In search of a good audio player for Ubuntu 9.10

I use an "heir" of XMMS: Audacious

"A few thoughts. If you (mostly) like RhythmBox, you might want to know there is a command-line tool (RhythmBox-client) you can use to access that info using another tool that could give you the info you want. A popular system monitor program is conky. I use it to display my music state like so:

You produce it with:

${if_running rhythmbox}
${alignr} ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format %aa}
${alignc} ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format ""%te of %td""}
${execbar rhythmbox-percent}
${alignr} ${color f1aa0e}${scroll 50 ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format ""%tt - %at""} }
${endif}

I tend to use rhythmbox because I'm lazy and I use hardly any features that most music players have. I had to get the status to conky the hard way, but conky knows how to talk to BMPx, moc, mpd, and xmms2. Every single one of these is very lightweight - so lightweight that concepts like skinnable cease to even apply - moc is a terminal app & mpd is a daemon only.

I really liked Amarok before they went to their 2.0 design. I might go back, but I don't know. Exaile is a GTK+ based player inspired by Amarok that has kept to the 1.4 UI. My favorite feature is the wikipedia integration. I was one of may favorite things about Amarok, probably the main thing I miss. It's considered lightweight, but I wouldn't call it that lightweight."

Foobar2000 has a large following.

"In three letters: VLC.

VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.


Simple, fast and powerful media player.
Plays everything: Files, Discs, Webcams, Devices and Streams.
Plays most codecs with no codec packs needed:
MPEG-2, DivX, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3...
Runs on all platforms: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Unix...
Completely Free, 0 spyware, 0 ads and no user tracking.
Can do media conversion and streaming."

"My choice is Rhythbox, primarily because it actually has some IR remote (lirc) support while Amarok (still) does not.

Sure, you can do some things with DBUS, but nowhere near enough—I’ve got all the useful Rhythmbox functions controllable with my remote—including shuffle and repeat toggles.

My second choice is probably Banshee—I just prefer the UI to Amarok (either version)—though I have to say I prefer the Rhythmbox UI to both. Just the fact that I can filter the library with three separate boxes (genre, artist, album) alone counts for a lot in my opinion."