MP3 Players

[Michael A. Peters]

On 11/26/2004 01:22:21 PM, Dean Browning wrote:
> I am new to Fedora 3, and I was surprised to see that there was no  
> mp3
> player built in.
> 
> What is the best mp3 management/player being used in Linux?  I have
> 40GB
> to manage.

That's a lot of mp3's - I'm sure the RIAA loves your business ;)

I've never tried to manage a collection that big, but I think the  
*best* mp3 player for Fedora is probably xmms simply because it has  
such a small screen footprint. As other people have pointed out, you  
can get xmms-mp3 package from rpm.livna.org - and it works well. They  
also have an xmms-faad plugin for aac files.

That being said - I'm a big fan of the GStreamer backend, I think it is  
the right multimedia framework for desktop linux to use. With GStreamer  
there are a couple of options - Rhythmbox ships with Fedora, but it has  
an absolutely huge footprint on your screen, and I've had it take large  
amounts of time scanning flac directories on startup (that may be  
better now, been a long time since I used rhythmbox to play flac  
files). Rhythmbox also won't play aac files. Not for me anyway.

The GStreamer player I like best is called gamp.
It works very well for me, though it could use some polish. It also  
will play aac files with the (just released) 0.8.6 version of the  
gstreamer aac plugins.

GStreamer backend needs mp3 support just as xmms does, you can get the  
plugin from livna.org - or I also package the plugin in my yum  
repository (along with other gstreamer plugins and apps - I'm in love  
with GStreamer, did I mention I think it's the media backend of the  
future? ;) - http://mpeters.us/linux/fc3_gstreamer.php

You still have to use livna though to use my repository for libmad and  
lame.

-=-

Anyway - the short of it, mp3 works very well in FC3 with just a little  
bit of work (adding some repos and installing packages)

For the best user experience, xmms is still king.
For a neat visualizers with xmms - try the xmms-libvisual plugin  
(available in my yum repo) - some really nice effects.

To taste the future, I suggest a GStreamer backens solution like gamp.

Nice thing about GStreamer (why I love it so much) - add a plugin, and  
and all GStreamer apps can theoretically use it without needing a  
recompile. That is theoretical, sometimes the apps themselves (like  
rhythmbox and aac) have issues, but it generally works.