The state of Linux media players

I’ve been a long time observer of what was going on in the Linux world, I tried couple of distros along the past couple years, dual booting with Windows, Windows beeing the main OS. I think I can say that I was mostly avare of what was going on, especially in the recent years.

Recently my computer has gone belly up, with no way to rescue it. So, I had to purchase another one, and since I wanted a laptop for a while, I got a brand new, and cheap Dell Inspiron 1525. And since this was quite a huge change for me, being a computer and internet addict, I considered I’ll switch totally over to Linux. Ubuntu, to be more specific, the Hardy Heron incarnation. I am quite happy with it. I really like it.

This brings me to the subject of this post. As a longtime user of Windows (actually I started way back with DOS 6.22, then Win3.1, 95, 98, then XP) I always used Winamp as a music player. Not because it was the best around (although, it was for a while), but because that was the first I started to use and got I used to it, and it served its purpose well, had nice plugins to extend with, was skinnable (a great thing in its first years), and overall was working well.

Once I started to use Linux, I was a little bit frustrated by the state of audio players on linux as there are a bunch of them, but none of them provides (not even combined) the feature richness which Winamp (and other media players on Windows) has. Way back, when XMMS was the most professional audio player on Linux, I almost was as happy with it like I was with Winamp. It offered the almost the same features in the same way Winamp did, and was working well (provided that I could get audio working at all).

But the winds of change started to blow with the appearance of iPods and iTunes and the GStreamer media handling framework on Linux. Suddenly everybody was starting to create media players wich at some extent resembled iTunes, or at least tried to offer the same functionality. I’m talking about Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Listen, Exaile, BMPx and Banshee. The fact that all of them tried to be an iTunes-like player wasn’t such a bad thing. The bad thing was and is that after at least 3 years (IIRC) from the appearance of Rhythmbox (and later on the others), these media players are still not on par with a feature rich media player like Winamp was (or iTunes is – which I don’t really like and use at all). Some of them were even rewritten couple of times as the developers found out a better approach to the problem, but even like this I can give you a huge list of features that media players from the end of the 90s had, and current Linux media players doesn’t have today.

Like the first and foremost important feature of a media player would be to support iPod. All media players are rushing to complete iPod support, but forget that they aren’t providing the media player functionality, only that of media management – or iPod manager software, if you like. Don’t get me wrong, iPod support is important, really, but if you state that your software is not only media management software like the aforementioned players’ authors seems to do, but also media player software, then do something about it. If I just wanted a media player software with very basic playlist functionality, I could pick Totem for that (which is also far away of being a good video player). Hell, I could play my audio files even from Nautilus, if I just want to simply play it back – no volume changes, no playlist, no anything, just playback with start from the beginning or stop functionality.

One other thing that bothers me is the default Gnome sound volume control.  When it is on the panel as an applet, then it is ok, but why on earth do I need to hover my mouse over the little speaker icon just to know at what percentage the volume level currently is. And it seems to be so cool that all media players are adopting it. It is all cool and useful to have the ability to use the mousewheel to change the volume, but if I do not want to change it just want to see the current level, I need to to hover over my mouse pointer for that. Why? Is this more usable than a nice slider?

Just to mention a few of them:

• Good media library with playlists that aren’t that “smart” that I can’t or dont’t want to use them.
• Everything just works, and the player doesn’t crashes even after years of development more than one time per week
• Has nice gapless playback and crossfading support
• Automatic replay gain support
• Usable playback que as an extension of the playlist, with a predictable way of working
• At least basic scope and analyzer visualizations, which look good, implemented in the interface (not in a separate window)
• Configurable playback time display (switch between time passed and time remaining at least)
• Stop playback after current song

Things like that, I could write more if I got the time to think about it a little.

Every couple month a new media player arises or a new (possibly rewritten) version of an older player appears, stating that it is the silver bullet for Linux media playback, then development slows down, and we get things like the dinosaur Rhythmbox. After a few months you can’t even say that the project is still alive or not, or what is happening to it.

Development on Linux is sadly not the strongest part of any current distro. There simply isn’t a really good development tool (a single integrated one, not a bunch of them which you have to combine in order to use) with wich you just start a new project and start tinkering. This way only people with enough knowledge to create their own development environment will start to develop anything, and others won’t join in because the first step to actually have done anything is a fucking huge leap to take. And it’s a shame because there are great languages to develop with (Python, Vala, C#, etc.). But maybe I’ll rant on this later.

So, what do you think?

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