Re: MP3 Player for Linux

["Samuel Baldwin" <user=1502@nabble.blu.org>]

 I used Amarok for ages (I even helped draw icons for them, versions 
ago), but once I stopped using KDE, I realised it was silly just to 
install something to play music that had about 50 dependencies. My 
favourite feature was being able to hit Meta-C and pause my music, 
then start it again. (Alas, this stopped when I got my Model M, no 
Meta key.) I tried Audacious for a while, which is just an XMMS clone 
with some arguably `better' features. Then I used `moc' [1] for a 
while. Nice ncurses UI, played everything I wanted to locally. The 
problem arose when I tried to stream flac files, though. Just didn't 
work. For a while I used mpg123, ogg123, and flac123 to play music, 
but those didn't support streaming at all. (Or at least flac123 
didn't.) I wrote a very messy perl script to handle it all, too, but 
that's long since trashed. 

A long while back I tried mpd, but it was very buggy for me. Recently 
I tried it again, and it works absolutely fantastically. I'm using it 
now. There's some minor setup (editing a configuration file), but 
anyone should be able to handle that. I keep all my music on one of my 
servers and stream it with gnump3d [2]. (It's handled every format 
I've thrown at it, with the proper libraries installed.) Since gnump3d 
is perl, it runs just fine on various BSD and Linux distros with very 
minor setup. Just point it at your collection (again, minor editing of 
a configuration file, from a sample), run it, and you have a very nice 
web interface to access your music on a port of your choosing. It 
gives you m3u files when you try to play something, which I keep a 
collection of in /home/samuel/audio/playlists. Generally it's as 
simple as loading the playlist with ncmpc. If I kept everything 
locally, it'd be even easier (ncmpc has a very nice ncurses UI for 
selecting music and adding it to the playlist.) 

The very best part about this setup, however, is that because mpd is a 
daemon, I can control it from various methods. I generally don't have 
a player window open at all. If I want to check the song playing, I 
can just punch `mpc' into a console and it spits out the info. To play 
and pause, I bound Control-Alt-T to pause and Control-Alt-N to play 
(on dvorak, so J and K on Qwerty) in Xmonad with the lines: 

    , ((modMask .|. controlMask,  xK_t     ), spawn "mpc pause") 
    , ((modMask .|. controlMask,  xK_n     ), spawn "mpc play") 

in my xmonad.hs. (As well as other things such as setting the volume 
and skipping tracks). It's really the nicest setup I've ever had with 
my music. Never came across a format that it can't play. (Mainly mp3, 
ogg, flac, mpc, and wav.) 

Sorry for the sales pitch, I'm rather passionate about my music software. 

[1] http://moc.daper.net/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnump3d/
-- 
Samuel 'Shardz' Baldwin 
Shardz's Igloo: staticfree.info/~samuel/ 
Registered GNU/Linux User #410639 

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and 
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is 
believed to be clean. 

_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss