The sorry state of Linux audio
Posted on October 16th, 2007 by matt
Or, more specifically, the sorry state of Linux music player software.
I think I’ve tried most of the available options now. Here are my impressions:
- Rhythmbox
- I’m used to iTunes on Mac and Windows, so Rhythmbox is an obvious choice. It has a similar three-pane browse interface and that basically works pretty well. What stinks is stability. I do not want my music player falling over randomly. The version shipping with Gutsy is less-prone to keeling over than earlier revisions, but it’s still far too often.
- Banshee
- Come back when you get a browse mode.
- Exaile
- This is what I was using on Feisty. Not the version that ships with Feisty, of course, because I wanted DAAP support, but the backport version. That worked pretty well and I was happy giving it to my partner to use. Unfortunately the version in Gutsy has gone a bit senile and now “forgets” track numbers. Which makes it unusable if you’re the sort of person who still likes albums.
- Amarok
- If Exaile’s UI is OK, then why not try Amarok? Well, mostly because the versions in both Feisty and Gutsy are incapable of parsing more than the first 10% of my music collection before they go catatonic. Yeah, OK, I can accept that maybe there’s some weird shit in my music tags, but I cannot accept that “sit still and do nothing” is the right response. Throw an error and move on to the next file, damn it. I believe this is a problem with the KDE tag library it relies on, but I really don’t care whose fault it is.
- Totem
- OK, so the fancy-pants library-based players are all failing to work. Surely the bare-bones “movie player” can handle the job? Sadly not. In Gutsy at least it has the random crashes down pretty well, just like Rhythmbox did on Feisty. It’s fine for playing a single track or a single movie, but gets all upset with a playlist.
- VLC
- Getting really spartan now, aren’t we? This worked OK the first few times, though I don’t know that I like the playlist editor much. But then it started deciding to play only one track at a time: it’ll play a song, then stop. I can tell it to play the next one, but I have to do so by hand. Gah.
- Audacious
- A “modern” rewrite of XMMS? Yeah, OK, why not give it a try. Feeling a bit like it’s 1999 all over again, but it seems to work. Except for the bit where I start finding Warcrack hiccuping — screen and sound updates pause for a second or two — pretty regularly where it hadn’t done before. This with Audacious idle. Quit Audacious, suddenly the problems go away. Clever.
- XMMS
- So now it really is 1999. And guess what? It actually works. So far, anyway.
What is so difficult about writing a reliable music player, anyway? Genuine question, I really don’t know the answer. I can understand that the more bells and whistles you add the more likely you are to run into trouble, but this is one area where I think there needs to be a really serious push to get behind one application and make it really rock-solid. You aren’t going to get granny to stick with Ubuntu when it turns out she can’t play her Nirvana albums on it.
Popularity: 65% [?]
MPD and a compatible client?
These days, I use xmms2, it is comfortably command-line-only and plays my music Just Fine. Saying that, my main reason for wanting a music player is to provide a good timer for “time to stop spodding and head to work” and thus the ability to shut the sound off from the command-line is my primary criterion in music-player selection.
Saying that, XMMS2 is split in a server part (that does the music-playing and keeping-of-playlist(s?)) and one or more clients (that provide a user interface). Unfortunately, the developers have yet to publish a stable protocol and refer to the library they provide (all fine and dandy, but having the ability to write to a stable protocol would be nice).
I hadn’t seen MPD before. Having installed it and had a quick play, it looks like it could do the trick. But having a working volume control and sound mixing requires faffing about with the ALSA configs. Haven’t got there yet — I can either have no MPD volume control and a sound mixer, or a volume control and no sound mixer — but with a bit more fiddling I’m sure it’ll work.
Still not exactly what I’d call “granny-friendly” though.
I was going to join in the whining with a complaint about mplayer dying on mp3s with titles over a certain length, apparently due to tag parsing problems, but that seems to have been fixed over the past couple weeks while I wasn’t looking. (Currently, the shell is enough of a library-organizer for me.)
And then there are the audio devices, which have also been “fun”, though a good part of that might have been taken care of with someone’s graphical thing.
Don’t get me started on audio device support. I love that there are drivers for lots and lots of things. I love not having to rely on Creative to continue supporting my old but perfectly good Sound Blaster Live! card. I don’t love that there are at least two different driver architectures (ALSA and OSS) and that some applications still only support OSS.
I also don’t love that ALSA makes it such a pain to mix audio from different users.
One thing Vista got right is the per-application volume sliders.
(And how the hell do I get WP to display linebreaks in comments, anyway?)
Another vote for mpd (and glurp for a GUI client, though mpc from the commandline works too). We use it partly because we had one computer with decent speakers and the music collection, but two workstations, so SWMBO and I can both control it as needed. Your household might find that useful too.