it sounds like: cdrtfe can burn a standards-compliant video DVD when given the right source. It won’t do any sort of encoding for you: you’ll need a special DVD authoring program to create a correctly-formated TS_VIDEO (for instance) directory.

Other thoughts

Like a lot of hobby projects, cdrtfe has its problems and its quirks: likewise, it’s hardly the sort of hand-holding program that will wipe your nose for you while it converts, edits, and burns the entire contents of your hard drive for you. It wasn’t made for that purpose: in grand Unix tradition, it’s a tool which does one thing: it burns stuff to optical media. The fact that it has a few extra features (even if they don’t all work) is just a little bonus.

Take a look at the screenshots: if you like what you see, then cdrtfe might be just the thing for you. If it’s too ugly, there’s always Infra Recorder. If that’s still too difficult for you, well, you can always drop a hundred dollars for crap.

The search for the perfect audio player on the Linux desktop seems to be on par with finding the Holy Grail. The problem is that everyone has features they have to have, especially if they’re migrating over from Windows. Gone are the days when XMMS, a simple WinAmp clone, sufficed for just about everyone in Linux. In the past two years, we’ve seen more whizbang audio players and media managers than I could easily count, and all of them racing desperately to (a) tie into media devices like iPods and (b) tie into social network constructs like podcasts, listen.fm, and whathaveyou.

Historically, my player of choice has been Amarok, which arguably leads the way in all these features, as well as having a stunning interface. For some people, however, it’s too bulky. Others dislike the fact that it’s a KDE application, meaning those who use an different desktop like GNOME—I include myself in this group—have a great application that doesn’t really match or integrate.

Slowly but surely, though, the GNOME/Gtk+ players are catching up. I’ve experimented in the past, only to find them inconsistent. There was no single player that provided everything; rather, each had a few strong points and a few weak points. Many are based on Python, which make them slower than a native application like Amarok. Others had clunky interfaces—I have yet to find one that provides a tree-based library viewer like Amarok. I also have yet to find one that can hook into a database like MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of using a slower SQLite (which is arguably fine for small media libraries, but not so quick once it gets up to 250GB….)

What follows is a brief look at the major players in the GNOME player market, though limited in scope to audio players, and not general media players which can play audio.

Audacious

Audacious

toggle thumbnails

Audacious is one of several forks of the code for XMMS, an environment-agnostic media player which sought very much to emulate the look and functionality of WinAmp. For years, it was the de facto audio player for Linux: there wasn’t the panoply of audio players that we have today. Insofar as the goal of Audacious was to keep XMMS when development stopped in favor of XMMS2, it has achieved this: Audacious seems to me almost indistinguishable from XMMS (as you can clearly see from the screenshots). One drawback is the limited visual space, requiring the antiquated ticker technique to display meta information.

Audacious supposedly supports Winamp “Classic” skins (i.e. bitmap skins from v2.x), though of course this makes it virtually impossible to scale the window gracefully—the program doesn’t take advantage of a nice, modern graphics toolkit for its UI.

The options screen is intuitive, and offers a limited number of options for customization. There are also a number of default plugins, many of which are merely for decoding support and others for visualization—in fairness, though, the supported filetypes is more impressive than that offered by any gstreamer or xine-based player.

For diehard XMMS fans, Audacious is a good option for fresh code without any substantial change to core or interface. For those who like better desktop integration or more features, it has little to offer.

Banshee

Banshee is a relative newcomer to the scene, but it has quickly gained traction as a popular player—ever since Novell/Suse began pushing Mono with their distributions, this little C#-based audio player has been developing rapidly. I tested v0.11.3, and while I was able to appreciate Banshee for its relative merits, it’s clear to me that it’s still a project in its infancy: it’s incredibly slick-looking, but it’s support for music libraries is iffy, and I find the player window to be lacking in customization.

Upon first run, the user is given the option is importing a folder into a music library, which is fine, but I couldn’t find an easy way of synchronizing after changes (Amarok has a “Scan for Changes” button, for instance). Also, its support for library monitoring was broken and removed several versions.

The breadth of plugins for Banshee right now is pretty sparse: there’s an official plugin tree that was recently merged into the core, but no comprehensive plugin or scripting repository like some other players have. Banshee’s configuration is sparse, as well, offering very little in the way of customization options: one neat feature, however, is Banshee’s CD importing ability (that is, if you don’t use some other tool like SoundJuicer or Grip).

Selecting the properties dialog for a given track will present a two-tabbed window: one tab offers some metadata-editing capability, though only within a given set of predefined fields. The second tab is a details pane with information about the file itself, as well as some usage-tracking from the SQLite database that Banshee uses.

One of my major gripes with Banshee is the way it doesn’t allow easy library browsing: the user library is presented in the sidebar as a single playlist, and clicking it loads the entire library into the main window. The break down the library, you have to make custom playlists and save them.

In terms of speed, Banshee rates a solid “moderate”: though it is technically an interpreted language, C# via Mono seems somewhat faster than Python, and certainly moreso than Java; however, whether its the language, the code, or the SQLite backend, large libraries seem to contribute to a massive slowdown of Banshee (this will be a theme…), especially since the “Music Library” playlist which is created loads the entire library at once. This, I think, is a poor design decision.

Banshee does have one good thing going for it, which is that it supports not only gstreamer, but also the Helix engine for playback (xine is sadly lacking). To me, Banshee shines more as a audio player than a jukebox: it’s media management and library functions just aren’t developed enough to be a serious contender.