Slashdot Mirror
Groove Basin: Quest For the Ultimate Music Player
An anonymous reader writes "Andrew Kelley was a big fan of the Amarok open source music player. But a few years ago, its shortcomings were becoming more annoying and the software's development path no longer matched with the new features he wanted. So he did what any enterprising hacker would do: he started work on a replacement. Three and a half years later, his project, Groove Basin, has evolved into a solid music player, and it's still under active development. Kelley has now posted a write-up of his development process, talking about what problems he encountered, how he solved them, and how he ended up contributing code to libav."
Get an old copy, because it still whips the llama's ass.
sig: sauer
Why use my phone when I'm at home? Clementine on my desktop won't drain my phone battery.
A fork of Amarok. http://www.clementine-player.org/
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Was I just listening to streaming pirated music before the "server down" errors started?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Server fall down, go boom.
Whelp, at least we know what kind of porn you're not watching.
:-P
I just wanted to say, this is relevant to my interests
It is only barely relevant, but I fully agree with this AC. FOSS programs, if they're ever going to garner sufficient usership needs to have easily pronounceable names because, like it or not, word of mouth is the most trusted form of marketing.
Some people like to keep their interests neatly divided.
Personally, when I open my music player, I want to see only songs, not videos or what have you. And I want to see them divided by folders, not by artist, by album, genre or whatever. Folders are way easier to organize - at least for those of us that kept a fairly organized selection from the start. So my (admittedly retro) software bundle of choice is Dolphin > Totem. Extremely simple and with a fairly clean interface, just the way I want it. I think I'm in a small niche, though.
I can't wait until someone re-invents the wheel. Again.
The Ultimate Music Player would be a solid port of Foobar2000 to Linux. Groove Basin...not so much.
So its web based? Thanks, but no thanks.
Call me old fashioned, but I like my web browsers and music separate.
I do web development for a living, and I've even built my own front end to mpd in HTML5 (and a backend controller, so technically not a front end to mpd the daemon, but it handles the UI part). Its integrated into my HTPC software. I moved to a WD TV live about a year ago, for Netflix, but I've since got netflix working on my HTPC (via Pipelight) so I'm moving back when I can get some new, more efficient hardware for it.
Back to the point, i'd rather it run in the background, with a UI tucked away I can pull up with a hotkey or mouse click in the system tray.
I know I could wrap this in a simple webkit window, if I really wanted to, and it may already do just that, but still, do not want.
Everything libav supports.
288kb of optimized, "true to original" playback.
http://www.un4seen.com/
Only downside? No scaling options for dpi :(.
I don't know what he has against Amarok, he could have the same funcionality (or at least very close to) if he had writen some plugins for Amarok.
Actually it would be better, because lots of other people could use it without the need to change players.
The one thing I miss for Amarok is a good Android remote control with a widget, there is one at the Play store but it is old as hell and doesn't have a widget and the source code is not published.
So a usable web interface to manage a playlist of my media collection, sounds interesting. Now I just need an easy way to pipe the audio into my house and turn it off when watching something on TV. An XBMC plugin would do it.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I prefer it the same, and to the point of building my own software to do it properly.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
DeadBeef thats is http://deadbeef.sourceforge.ne...
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Yes. Totem for audio, Rhythmbox for streaming, VLC for video.
You got the bad one, Winamp 2.95 was the good one.
When they upgraded to 3.0 it go too bloated and slow. I can start up that Winamp and its footprint is so small you would be surprised, running with an 8MB MP3 loaded and it still took up less than 10 MB. I can run Solitaire on my PC and listen to music and the card game is a bigger resource hog.
It was around 3.0 when AOL bought it and required they throw in everything but the kitchen sink and bloat it that it died.
People like me who like to play music in the background while doing other work/play, and so don't want some wonky code in VLC making it chew up a whole core to play an MP3?
(I still swear by it for videos, though)
If you use windows, tomahawk is really cool. it can play from pandora etc..., connect to Gtalk etc....
on Linux I prefer mpg123. just kidding!
I prefer it the same, and to the point of building my own software to do it properly.
I've gone one better - I whipped up a little tcl/tk (wish) script that uses the locatedb to show me my music files*, so I never have to click "open" or "import" or any of that crap. I simply type parts of the filename that I remember into a box and it only displays the matches :-)
* and mpg123 to play them
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
My music is also organised by folders, but Musicbrainz Picard does all the heavy lifting of sorting stuff into the right folders.
I use Amarok and do use the library feature most of the time but every now and then I drop back to folder view for certain albums that confuse Amarok (Age of Wonders 3 OST...)
I'm sure it works for the author and I'm all for 'if you can't find what you want, build it yourself', but I'm also sure he's the only person who will appreciate it.
Not sure what's wrong with the Swiss Army knife of media players. It wouldn't surprise me if it could actually play a spreadsheet.
Winamp classic got it right. It looks like a tape player, it works like a tape player, only it plays mp3's. It doesnt eat up my whole system to do it, even when i put a 1000+ song playlist in it. And it doesnt try to be my all encompassing multi-media front-end / librarian.
Well it does.. but you can turn that shit off.
VLC is great too... except it chokes if you throw more than a couple dozen files at it.
eedjit.
The player analyses each track so that all songs are uniformly loud, not that it alters your volume setting. This is so, if you have 2 tracks playing next to each other - the first quiet, the second mastered to be loud - you won't hurt yourself if you turned up the volume to hear the first one ok.
MIne's also done in tcl/tk (8.6), but it's a full blown graphics job which has playlist capabilities. At the cli I usually just call a pre-made playlist.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I don't have to open my music player. Setup mpd so my music is "always on", connect to it with Cantata, vlc, sonata, mocp, my Android, etc. Pretty much anything that can connect/output the stream. Use conky on the desktop to show what's playing.
- Good things come to he who waits... but, but Arch Linux FTW!
It's called Replaygain and it can be disabled if you don't like it.
Eedjit.
Eat the rich.
The final release before Winamp was officially "shut down" by AOL and subsequently purchased is 5.666 (note the three sixes, not two) and can be found here.
I use mpd as desktop music play for several years, I also use it on my raspberry-like box. I miss a decent web gui, I isn't a must have, but nice to have feature. Sometimes I would like to listen to music from my browser far away form home. It seems this music player know everything I need, and has even mpd compatible interface, so the desktop client I use with mpd should also work with this. If I would design a music player, it would be exactly the same. I'm seriously considering migrating to Groove Basin.
That's really an outdated way to do things. A song or artist could be categorized across multiple genres. What about collaborations? What about "Walk this Way" with Aerosmith and Run DMC? Do I make multiple copies if I sort folders by artist/genre etc?
The file system is terrible for organizing music. My music is sorted into folders, too, but it lacks. The music player has to make up for the short comings.