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Media Player Nightingale Reaches 1.12.1; First Release Since Songbird
ilikenwf writes "The Nightingale developers have announced version 1.12.1 of the media player, forked from the now defunct Songbird (RIP). Improvements include a new localization infrastructure, enhanced stability, battery drain fixes for OS X, Unity integration fixes, libnotify integration, new first run pages, and more (Release Notes). If you already use Nightingale, the automatic update feature should have notified you of the release. If not, get the new version here."
Firstly, autoupdate notifiers suck - they randomly chew bandwidth, and send an indeterminate amount of information to ... someone.
Secondly, whats wrong with whatever applet your OS provides for music? What do all these dot-release version 3rd party players do?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So you trust Windows Media Player? I don't, it is like having a local miniture MPAA/RIAA in your computer.
I didn't realize there was a Linux port of this -- can't wait to try it as everything I've tried to date has been less than desirable in terms of complete, usable functionality that I'd expect of a mature application.
FooBar2000 clone with extra crap added.
Why should I leave Foobar2000?
Built on bloat, from the ground up. XUL-based apps are slow and hog memory like no other.
FooBar2000 clone with extra crap added.
Why should I leave Foobar2000?
Never heard of FooBar2000 but it looks another Freeware 3-Pane Window-95 Player, built on sound open source libraries...but then what isn't.
I am rocking Clementine at the moment..but I am giving Nightingale a try, it was a download away. I have and a quick glance I am impressed.
How does this compare? The last time I tried Songbird, it managed to out-bloat iTunes in RAM use and was slow as sludge.
Does anybody know if it supports writing POPM (ID3v2 ratings) tags?
I was just about to switch to Clementine-trunk for this, but if Nightingale has it, I might give that a spin. Or use both, since my metadata would be in the files now anyway.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'll stick with GMusicBrowser thanks, which by the way just a new version.
When you go to the website, you have many options for downloading. With Windows you get a .exe to download and install. With Mac, you get an image file. With Linux you get a tarball. A bald, naked tarball - just a bunch of files. No instructions, no readme, no clue whatsoever about how you get the thing to play music.
Some users might stumble across the nightingale file and, out of curiosity, try to run it. However, for all the effort that people have put into writing code for this thing, would it have been so difficult to write a single-line README file, sayinf "run the file called nightingale"?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Back in the 1.x days, Amarok was in my personal opinion, one of the best pieces of open source software around. I convinced several folks to try Linux based on that software alone by just describing the features (i.e. you play a song and it auto-fetches the lyrics & opens the wikipedia page of the band). For large music collections, you could use a real DB like MySQL or Postgres so it's performance blew everything out of the water. At the time, I was a complete Gnome user, and I would install KDE libraries on every PC I owned just for Amarok.
Unfortunately that all changed with Amarok 2. Every year or so, I install it and give it a go, but it's never come close to its former glory. The early releases of Amarok 2 were a complete regression, and even more recent ones are still not up to par with Amarok 1.4. For a few years, I kept maintaining ebuilds/patches in Gentoo for it to continue to compile, but eventually I gave up.
Fortunately some of the ports based on the original Amarok are doing well; my personal favorite is Clementine. These days I mostly use MPD and my cell phone (running MPDroid) for controlling my music collection, but I still miss Amarok at times.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
Just hung and crashed the system on very nice machine. Perhaps I will re download it.
Here is what I need: Replaygain, Crossfade, Stability. Preferably it will also be in a major distro repository so its signed and reasonably safe to install.
Amarok 1.4 had all of those things, yet there is no mention of them on the nightingale features page (which is a pathetic run-on about frameworks and such).
Still sticking with iTunes for now.
How does it compare to other players?
The most obvious one is VLC, which can play any format known to man, and is also cross platform. The only issue is that the UI isn't as clean because it is so powerful.
As I primarily using a Mac, I personally like to use Vox for audio, and Movist for video, for a variety of reasons (most of which boil down to 'I happen to like the way it does X or Y')
As a computer geek I'm happy that there's another option out there, especially an open source one.
But from an end user perspective, I have to ask things like, "What's special about it?" and "What does it give me that I can't do already?"
Still sticking with iTunes for now.
I hurt myself laughing. iTunes is an abomination of a bygone age. Every music player is better than iTunes.
You should try it. nothing beats Clementine(okay maybe GMusicBrowser) if you have a decent internet connection, and you manage your own MP3's. That said Nightingale is still a three pane browser it always was, although it is looking slick. you can see the screenshot on the front page. If you haven't looked at it since songbird you are into a pleasant surprise its fast. I am running this on a old single core atom on a large collection. Initial import did take a while but it is quick. As for iTunes I would say its a better than iTunes drop in replacement.
I followed link after link at their site - forum, wiki, blog, etc. Lots of technical stuff for developers & fans. Not a word about what it is, what it does, why I might want to have it. No contact/feedback link. It is any wonder that open software lives in a dark corner of civilization?
...omphaloskepsis often...