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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."

15 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Winamp by ichthus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Get an old copy, because it still whips the llama's ass.

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    sig: sauer
    1. Re:Winamp by nctritech · · Score: 2

      I'm listening to Winamp 5.666 right now. Winamp is still being actively developed. I strongly prefer it over things like iTunes and Amarok. The compact design that hails from the era of 800x600 being a common resolution is very nice, the playlist is very compact yet the font size is configurable and the list is resizable, and if I want to listen to anything I know, I just hit "j" and start typing. The only things that are remotely as good are clones of Winamp. Ugly full-screen grey-white music players with tons of space between screen elements are garbage as far as I am concerned.

      Nothing ever truly competed with Winamp. It has a great and DISCOVERABLE interface with heaps of easy-to-find hotkeys. Winamp is like the Windows XP of music players; Amarok and iTunes and everything else like that is the Windows 8.0 of music players: crap interfaces, slow to get around, takes up way too much space, and hotkeys aren't discoverable enough. They might as well be RealPlayer from 1998.

      BUFFERING *snicker*

  2. Clementine by Atmchicago · · Score: 5, Informative
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    You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.

    1. Re:Clementine by Niterios · · Score: 2

      This is my audio player of choice. Lyrics on the player Window. No problems setting up any hotkeys. Reasonably configurable interface. Doesn't look like it was made in 1998. Reasonable song information management. All those online music platforms which I do not use. By far the most well rounded player in Linux.

  3. I am so confused... by wjcofkc · · Score: 2

    Was I just listening to streaming pirated music before the "server down" errors started?

    --
    Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
  4. Genres by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Stupid name. Reminds me of an old lady or a fruit. Neither is very appealing.

    Whelp, at least we know what kind of porn you're not watching.

    :-P

  5. Thank you OP by bananaquackmoo · · Score: 2

    I just wanted to say, this is relevant to my interests

  6. Re:Really? by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  7. Foobar2000 for Linux by nowsharing · · Score: 3

    The Ultimate Music Player would be a solid port of Foobar2000 to Linux. Groove Basin...not so much.

    1. Re:Foobar2000 for Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What about DeadBeef?
      http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

  8. Re:Supported formats? by Desler · · Score: 2

    Everything libav supports.

  9. Sounds interesting, need an XBMC client plugin... by complete+loony · · Score: 2

    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.
  10. Re:aimp winamp by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:Really? by goose-incarnated · · Score: 2

    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.
  12. Re:No thanks...dev making decisions for the user by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.