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'm very picky when it comes to music players, so I tested: Rythmbox (obviously, it comes with Ubuntu), Jajuk, aTunes, the new Exaile and Banshee, Songbird, Guayadeque, GMusicBrowser and Amarok 1.4 and 2
Rhythmbox is the default on Ubuntu and these days I find VLC’s user interface too limited when it comes to playing music files. I’d rather stick with Rhythmbox or if I am playing songs found in one directory, I could make do with Totem. But if you want more options in managing playlists for your mediaplayer you need more than that.
Goggles Music Manager is a music collection manager and player that automatically categorizes your music files based on genre, artist, album, and song. Basically, it's a simple music player that does it's job and works really fast.
Based on Fedora, VortexBox is a free, open source (GPL v3), quick-install ISO that turns your unused computer into an easy-to-use music server/jukebox. Once VortexBox has been loaded on an unused PC, it will automatically rip CDs to FLAC and MP3 files, ID3 tag the files , and download the cover art.
"I recently decided to begin ripping all of my newly purchased CDs into FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec. Music files in FLAC format sound better than those using lossy compression formats such as MP3--plus, FLAC is an open standard. The only downside is that my 80GB Apple iPod doesn't play FLAC files. Happily, we can fix that..." with free software!
Exaile is a music player aiming to be similar to KDE’s Amarok, but for GTK+ and written in Python. It incorporates many of the cool things from Amarok (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm submission support, and optional iPod support via a plugin.
Did you ever downloaded a single APE or FLAC file consisting of multiple songs? If so, it's quite annoying to try and listen to only one song. But you can split the files into multiple songs exactly like in the cue file (each song's start and end time are saved in the cue file, so we'll know where to cut the big file).
Listening to the music played back from original audio CDs on a home computer creates clear discomfort — the CD drive is being blocked and the CDs have to be changed again and again (unless you have a home jukebox). Now it’s time we learn to rip (grab) our own audio collection and save it to a hard disk in the form of .mp3, .ogg, or .flac files.
Amarok is a wonderful application for managing and playing your music collection, but the default settings aren't optimized for speed when it comes to large collections of music. The problems are especially noticeable while trying to use the search box.