Music player capable of a large music library

stefos · 2008-02-14 02:03:40

I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.

I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??

The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:

- frontend options
- dragging multiple files in playlist
- tag support (genre//musicbrainz id's/sort name)
- etc

I've tried:
- Amarok, which didn't even load my library when I told it to, and uses a bunch of kde libs
- Exaile, takes up 400 mb of memory, starts/responds very slow
- Quod Libet, promising, but also very slow
- Listen, Banshee and others are too buggy and slow
- Foobar on wine, gives a lot of interface errors due to the windows api in wine not being complete

So are there any options I'm currently missing?

Snowman · 2008-02-14 02:18:14

rhythmbox?

stefos · 2008-02-14 02:23:34

Also tried that one, but it's just not as fast (by far) as foorbar, or mpd. And it also has very limited customisation options for the library layout.

Last edited by stefos (2008-02-14 02:26:16)

iphitus · 2008-02-14 02:37:25

stefos wrote:

I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.
I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??
The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options

limited? There's tonnes of frontends for mpd

So are there any options I'm currently missing?

You're missing the Sonata frontend. pacman -S sonata

fwojciec · 2008-02-14 02:47:04

My library is about 160GB -- mostly flacs. In Windows used to use foobar2000, in Linux I use mpd (usually with sonata as frontend, but I also have some keyboard shortcuts defined using mpc). I'm very happy with it -- it works very well, especially since my library is organized using directory structure (genre/artist/album/song).

I use mpd/sonata for playing music only... For tagging I use easytag, I have some scripts for format conversion, I use bashburn for burning and rubyripper for ripping -- essentially one app per task philosophy which seems to work best with a large(ish) library.

stefos · 2008-02-14 02:49:00

iphitus wrote:

stefos wrote:
I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.
I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??
The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options
limited? There's tonnes of frontends for mpd
So are there any options I'm currently missing?
You're missing the Sonata frontend. pacman -S sonata

I'ts beginning to sound cliché But I also tried that! (you should see my "Sound & Video" gnome menu list!) But that had even less options than gmpc, and i meant options like sorting artists bij sort name, displaying discnumber tags etc. This just isn't possible with the mpd database model.
The is indeed plenty of choice in the frontends, but they all boil down to the same functionality.

bionnaki · 2008-02-14 03:01:50

moc is a great alternative to mpd

stonecrest · 2008-02-14 04:17:03

stefos wrote:

and i meant options like sorting artists bij sort name, displaying discnumber tags etc.

It can do both of these. (Granted the latter is only available as of 1.4.2, which just got packaged for Arch today.)

Last edited by stonecrest (2008-02-14 04:17:15)

smoon · 2008-02-14 07:45:05

stefos wrote:

I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.
I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??
The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options
- dragging multiple files in playlist
- tag support (genre//musicbrainz id's/sort name)
- etc
I've tried:
- Amarok, which didn't even load my library when I told it to, and uses a bunch of kde libs
- Exaile, takes up 400 mb of memory, starts/responds very slow
- Quod Libet, promising, but also very slow
- Listen, Banshee and others are too buggy and slow
- Foobar on wine, gives a lot of interface errors due to the windows api in wine not being complete
So are there any options I'm currently missing?

You should give XMMS2 a try. It is client/server based just like mpd, but has some advanced features like collections which come in really handy for big media libraries.

mrcold · 2008-02-14 15:33:35

bionnaki wrote:

moc is a great alternative to mpd

not really.. It is a good alternative to mpd with mpc or ncmpc, but only if you don't need the remote access.
or am i missing something?

uastasi · 2008-02-14 16:29:25

stefos wrote:

The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options
- dragging multiple files in playlist
- tag support (genre//musicbrainz id's/sort name)
- etc

There's no best choice matching your requirements. Try install some plugins from aur such as gmpc-extraplaylist , gmpc-autoplaylist , gmpc-mdcover and gmpc-coveramazon and maybe you could improve its usability.;)

GogglesGuy · 2008-02-14 16:52:22

Try my Goggles Music Manager (http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm). It's in the community repository under "musicmanager". I'm curious (since I'm the developer of GMM) to see how much memory it takes with 50K songs.

(it should be pretty good in memory use compared to Amarok,Banshee, Rhythmbox, Listen, Exaile.)

Last edited by GogglesGuy (2008-02-14 17:15:16)

Don-DiZzLe · 2008-02-14 16:55:21

moc +1, simple and powerful!

kelnoky · 2008-02-14 17:16:24

I also used foobar on Windows and loved it. At the moment, I' using mpd+sonata and I like it very much. But I can see that it lacks some features you want, that's just not the way mpd was built.

To be honest, there is nothing that can hold a candle to foobar. Nothing. It's the one program that has no equal counterpart on linux. Give up. I was searching for an alternative a very long time after I switched to linux and just didn't find anything. Mpd and Sonata comes close, but yeah...

fwojciec · 2008-02-14 17:43:20

kelnoky wrote:

To be honest, there is nothing that can hold a candle to foobar. Nothing. It's the one program that has no equal counterpart on linux. Give up. I was searching for an alternative a very long time after I switched to linux and just didn't find anything. Mpd and Sonata comes close, but yeah...

I used to think the same way... but I got over foobar completely and I don't miss it anymore. The key was to stop looking for a foobar replacement and to rethink how I manage my music library so that it matches the linux way of doing things instead (one app per function). I prefer my current solution -- the main advantage is that I'm completely independent from any particular piece of software -- I could migrate my library to another player in a matter of minutes, for example, which is great.

fifafrazer · 2008-02-18 20:18:28

I can't believe no one suggests xmms. It is just as lightweight as the console players and the playlist is damn fast. Although it has stopped development, it got all the features it needs.

wuischke · 2008-02-18 20:41:50

I personally use xmms2, but I suggest taking a look at amarok. It is not light on resources, but I love the UI.

Romashka · 2008-02-18 21:22:42

stefos wrote:

I've been using arch for about a year now, and really like it! But I still miss one thing, a good Gnome music library/player.
I have a rather large (+-50K songs) which I used to mange and play with foobar on windows. Foobar was perfect, good library, fast, extremely configurable, and very conservative on memory. Especially the memory, what is foobar doing right that all these linux players are doing wrong??
The only thing kind of working for me is mpd+gmpc. This works ok, updates the library fast, but this is a very limited program when it comes to:
- frontend options
- dragging multiple files in playlist
- tag support (genre//musicbrainz id's/sort name)
- etc
So are there any options I'm currently missing?

Other mpd frontends?
sonata, gimmix, qmpdclient.

Frood · 2008-02-19 23:37:43

Try amarok one more time. The UI is the best i have seen in any music player and its fast although resource intensive.

Every now and then I try to switch to something a bit more lightweight but each time so far I have gone back to amarok in the end. I use it with a fairly large library of about 14k songs and works very well.

Slash · 2008-02-24 20:53:43

fwojciec wrote:

kelnoky wrote:
To be honest, there is nothing that can hold a candle to foobar. Nothing. It's the one program that has no equal counterpart on linux. Give up. I was searching for an alternative a very long time after I switched to linux and just didn't find anything. Mpd and Sonata comes close, but yeah...
I used to think the same way... but I got over foobar completely and I don't miss it anymore. The key was to stop looking for a foobar replacement and to rethink how I manage my music library so that it matches the linux way of doing things instead (one app per function). I prefer my current solution -- the main advantage is that I'm completely independent from any particular piece of software -- I could migrate my library to another player in a matter of minutes, for example, which is great.

Same with me. I use mpd with ncmpc along with some small scripts to automate things and other tools if I want to do something besides simply play music- Foobar2k is great and I used it years ago on Windows, but I now prefer having different tools for different jobs. Foobar2k is a rarity in software due to the fact it does everything and does most things a lot better than other function-specific tools. I do not foresee anyone cloning foobar2k in any OS and being successful. 9 times out of 10 such software is a bloated piece of crap, foobar2k just got lucky I agree, you have to rethink how you deal with your music collection if you aren't using foobar2k. I currently have 66,000 songs in mpd and I would never go back to a "regular" client for playing music, not even if foobar2k ran natively under Linux. I am gay for the server/client model now

funkyou · 2008-02-24 21:00:00

Amarok with postgresql, i have a similar sized collection and its lightning-fast

However, you need to tag all your files correctly to make use of all the goodness in Amarok

theringmaster · 2008-02-25 00:41:48

what you are looking for is quod libet. It is a nice, simple yet very customizable music player written in python (I think)

onearm · 2008-02-25 09:53:52

Has no one named gmusicbrowser yet? I'm using it instead of amarok and, besides the slightly weird interface, it is fast and meant to be used with large (>10000) collections.

stefos · 2008-02-25 13:38:23

Thanks for all your replies!
I currently use mpd+sonata instead of gmpc. It's better indeed, still fast, but not perfect.

@wuischke:
xmms2 looks promising, but is still very much alpha software

@theringmaster:
Quod libet was so sloooow

@funkyou:
I like the amarok functionality and interface, so I'll try that postgresql db backend tonigt! (using http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Postgresql_HowTo).

@onearm:
I'll also trie gmusicbrowser, if a program self-advertises with large collection support, it should better be good...

Last edited by stefos (2008-02-25 14:16:57)

Don-DiZzLe · 2008-02-25 13:46:05

Audacious is also pretty cool, similar to winamp.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-02-14 02:03:40

Music player capable of a large music library

#2 2008-02-14 02:18:14

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#3 2008-02-14 02:23:34

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#4 2008-02-14 02:37:25

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#5 2008-02-14 02:47:04

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#6 2008-02-14 02:49:00

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#7 2008-02-14 03:01:50

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#8 2008-02-14 04:17:03

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#9 2008-02-14 07:45:05

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#10 2008-02-14 15:33:35

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#11 2008-02-14 16:29:25

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#12 2008-02-14 16:52:22

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#13 2008-02-14 16:55:21

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#14 2008-02-14 17:16:24

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#15 2008-02-14 17:43:20

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#16 2008-02-18 20:18:28

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#17 2008-02-18 20:41:50

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#18 2008-02-18 21:22:42

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#19 2008-02-19 23:37:43

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#20 2008-02-24 20:53:43

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#21 2008-02-24 21:00:00

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#22 2008-02-25 00:41:48

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#23 2008-02-25 09:53:52

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#24 2008-02-25 13:38:23

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

#25 2008-02-25 13:46:05

Re: Music player capable of a large music library

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