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My quest for a Linux audio player
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CommentsBefore evaluating the Linux audio players, I considered what I wanted from them. I listen to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, CDs, MP3 streaming Internet radio stations, and podcasts. Someday I may also want access to FLAC music files, RealMedia and Windows Media streaming radio, iPod compatibility, and Windows audio file formats (WAV, WMA, and ASF).
My test system is a Toshiba Tecra 9000 laptop with an Intel 82801CA-ICH3 sound card. I use Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.04, GNOME, and the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Dapper Drake is still a beta release of Ubuntu, which may have led to some of the instability I witnessed. I confined myself to looking at the audio players I could find included within the Ubuntu APT software repositories.
Several of the players model themselves after popular music players on other platforms. I tested three that take their cue from WinAmp and five that resemble iTunes, along with several players with more original interfaces.
WinAmp-style players
The applications in the first group of players have a small, usually skinnable user interface with three windows available: one main window with audio controls, one Graphical Equalizer window, and one Playlist window where you can manage your list of music. Music management is usually limited to a single playlist at a time.
XMMS refused to play WMA and ASF files; the application froze when it reached these files in the playlist. In fact, the ASF file froze my whole GNOME session. XMMS would play my streaming MP3 radio station, but not streaming RealAudio or Windows Media radio stations. It has only a single playlist to manage your music, which seems old-fashioned compared to some of the newer audio players around now.
Beep Media Player's source code was forked from XMMS, and indeed it looks and feels just like XMMS, but with an updated Gtk interface. It would not play my .flac, ASF, or WMA files, and would not play my CD. The only radio station it played was streaming MP3. Music management is limited to a single playlist at a time.
I added my list of files to the Zinf audio player's playlist and started to play them. As soon as it encountered a WMA file Zinf crashed. In fact, it seems that any unsupported files it encounters causes a crash. My mono MP3 and my MP3 podcast came out scrambled, as did my sample WAV file. Zinf also crashed when I tried to play a CD or change the skin. It played my streaming MP3 radio station but not the Windows Media or RealAudio stations. The only file format it liked was Ogg Vorbis.
iTunes-style players
The next group of players follow iTunes' style, and usually have fairly extensive media management facilities. Some are capable of burning files to CD, sharing music over a network, downloading song lyrics, and displaying album art.
Rhythmbox has good music management features, modeled on those of iTunes. It keeps a library of all your music files, and offers the ability to add and edit playlists, Internet radio stations, and podcast feeds. After installing all of the GStreamer plugins I could find, it played all of my files and my CD without a problem. However, it would only play only my streaming MP3 radio station and not the Windows Media or RealAudio stations. Rhythmbox supports iPod playback only, and it recognized the iPod attached to my computer as soon as it fired up. It supposedly supports sharing files over a network, but while iTunes on my Windows box at work did list my Rhythmbox share, it was unable to list its contents. Rhythmbox also claims to have the ability to write tracks to CD, but I couldn't test this because my laptop doesn't have a CD burner.
Muine did not recognize my WMA, ASF, or FLAC files, and I could not play music from CD or any of my radio stations. It only has a single playlist for music management.
Quod Libet did not recognize my WMA, ASF, FLAC, or WAV files, and could not play Windows Media or RealAudio radio stations, or my CD. However, I was impressed with Quod Libet's extensive music management facilities. It lets you subscribe to podcast feeds, manage Internet radio stations, and manage playlists, and provides an iTunes-style paned browser and search facilities.
Banshee would not play my WMA, ASF, or WAV files, and I could not play any of my Internet radio stations. On the plus side, it supports writing tracks to CD and sharing files over a network. I was able to see my Banshee shared files and play them with iTunes. It also supports iPod playback and synchronization.
amaroK can be displayed with a WinAmp or iTunes-style interface. It would not play my WAV, FLAC, ASF, WMA, my mono MP3, or my downloaded podcast MP3s, and it would not play my audio CD. While moving through my playlist with these file formats included, it froze. It supports iPod playback and update and detected my connected iPod upon startup. While amaroK is feature-rich, I found it to be buggy and not reliable enough for my everyday use. That's too bad, because if it were less prone to freeze and crash, amaroK would have been in my top three, thanks to its extensive music management capabilities and other features, such as downloading album art and lyrics, and its attractive and themeable user interface.
Others
Juk would not load my WMA or ASF files or my CD and it does not support radio stations or scheduling podcast feeds. I could not get it to play my MP3 files even though the files were loaded into the playlist. It did play my other files without a problem.
You can start Somaplayer from the command line or with a Gtk user interface. It played only my Ogg Vorbis file successfully; other files either did not work at all or gave garbled hissing sounds. The application froze after I cycled through my playlist of different format music files and then clicked the stop button. It could not play any of my radio stations.
MPD is a music playing daemon that you can connect to using an MPD client such as Glurp either on the same machine or remotely over a network. It did not recognize my WMA or ASF files and it could not play my CD or my radio stations. The Glurp interface is rudimentary but functional, but other interfaces are available. Playlist management is limited. It lists files only in the folders you configure.
RealPlayer would not play my FLAC, WMA, or ASF files. Music management is non-existent except for a favorites list. It could not play my CD, and it played my streaming MP3 radio station but not my Windows Media or RealAudio radio stations.
Helix Player would not play my MP3, WMA, ASF, or FLAC files, and I could not play any of my radio stations or my CD. Playback was jumpy on my Ogg Vorbis file. As with RealPlayer, music management is non-existent except for a favorites list.
GXine would not play my WMA, ASF, or MP3 files, and it played my Windows Media radio station but not my RealAudio or streaming MP3 stations. It only has a single playlist for music management. GXine seems designed more with video playback in mind than audio playback.
MPlayer played all of my sample files and radio stations, although I had to resort to the command line to play my CD. This was the only application I looked at that played everything I threw at it, but it has limited music management facilities.
VLC did not play my RealAudio radio station, but it played all my other files and radio stations. As with MPlayer, though, it has only a single playlist and little in the way of music management facilities.
Conclusion
| More choices |
|---|
|
I didn't test every available Linux music player. You might want to consider one of these additional candidates: Lamip |
I found most of the available audio players for Linux to be quite usable, even though many were lacking in music management features and some had limited file format support. MP3 and Ogg Vorbis were by far the most widely supported formats on Linux. Most of the players could receive my MP3 streaming radio station, but strangely, only one, XMMS, would play the stream over dial-up without getting a message that I needed to log in before I could listen to the station. I found it odd that RealPlayer and Helix Player could not receive my RealAudio radio station, since this is their native format.
All of the players I looked at crashed or froze at least once with my list of CD audio files, music files, and radio streams.
After trying out all those applications, three players impressed me the most: Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, and XMMS.
Rhythmbox is a functional, reliable audio player, and its no-nonsense (some might say boring) interface offers a good selection of music management features. Its GStreamer back end allows you to add support for many different file formats through plugins; you should explore these if you want to get the most out of what Rhythmbox has to offer. It is a solid performer with all the features I could wish for, but I'd like to see Rhythmbox spice up its interface, perhaps offering different skins or brighter icon sets for users to choose from.
Quod Libet was a bit of a surprise for me. It improved drastically from Ubuntu 5.04 to Ubuntu 6.04. It has features that rival those of Rhythmbox, including management of playlists, Internet radio stations, and podcast (audio) feeds, and a central library of music files. It also includes a plugin that allows you to burn files to CD, and others which download lyrics and album art from the Web. One drawback is its lack of support for playing directly from CDs. But if you need to play only MP3 and Ogg Vorbis music files, Quod Libet may be a good option for you.
XMMS is a solid and reliable player and has plenty of plugin support for different file formats, audio effects, visualizations, and even a music management interface similar to Rhythmbox called MadMan. Even though it froze on me during my testing, this is, in my experience, an exception rather than the rule. For supported formats, XMMS is a rock-solid player. Although it lacks some of the music management features of newer audio players, it stacks up well against them in performance and versatility.
While MPlayer was excellent in its support for different filetypes, its music management capabilities are limited. I want an audio player that can manage my music as well as play it, so MPlayer did not make the cut for me, but I will use it as my fallback when I need to listen to a file or radio station that my top three players don't support.
On page 2: Feature comparison tableComments
on My quest for a Linux audio playerNote: Comments are owned by the poster. We are not responsible for their content.
author points out the ability to add functionality
to xmms via plug-ins.
Frankly your review was generally shit.
I suppose it's only fair to point out that the "average user" that Ubuntu (actually, GNOME, but Ubuntu is very GNOME-friendly) aims at probably couldn't stop picking their noses long enough to find out how to play MP3s in AmaroK, which makes it "bad" or "unusable" or "why Linux isn't ready for the desktop"...or something.
Quodlibet CAN parse podcasts (needs feedparser python module)
Quodlibet HAS ipod support (plugin) and much more!
The only thing you've focussed on is what kinds of files can be played or not, and that fact isn't even related to the player itself, more to your (probably badly configured) system.
Most described players are merely a GUI for some outputapplication, so please review the GUI only.
To the look of mpd, the main purpose is to play music on a remote machine from your comp, at what it does, it does it pretty neat and you can make your server act like Apple's AirTunes. And btw, mpd supports multiple playlist...It may be the client you used to access mpd didn't support so.
I don't use every audio player out there, so I don't comment them all, but for example, Real Player, I suppose it's made to play RealAudio files, plain and simple, that other players might have problem with. But this review just make RealPlayer a very poor choice because it only plays RealAudio fine...
They have use for different use... one flat comparison doesn't really make it. At least if you could list up the bigger feature of each application along side their file format playability, it'd gave a little more look to each softwares.
It's a shame. I was quite looking forward to reading up on the capabilities of each without have to install and try each and every one of them. Guess I'll have to look elsewhere<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...
<a href="http://listengnome.free.fr/" title="listengnome.free.fr">http://listengnome.free.fr/</a listengnome.free.fr>
This becomes all to apparent when he talks about the capabilities of the different player, obviously without being aware that most of the problems can be easily solved by installing some additional software.
He also doesn't seem to be aware about the fact that for example amarok can't play any files at all, but relies on different backends for its playback. And yes, properly configured, these backends can playback all the media files the author reports as not working.
Seriously, why take the time to write such a diatribe and not invest the five minutes it would take to look up the issue on the ubuntu documentation?
Quite frankly, why something like this gets published is beyond me.
Your results are incorrect because your methods are wrong.
If you want good support for proprietary Microsoft formats, then you should run Microsoft windows. Mplayer's packaged dlls are certainly handy, but tend to crash and are generally violations of copyright.
--k8to
There are only two ways to enforce our desire for Free (as in Freedom) file formats:
1.) at the store, with our wallets, and
2.) at the ballot box, come election time.
If we fail to do these, then as a society we deserve the restrictions that the Microsofts of the world try to put upon us. I do not fail here, and I hope that you choose likewise.
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</tt>
had a problem with Mplayer or Kaffeine under
KDE on multiple boxes and distros. That
sounds more like a config issue.
GXine seems designed more with video playback in mind than audio playback.
What a surprise... ever looked at the title of the page the xine entry linked to? "xine - A Free Video Player".
Still, xine makes a wonderful backend... for example for amaroK, which plays all the stuff I throw at it just fine. Through xine.
The rest of the article is as bad. This "review" looks like being written in the lunchbreak, without doing some serious research. Not helpful at all.
Beside the AudioCD Problems (wich will be solved next release) I only have two others: Some MP3s make amaroK crash (mp3s made by tim pritlove: <a href="http://tim.geekheim.de/" title="geekheim.de">http://tim.geekheim.de/</a geekheim.de>) and some others low quality MP3s sound really really bad with amaroK. With BMP or XMMS they don't sound THAT bad.
This review is nearly perfect...and here's why:
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 04, 2006 11:00 PMYes, he could have searched the Ubuntu wiki and found some answers, but have you taken a serious look at the Ubuntu wiki...it contains so much info it's rediculous. Newbie have no idea where to start finding help and you have to know exactly what your looking for to find relevant information. And _searching_ for info, is not what newbie Linux user do with aplomb.
If one of you sanctimonious posters who complain about these reviews would ever take the time to write your own article, you would realize the difficulty of the task. Instead you spew some technical jargon and specific recommendations at everyone and accomplish: NOTHING! for the community of Linux users. Write the damn review yourself if your so confident in your capabilities.
-end rant
Re:This review is nearly perfect...and here's why:
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 04, 2006 11:24 PMRe:This review is nearly perfect...and here's why:
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 04, 2006 11:32 PMNew user A installs linux distro Y. He reads this review and decides that although he has media app M, that media app N is more appropriate to him. Now in distro Y Media app M is properly installed and all dependencies are taken care of, and is setup appropriately to do what the review says it can't. After spending lord-knows-how-long installing Media app N and finding that it doesn't work, has different dependencies and behaves differently than how the author describes is left no better of than when he started.
What it does not do is effectively review the music playing applications for a variety of Linux users. This is what the titling and copy purports the article is for, so it is a failure by its own definition.
Moreover it's pretty pointless whining. "I can't play my windows media files!!!" Just listing a couple of missing features from a long list of programs is going to be useless to _all_ readers unless they too care about those couple features over all others. This is why competent nuanced reviews tend to touch on a larger number of features as well as discuss the balance of impression of programs, to be useful to a broad audience.
--k8to
Amarok with Xine should run ANYTHING! The only case it wouldn't is with OpenSuSE. Even then all you have to do is download xine-lib from xine's website, and install it, and then it'll run anything.
This reveiw is bogus becuase of the writers pick in distros, becuase he picked WRONG! What the hell is he runnning anyways!
I want Linux people (that care if people use their software) to realize that people want things to work EASILY(ala NO command line, documentation a 10 year old can understand, etc).
ONE OFFICIAL LINUX FOR ALL!
web installers will fix the sound problem.
This article is so slanted it seems to be FUD.
<a href="http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Hack:Mpc-play" title="wikia.com">http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Hack:Mpc-play</a wikia.com>
Alternatively, try a site like www.xmms.org, and note that the great folks there have actually put a link for "plugins" right there on the front page. Take a look, lots of good stuff there.
Imagine that, someone really did think of it already.
Hm, what are the chances that other resources are out there, just waiting to be found by someone with the initiative to actually use a search engine.
I have tried many of players listed - Banshee, amaroK, and Rhythmbox, for example - but none of them can handle the size of my music library. My 5000+ title library (all legally acquired) isn't that out of the ordinary, but so far the only GUI player I've used that can handle it is XMMS.
ditto. I have a collection of nearly 21000 songs (mostly on network mounts), and have spent hours desparately searching for a player that could handle it while providing a stable interface.. last time I checked, XMMS was it. Which is a shame, because XMMS doesn't see alot of development, and the UI is really pretty bad (no offense intended).
Rhythmbox seems to be getting better though..
1. if you have relatively large collection, try using mysql instead of sqlite for the backend. there even are tutorials for migration sqlite -> mysql. this would speed up some operations.
2. note one thing. amarok is _not_ able to handle huge playlists. it just isn't designed to do that. it handles huge collection fairly well, though<nobr> <wbr></nobr>:)
to achieve the effect of "all my tracks", take a look at dynamic mode - it will constantly add tracks from your collection to your playlist etc.
i would like for it to support huge playlists (dynamic mode is great, but there are some drawbacks), but that is not critical for usage.
i am using amarok with some 18000 tracks, all on nfs share and with sqlite (i need to migrate to mysql, i just haven;t gotten to it - because i don't see significant enough slodown because of it...).
the biggest problem is big load on nfs server which can impact playback.
as for the article itself - weak. it's not a comparison of audio players, it's a comparison of "how badly each of these players is set up in a beta version of a particular distro". close to useless, i'd say.
Not only that but this review was on media players yet there was NO discussion on the media players themselves.
I don't normally read linux.com but this article is so poor I had to comment. I think i'll keep my vists here to a minimum.
What happened to this place?
My suggestion in the future for such reviews would be to review not just "Linux Audio Players" but "Linux Audio Players On Distribution X," or better yet, "Linux Audio Players on Distribution X with Backends X, Y, and Z."
By far the worst article I have ever read on Linux
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 05, 2006 01:51 AMThis writer should never be allowed to write more articles for Linux.com. This was a travesty.
Re:By far the worst article I have ever read on Li
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 06, 2006 08:02 AMthere's from time to time, there're poor quality articles and poeple whine that author gets $100 for those haha.
The main benefit of XMMS is it's ability to handle large playlists. 50K songs on Amarok sucks up 1GB of ram. 50K songs on Xmms sucks up a few MB.
The biggest problem with Xmms is that mpg123 crashes on bad ID3 tags and mad displays bad duration data on some mp3's
<a href="http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125022" title="gentoo.org">http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125022</a gentoo.org>
<a href="http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125142" title="gentoo.org">http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125142</a gentoo.org>
Frank
Amarok can play anything, and it's rock solid
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 05, 2006 02:14 AMRe:Amarok can play anything, and it's rock solid
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 05, 2006 05:50 AMRe:Amarok can play anything, and it's rock solid
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 07, 2006 07:28 AMI had no idea SuSE 10.1 has been in beta for 3 years (not to mention amarok 1.4 and Xine-lib engine 1.1.1).
2. There is<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/much/ more to take into consideration when looking at media players than just what file formats it can play. Since that's just about all you looked at, this review is more geared towards<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/you/ than towards the linux.com audience.
This is a line printed every time I start my Quod Libet 0.17 (this isn't even the latest version.)
As you can clearly see, FLAC support is present. I have several albums in the flac lossless format, and Quodlibet handles them perfectly fine. Also note the presence of *several* formats other than MP3 and Ogg, which you stated were the only supported formats near the end of your article.
Furthermore, your article is filled with false or poorly researched information in almost every area, and if I didn't know better, I could almost say this was anti-Linux FUD.
You, Sir, are an idiot.
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Looks like these days reviewers install linux 5 minutes before reviewing. If the reviewer had actually used amarok, it would have transpired that it can practically do everything that other players can -- and very well, and while looking good visually!
I also believe there is a covert conspiracy from the GTK-GNOME crowd to say a lie thousand times so it becomes the truth!
Bah!
Re:Basically typical GNOME user's review . . .
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on July 24, 2006 09:44 PMThis guy is as clueless about Gnome applications as he is about Amarok. Or may be there is a malice -- John C. Dvorak's one -- by writing something so stupid as this article he is certain to create a lot of angry reaction and thus impressions of ads in the top of the page. And that's what matters, right?
To make this post at least slightly useful, two links. If the author spend at least hour looking around for the web, he should stumble upon this
<a href="http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/26/essentials-2006" title="diveintomark.org">http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/26/essen<nobr>t<wbr></nobr> ials-2006</a diveintomark.org>
which leads to this
<a href="http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/" title="freecontrib.org">http://easyubuntu.freecontrib.org/</a freecontrib.org>
Best,
Matěj
you are giving completely bogus info on amarok
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 05, 2006 02:15 PMfirst, amarok is engine independent, and xine will do all the things you mention..
realaudio radio? sure, xine supports EVERYTHING mplayer does, including win32codecs, and realaudio..
cd support? ffs! it does!. the rest of the formats? YES, it supports it, via xine..
get your facts straight
Re:you are giving completely bogus info on amarok
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 05, 2006 02:16 PMXMMS operates easily using the special buttons on the keyboard, with a plugin that lets me press whichever key I wish to bind to each function.
An excellent feature of its playlist is the queueing function. You can leave it on random, but queue up an album or two then have it revert to random once finished.
XMMS also has a numebr of control panel plugins for various desktop environments.
Amarok is improving and now has a lot of these features, but in comparison I find it a lot less resource efficient. Earlier versions had serious multithreading issues. Whether these have been resolved or whether I'm just doing better on a bigger machine I don't know.
After testing most of the popular linux software, my personal choice goes to:
+ wine (www.winehq.com)
+ foobar (www.foobar2000.org)
+ deliplayer (www.deliplayer.com)
and for a non wine solution I use:
+ vlc (www.videolan.org/vlc/)
+ mplayer (www.mplayerhq.hu)
> + foobar (www.foobar2000.org)
> + deliplayer (www.deliplayer.com)
oh, dear...
use audacious and uade -> <a href="http://zakalwe.fi/uade" title="zakalwe.fi">http://zakalwe.fi/uade</a zakalwe.fi>
Written from the perspective of an end user. Good
Posted by: Administrator on April 05, 2006 07:57 PM
The fact that I'm using Linux that doesn't mean I want to wade through manuals to install something as basic as a music player. To be frank, I don't want to spend more than 5 minutes on choosing and installing it. A music player is a typical end-user application, which (in my opinion) when packaged with a distribution should be approachable like one. That means point, click, and it works. Without problems. And if I point the darn thing at a format it doesn't know how to handle, then it can tell me that I should install lib XYZ in order to play that format instead of crashing. For me, nothing less is acceptable if Linux is to compete with Windows on the desktop.
This is precisely why I'm using a distribution that does that sort of stuff for me (I use Suse 9.3 and run KDE). I expect end-user packages that come with the distribution to just work after installation. No crashes. No install sections of any manuals to search. No additional libs I should have found in the manuals, hunted down, compiled and installed. If additional packages are needed, then I want the distro's installer to handle that for me (which YAST usually does).
Now there are plenty of applications that aren't targeted at end-users, and for those its completely fair to explect people to first read the manual and then to carefully do the install by hand, paying attention to any libs that it might need.
As regards Amarok, when I installed it under KDE using YAST, it ran first time and didn't crash. It probably did for the reviewer, but then he was careful enough to state what distro he used.
What we can learn from it is that an application that crashes on one distro may run quite nicely on. So the upshot is we can probably say that real end-users should wait for a review targeted at their particular distro.
Re:Written from the perspective of an end user. Go
Posted by: Administrator on April 06, 2006 12:18 AMIt has an iTunes-like interface (Gtk+ interface with Perl bindings) and really does a good job at editing the tags (I only tested the ogg format) and classifying the music according to these tags.
Really, I set up a juke box with that program and I a very happy.
Browse sourceforge.net for it or go to
<a href="http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowser.html" title="squentin.free.fr">http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrows<nobr>e<wbr></nobr> r.html</a squentin.free.fr>
Ciao
Filippo
Re: I recently found gmusicbrowser...
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 24.108.207.46] on November 30, 2007 04:11 AMIts very slim/no bullshit and extremely FAST when organizing and sorting lots of music. It grabbed 5000 files from my NTFS windows partition in less than a minute and plays them no problem. Also, there are about 15-20 layouts (emulations of all popular linux players and more) you can choose that all drastically change the functionality of the player... This is the most impressive part I think.
TRY it and play around for a few minutes and I think you'll have a new friend.
This place is supposed to provide technical report of said title you offer. So put some facts in more instead of, this worked for me, this didn't, so this one is cooler...
Just get what an article is before you publish next one, though it seems linux.com publisher don't give a damn to publish what.
Amarok plays WAV, FLAC, ASF, WMA, OGG, MP3 fine, but you have to install win32codecs of course...
new kaffeine (0.8.1) <a href="http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/" title="sourceforge.net">http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net/</a sourceforge.net> is really awsome
I would like to add a mention about a feature I really like. XMMS supports drag n' drop very nicely.
Drag n' drop onto the player and that song plays. Drag N' drop onto the playlist window to build your playlist.
I love it.
Article title says it all (many missed his point)
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 07, 2006 07:42 AMAs the title of the article states, the article is about one guys quest to find an audio player and it is NOT a review of audio players.
Truth be told, I think he did a pretty good job of summarizing the options that he found for his distro.
I would also agree that using an Ubuntu beta version was probably not the best choice of distros for starting out on such a quest.
Peter, never mind what these critics are saying; keep writing. I found your article entertaining and enlightening (I had no idea there were so many players out there).
-- Tom
Re:Article title says it all (many missed his poin
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 29, 2006 08:03 PMI would encourage the Author to continue writing articles, personally I thought the review was very useful.
Bitching about not being able to play various formats when they obviously did not configure the media backends (gstreamer/xine) with w32codec support... what a morron. You have effectively screwed over a lot of great quality software with bad experience due to your idiocy.
Nice one.
A couple of minor mistakes w.r.t. XMMS
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 04, 2006 06:05 PMAlso, the first page says "XMMS refused to play WMA and ASF files" - it should be noted that one of the strongest features of XMMS not even alluded to in the article is the existence of many, many plugins to handle additional formats and extra features in the player.
Sure enough, there's an "<a href="http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/" title="mcmcc.bat.ru">xmms-wma</a mcmcc.bat.ru>" plugin available that works fine (note that the feature table does indeed say "Yes" in the WMA column despite the article claiming it doesn't play WMA's). And a quick Google finds a <a href="http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/AVI-Player-for-XMMS-Download-378.html" title="softpedia.com">AVI player for XMMS</a softpedia.com> which also handles ASF files. This is why I use XMMS - it's the best GUI audio player w.r.t. handling different formats.
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