Written by grashdur the 28 Feb 08 at 20:08.
Category: Multimedia.
Related project:
Nothing/Others.
Status: Won't implement
Rationale
A better music player would be great. I currently use Amarok for my music, but I find it to be too complex and bureaucratic for my own tastes. I use Rhythmbox for listening to podcasts only -- though it has improved, it doesn't support AAC format, nor can it handle large music libraries (a couple thousand songs) without frequent errors and crashes. Rhythmbox has a great interface, but is a little weak on features. VLC is nice for watching DVDs (better than the default program) but isn't as user-friendly as I'd like.
Perhaps it would be more constructive to suggest what would make RB a better music player. That way RB can be fixed rather than going to a whole new solution.
What are you talking about? Rhythmbox certainly *does* support AAC audio - I have a couple of thousand AAC tracks (non-DRM) that play perfectly well in Rhythmbox. The one limitation of AAC in RB is that you can't edit the tags internally like you can with MP3s. "Ex Falso" will allow editing of tags externally, though.
A question: Is it all right to submit GNOME ideas, rather than strictly Ubuntu ideas, in brainstorm? I was going to make a suggestion about Rhythmbox but thought better of it. Still, while we're on the subject, I'll give it a mention:
I would like to see an option to choose the behaviour of the "x" button in Rhythmbox. At the moment, it quits the application, whereas in most other media players you either have a choice of quitting or minimising to tray, or it just minimises to tray by default. I keep accidentally closing it!
If anyone notices this comment and thinks it would be fine for me to make a suggestion about this here, please reply. I'll try and keep an eye on this idea.
I don't think there's anything wrong with suggesting a few GNOME-specific ideas in Ubuntu Brainstorm. Brainstorm is a pretty popular site, and I can't imagine that many GNOME developers looking for ideas aren't checking in on Ubuntu Brainstorm once in a while to see what's popular.
Songbird is what we need. Its based around firefox and supports:
- Full theming (none of this BS color changing stuff like Amarok and others). You can actually make it look like itunes if you want
- Cross platform extensions.
- Cross platform. Similar to firefox, it can capture the entire market. Not just little pieces.
When watched folder support and CD ripping is complete, it will be much better then winamp. In fact, apparently a lot of the guys coding it used to work at places like Nullsoft
Songbird is too heavy and it's really still in development. The USB Mass Storage transfer plugin didn't work with the most recent version as of a month and a half ago.
Plus, it's a rather ponderous application--it tries to be both a browser and a music player. That's a waste of system resources.
At least the most recent version should be in the repos.
If we want to go for a big application, let's put in Amarok. It's a killer application and sounds way better out of the box than either Rhythymbox, Songbird, or Banshee.
It's well developed and has excellent Linux hardware integration.
But I would like to see Gnome give it some luv and get some of the kinks worked out.
Vahan Harutyunyan(Brainstorm moderator)
wrote on the 30 Jul 11 at 17:49
Banshee is Ubuntu 11.04 default music player.
Marking "Won't implement".