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Hell, just use mpg123.

http://www.mpg123.de/

Command line. Works on all platforms.

Really? I have 4,244 files consuming 41 gig of space and I find it to be neither slow nor memory intensive. Right now for me (and it's been running and constantly playing a few days now) it's using 41.8mb total (which includes the shared memory with KDE libraries so its actual footprint is smaller, though I can't tell you exactly how much smaller). It launches in about 2 seconds and all of its features respond instantly.

Compare that with iTunes on the same hardware (I have identical machines side-by-side one running Windows, and the other Ubuntu Feisty, using Synergy to control them). This takes around 10 seconds to launch and with exactly zero songs in its library consumes 38.6 meg.

So in comparing like for like, my 4,000+ song 41gig Amarok is faster with a similar memory footprint to the substantially less featureful iTunes with an empty library.

So I'm not really sure what your basis for comparison is. Maybe you're running AmaroK under Gnome and noticing startup sluggishness due to the KDE libraries needing to be initialized? (which you don't experience if you run AmaroK under KDE since these are initialized when you log in, and also the reported memory stays the same, but actual memory footprint is much lower since in that desktop so many of the libraries which count against AmaroK's reported memory are also shared with a variety of other apps)

The only thing I can think is that perhaps you're comparing it to XMMS or Winamp 3.x series (each eating under 10 meg of RAM and starting virtually instantly). Certainly if you want a music player that does nothing but play music you won't be satisfied with the performance loss to music juke boxes like AmaroK and iTunes. But in that case, may I suggest mpg123 as your primary music player since this will be even smaller and faster yet!

• mgp123 -- you know what for.

Key features of the Network Audio System include:

• Device-independent audio over the network
• Lots of audio file and data formats
• Can store sounds in server for rapid replay
• Extensive mixing, separating, and manipulation of audio data
• Simultaneous use of audio devices by multiple applications
• Use by a growing number of ISVs
• Small size
• Free! No obnoxious licensing terms

• Festival - The Festival Speech Synthesis System.
• mpg123 - a command line MP3 player
• GAIM - a free AOL IM client
• OpenOffice (StarOffice) - the (now opensourced) StarOffice Suite has built-in NAS support for the Solaris and Linux Platforms.
• The Qt Library - from Trolltech supports NAS natively. You will need to pass the '-system-nas-sound' to './configure' before building.
• libSDL - SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer library, now has native NAS support thanks to Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8}
• XAnim - the X Animation viewer
• XBoing - a blockout type X game
• XPilot - a multiplayer client/server space warfare game
• Xemacs - the best cross-plaform, cross-language IDE
• Alsaplayer - A NAS Output plugin written by Erik Inge Bols\x{00F8} is now supplied with the Alsaplayer distribution.
• X MultiMedia System (XMMS). A NAS Output plugin written by Willem Monsuwe is available at ftp://ftp.stack.nl/pub/users/willem/
• Wine. A NAS plugin written by Nicolas Escuder is now available with the WINE distrubution.

> a new person arrives
all the songs a rated already so how does the new person's choice make much difference

> tastes change
that new limp biskit tune was popular last month but now everyone is sick of hearing it. in three months though ppl will say "yeah, that ch00n r0x0r5" when they hear it (or at least they would in my irc channel :)

personally I'd go for a web server interface and mpg123 as the engine and cobble together some scripts

tbh so long as there aren't loads of tunes ppl hate then your probably just as well off running it in shuffle mode and tweak the playlist as you go along.

if you use a webserver for your mp3's then users can use xmms and winamp to play a tune that's not on the playlist

I don't know much about ogg, as I use mp3 for most of my music encoding. I've played around with various bit rates and finaly settled on what I felt was the best for me in terms of quality vs size.

I now encode all of my music at a variable bit rate 64-256kbps with lame. Lame 3.70 does a really good job of this and produces files (at least for the types of music I listen to) that sound very good. For the most part, they encode smaller than a 192kbps, as the average bit rate used is less. As a check, peeking at John Coletrane's Giant Steps, the average bit rate is right around 150. The bulk of my music averages between 160 and 192kbps.

The cool thing about vbr is that if the file needs more than that, is can use up to 256kbps to help make the harder to encode spots sound better. So I guess the worst case size you could get would be a song completely encoded at 256kbps (but I can't say that has ever happened).

I have a hard time telling these vbr 64-256kbps files apart from the orignal cd. Sometimes I can tell, but it is rare and difficult. However, IANAA (I am not an audiophile), so doing your own tests should help.

All of your standard tools should support vbr files. Xmms does a fine job. I did need to upgrade mpg123 to pre0.59s, however.

Anyway, consider vbr before you go straight to 300kbps.

On top of that it will run on BeOS and MacOS, making it the most cross-platform mp3 player available.

MP3 support for linux has been around for ages. Take a look at mpg123 for instance.

try mpg123 or xmms, both of these can stream mp3s. If these won't work for you, there's always http://freshmeat.net/.

--Phil

Where the pitfalls come from is what is used to rip and encode the MP3's. For the best digital extraction from the CD, CD-Paranoia is the best I've found which doesn't produce those click..click..click sounds like heard when using crappy rippers (it can even recover scratched and damaged audio CD's, too!). For MPEG-layerIII encoding, make sure to use something which produces an exact bit equavelent to Fraunhofer's output like BladeEnc. Lastly, reproduction is very important, too! Use something which produces correct quality reconstruction like MPG123.

You may have noticed that these are all command-line progs. I stay away from the eye-candy stuff unless I know the underlying engine really is quality. But, only those packages mentioned above are really known to be quality(, but they do have some third-party GUI front-ends if you are into that).

Happy Listening!

o
{:')
o

--Phil

BTW- For best possible audio, look into audio-DVD's. They are quite impressive when mastered correctly! There isn't much of a music selection available yet, though.