Media Players for gnome : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10)

By | 2007/01/29

I got on the topic the other day about media players in Ubuntu and which did I use. There are a few that I really like, but none of them are actually installed by default. Below are three media (audio, video or both) players that I like.

beep-media-player

This is a great little media player that is very similar to the old xmms or winamp. I probably use this more than any other because it does what all software should do. It does one job and does it well. It doesn’t have a lot of extras, or support for all kinds of external hardware (as far as I know) but when I want to listen to a playlist and not have a whole lot more it does that perfectly.

To install beep you can use the command below or install the same package via Synaptic.

sudo aptitude install beep-media-player

banshee

Import, organize, play, and share your music using Banshee’s simple, powerful interface. Rip CDs, play and sync your iPod, create playlists, and burn audio and MP3 CDs. Most portable music devices are supported. Banshee also has support for podcasting, smart playlists, music recommendations, and much more.

To install banshee you can use the command below or install the same package via Synaptic.

sudo aptitude install banshee

exaile

Exaile is a media player aiming to be similar to KDE’s AmaroK, but for GTK+. It incorporates many of the cool things from AmaroK (and other media players) like automatic fetching of album art, handling of large libraries, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via the wikipedia, last.fm support, optional iPod support (assuming you have python-gpod installed).

In addition, Exaile also includes a built in shoutcast directory browser, tabbed playlists (so you can have more than one playlist open at a time), blacklisting of tracks (so they don’t get scanned into your library), downloading of guitar tablature from fretplay.com, and submitting played tracks on your iPod to last.fm.

This app isn’t in the ubuntu repositories yet but they have put together a .deb package for Edgy and Feisty that can be found here.

17 thoughts on “Media Players for gnome : Ubuntu (6.06.1 / 6.10)

  1. TuxGirl

    I’m going to put a vote in here for Songbird. It’s not yet available in the package-management systems, but if you go to their website (songbirdnest.com), you can download a .deb to install with, and it works great. Honestly, it looks to me like a dark itunes clone, but it has a lot of web-browsing capabilities as well. I haven’t used it much, but so far, it seems really nice!

  2. vitae

    Yeah. What about rhythmbox? It is a very nice app which is stable and can handle a large amount of songs.

    I can`t say that about banshee, because I tried both.

  3. Byenary

    Hmmm yeah, tested songbird looked nice but surrounded with already a lot of crap (and its not even finished), if preffer Amarok a real Linux KillerApp

  4. rudlavibizon

    I like Amarok the best but i’m forced to use rhythmbox (second best for me), because Amarok won’t scan my ntfs partitions (the infamous taglib bug). Tried Exaile, it’s fine looking but a memory hog, others run fine (listen, banshee, gMusicBrowser, quod libet, xmms…) it’s just that i don’t like their interface.

  5. frankps

    I strongly hope that Banshee will be the new default player in Ubuntu, and remove Rhythmbox and Soundjuice.

    The Listen player would have been a strong alternative if it also had an inbuilt ripper.

  6. Evildead

    I vote for Exaile!
    It’s a really nice app, and it’s even written in Python πŸ™‚

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  9. kyu

    You can use amarok in gnome. in fact just a part of kdelibs is required for it to run correctle, and it is automatically installed when you install amarok via synaptec. amarok just beats all auther players imho πŸ™‚

  10. Tiago Sousa

    I’m amazed with listen player, I really should have been included and will surely take rhythmbox’s place in ubuntu as default player in a while!

  11. daniel

    I just installed listen 0.5 on ubuntu dapper
    and it’s a nice program sounds good
    and gave me the cover of the disc i was
    listening on the fly. Thanks for the tip!

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