Comments on: 10 Linux Alternatives to Songbird

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 17:07:00 +0000

Did the test include pointing the player at a large music collection on a remote storage? Guayadeque is very fast even with a massive collection accessed over NFS. Very stable too, been using it for more than a year. In the time I’ve been using it, I’ve seen a dozen new features added, very professionally developed and deployed. I’ve send a donation to the developer because it’s the only player I’ve used that has never, ever crashed even when pushed hard. It also has the much-desired “album artist” view which eliminates single entry pollution of the library by ‘one hit wonders’ and compilations.

By: Tor

Tor — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:15:00 +0000

what about gmusicbrowser?

By: tony baldwin

tony baldwin — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 21:43:00 +0000

Best music player for gnu/linux is moc. http://moc.daper.net/

By: VastOne

VastOne — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 05:13:43 +0000

Guayadeque is not being developed by Ubuntu Forums, not sure how that would even be remotely possible. It is in fact being developed by one individual, Anonbeat, who uses the Ubuntu Forum as his listening post for what we the users want. Having just retried all that you listed to challenge Guayadeque, I instantly returned to it because none of the others are any where as near as a complete player as G-Que

By: foobnix

foobnix — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Thank you for review.
I would like to recommend you my player foobnix.
Now it is in active development
The main feature it can play any music from last.fm and download it.

By: Josh Dressel

Josh Dressel — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:07:49 +0000

I think almost all the links are dead. Clementine link is particularly fun.

By: Nick

Nick — Sat, 29 May 2010 17:06:21 +0000

Only one alternative: Amarok!

By: Walter

Walter — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:44:17 +0000

An interesting post. However, why have active links that net one the dreaded “403: Forbidden” error message, no matter what I clicked on.

By: Name (required)

Name (required) — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:31:39 +0000

MPD is all you’ll ever need.

By: Xyzzy

Xyzzy — Thu, 27 May 2010 06:42:17 +0000

I tried Songbird both in Windows a couple of years ago, and in Linux more recently… There wasn’t much (if anything) in the way of features that various other players weren’t already doing, too much bloat of stuff I *didn’t* want, and in Linux it totally ignored my carefully-chosen GTK+ theme/colors, Metacity/Emerald window decorations, font settings, etc.

My favorite player is Exaile, which is fairly lightweight but has an excellent “playlist” tabs design & handling, very easy & quick music library navigation, and great plugins like mini-mode, ShoutCast radio, LastFM, or interface changes like changing the left-side nav tabs to a drop-down menu. It’s basically the “stays out of my way” player.

Second to that is Audacious, which is basically the GNOME/GTK 2+ clone of WinAmp 2.x — can even use the same skins. No super-fancy stuff, but it does have a lot of interesting plugins, including a great ShoutCast online radio browser. Best if you (or I) have saved playlists or (like me) use well-organized sub-directories to store your music and know basically what you want to hear.

Also, I wanted to mention that there are some great music players with full interfaces (just like Songbird, Exaile, etc.) that are text-only but really easy to set up & use, even for an ‘end-user’ like me. These are the ones I use periodically, their websites have screenshots for the curious:
http://mp3blaster.sourceforge.net/
http://moc.daper.net/
http://cmus.sourceforge.net/

By: tuxhelper

tuxhelper — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:54:50 +0000

aTunes is a nice alternative. Rhythmbox is great when you get a stable version and I guess using on different architectures should be to blame ..

By: Flavio

Flavio — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:46:14 +0000

In the near future Minitunes will hopefully become another viable alternative:
http://flavio.tordini.org/minitunes

By: sangh

sangh — Wed, 26 May 2010 12:29:10 +0000

run cmus with guake terminal!

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 26 May 2010 08:42:22 +0000

I did a review of music players for gnome:
http://thefreedesktop.blogspot.com/2009/08/music-players-for-gnome_25.html

I find compilation lists like this are a bit informative but not really detailing the experience of using some of these players. I suspect the author has not tried them all.

Another you haven’t included here is MPD and it’s clients:
http://mpd.wikia.com/

– C

By: Rodislav Moldovan

Rodislav Moldovan — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:03:25 +0000

Hi, you can add DeadBeef – not so full of features – but does what user wants.