Xmms_replacement

Music Player for Gentoo and Xfce

This article mainly focuses on the availability of different music players with gentoo, their dependencies, base functionality and handling. If you are interested in special features, supported audio formats or other deeper questions please consider the documentation of the programs and comment your insights.

The goal was to find a replacement for media-sound/xmms on a Gentoo system with Xfce.

My requirements were:

• graphical interface (Unicode support appreciated)
• available in stable gentoo, no unmasking (~x86) needed
• no KDE application
• no dependencies on large amount of gnome-packages (gstreamer is OK)
• no dependencies on multimedia applications for video playing
• a recent release and a supporting community

Please note that these requirements are my requirements, your opinion may vary.

I tried to evaluated 6 different programs:

• audacious http://audacious-media-player.org
• banshee http://www.banshee-project.org/Main_Page
• bmpx http://bmpx.beep-media-player.org/site/BMPx_Homepage
• quodlibet http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet/
• rhythmbox http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/
• muine http://muine-player.org/wiki/Main_Page

The latest versions of these programs are:

• audacious 1.2.1
• banshee 0.11.2
• bmpx 0.33.4
• quodlibet 0.23.1
• rhythmbox 0.9.6
• muine 0.8.5

The tested versions were:

• audacious 1.1.2 released 25 August 2006
• rhythmbox 0.8.8 released 05 October 2004

These programs were not tested:

• banshee only available in ~x86, so not tested

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "banshee" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- media-sound/banshee-0.10.12 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/banshee-0.11.0 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
# Luis Medinas <metalgod@gentoo.org> (19 Sep 2006)
# Mask Banshee 0.11 series and dependencies for testing

- media-sound/banshee-0.11.1 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/banshee-0.11.2 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/banshee-0.10.10-r4 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)

• bmpx only available in ~x86, so not tested

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "bmpx" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- media-sound/bmpx-0.32.0-r1 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
# Patrick McLean <chutzpah@gentoo.org> (25 Sep 2006)
# This depends on dev-cpp/cairomm which is in the Gnome 2.16 mask, so masking
# until Gnome 2.16 is unmasked

- media-sound/bmpx-0.30.3 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/bmpx-0.32.0 (masked by: package.mask, ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/bmpx-0.20.3 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)

• quodlibet only available in ~x86, so not tested

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "quodlibet" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- media-sound/quodlibet-0.23.1-r1 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)

• muine only available in ~x86, so not tested

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "muine" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- media-sound/muine-0.8.5 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)
- media-sound/muine-0.8.4 (masked by: ~x86 keyword)

As now there are only two canditates for the replacement of xmms, I just will make a short comment on both. Audacious seems for me the better choice. The program tries to be a xmms look-alike, handling large amount of audio files distributed along the filesystem seems to be much more easy than with rhythmbox. Forward and backward moving inside an audio file with the cursor keys is possible, but has some delay, the program is still going forward after the cursor key is released.

The version of Rythmbox has very bad usability. It is impossible to create playlist from filesystem folders, playlist management is centered on a central repository. Adding the files to the central repository is slow. As rhythmbox uses the normal GTK widgets, the filelist is not compact, and it is impossible to change the font-size to present more songs on the playlist. Changing between different songs is slow. Preferences are nearly not existing. There is no support for editing ID3 tags. The available version is more than two years old. Sometimes the programs stops working with Segmentation fault. I don't like this version, maybe newer releases are better.

The situation for Gentoo now looks very bad. Audacious is not bad, but it is the only available program to replace xmms. The decision to mask xmms without taking care for an upgrade path seems dull to me. Audio players seems to be negclected within Gentoo.

Everything written here is valid on 08th November 2006, situation may have changed.