xmms only playing mp3 as root

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Saturday 01 January 2011 10:36:49 Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Sat, 1 Jan 2011 01:23:38 +0000, Marko wrote:
> > On Friday 31 December 2010 17:45:14 Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > On Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:41:35 +0200, Johan wrote:
> > > > On 12/31/2010 05:20 PM, Rick Sewill wrote:
> > > > > For me, when I am logged in, as a normal user, I do have a file,
> > > > > ~/.xmms/config, and the line in my file is
> > > > > output_plugin=/usr/lib64/xmms/Output/libxmms-pulse.so
> > > 
> > > Which is the Pulse Audio output plugin for XMMS, which is only
> > > available if you install the "xmms-pulse" package. That one is not
> > > installed by default when installing the "xmms" package.
> > 
> > I can't help wondering why is this so? Pulseaudio is the default sound
> > server on Fedora, and xmms should include the xmms-pulse by default, and
> > prefer to use pa over alsa, also by default.
[snip]
> xmms-pulse is a separate package built from sources external to XMMS.
> It would need circular dependencies to have "xmms" require "xmms-pulse"
> and vice versa. Or it would be necessary to merge the two packages out
> of convenience.

Yes, it seems that the circular dependency is the problem here, since xmms-
pulse is an external project to xmms. Makes sense.

> IMO, it is time for the Fedora community to decide on the fate of XMMS in
> the Fedora package collection. Any Fedora user, who still uses XMMS
> despite the availability of many alternative audio players, ought to step
> up and give the packages some love. From a distributor's perspective, it
> would be more clever and convenient to just drop XMMS and its ancient
> build requirements GTK+ 1 and GLib 1.

Unfortunately, I don't have the proper skill or enough time to maintain it. 
But I still use XMMS on an everyday basis, and guess I am not the only one. 
:-)

My main reasons for not switching to any other player is that (a) XMMS is 
simple enough for elementary use (I don't want the player to maintain 
databases of my audio collection and such stuff), (b) the default black skin of 
XMMS integrates beautifully into the rest of my desktop, and (c) I am used to 
the elementary user-interface for playlists since my Windows and Winamp days.

<rant>
I tried out several other players over time, evaluating the possibility to 
switch, but they all seemed either overly complicated, overflowed with music-
collection-management interface or other options, or just plain ugly visually. 
For example, when I first fired up Amarok, instead of opening some window where 
I would find things like "play", "stop", "pause" and "open file", I was 
confronted with some sort of a wizard, taking me through steps to collect all 
my music into a database from which I could later make a playlist. Naturally, 
since I just wanted to play some random file, I was so pissed off with this that 
I decided never to try Amarok again. I don't know if the devs removed that 
wizard thing in the meantime...
</rant>

If you happen to know any other player which satisfies (a,b,c) in a reasonable 
way, especially if there is an exact same black XMMS skin available for it, 
I'd appreciate to know about it. ;-)

Best, :-)
Marko