A music player should serve to enhance the pleasure of how you perceive, collect, and connect with your music collection. When I used to use Macintosh computers, I exclusively used iTunes as it came directly installed with my iBook. I appreciated the ease of use, while not caring at all about the design of the interface. It was easy to use and neatly organized. That made me happy. Several years later (and several broken Macintosh computers later), I sensed a lack in the iTunes environment; a sterility and heartlessness. Looking for alternatives, I came across Songbird, which I still use on one Windows computer. The add-on features of Songbird were appealing to me. Giddy was the day when I found I could listen to music, write blog posts and watch Youtube videos all at the same time from within Songbird. However, that thrill faded as I began to yearn for a music player that was simply a music player and nothing more. I wanted simplicity. I wanted an application that would help pull my attention to the music, provide a beautiful and clean environment for listening and be neatly organized.

Jumping forward to 2007, I began running Ubuntu Linux and was impressed with the wide variety of music players available, all open-source and all varied in design and functionality. The Ubuntu Linux music players that I have used include the following:

1. Amarok
2. Audacious
3. Banshee
4. BMPX
5. Banshee
6. Exaile
7. Juk
8. Kaffeine
9. Rhythmbox

Of the above-listed nine players, and writing this now in 2008, only two have thoroughly impressed me and gave me that warm fuzzy feeling that has a tendency to get lost in listening to a music “file.” The first one, which I appreciate is “Audacious.” Audacious, with its simple light interface provides all I need to allow the music to come forth from the player, to lose the player. It doesn’t bog me down and it creates a nice atmosphere from which to simply listen. The second, apparently made by the same folks (correct me if I’m wrong) is BMPX. With BMPX, it seems that strict attention was paid to both the form and function of the player; the player comes alive. The typeface that the designers chose is sleek and clear, while the design is easy to manage and appealing. Everything seems to fit just right. Also, it makes adding your LastFM account a breeze and allows an easily accessible internet radio browsing function. Through applications like Audacious and BMPX, one is able to regain the sense of magic that comes with listening to music. Granted, listening to music files is definitely not the same experience as listening to a nice piece of vinyl or a cassette tape, but these programs provide a nice alternative for those of us who have amassed a large collection of music files and seek out a worth player, a player that will satisfy us.

Of course, my tastes and your tastes differ. I hope you find the best music player for your listening pleasure. Thank you for reading.

Audacious
BMPX

I am sitting here in the library studying and I just took a pause. Today I want to describe some programs which I use everyday and which are really good.This programs are about browsing, calendar, music listening, istant messanging, calls, office and dictionary. So, let’s start.

• Firefox 3: Well, I think many of you use Firefox, as it comes pre installed on Ubuntu. This new Firefox 3 has really improved from the former version. I expecially like the new address bar which seems to be kind of “intelligent”, trying to recognize where you want to go while you type the address; Together with Firefox I use GMAIL notifier, a small add-on which keeps constantly controlled my e-mail address. You can find it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/173;
• Rainlendar2: This program is a really nice desktop calendar. As I tend to forget a lot of stuff it’s really useful for me to have this small application on the right side of my desktop. I use it really much: exams, things to do, birthdays, everything. Rainlendar2 comes with 2 skins. I don’t like the default one, but the second one is… really nice! Rainlander2 has plenty of useful feauters. There are two version avaiable: the free one and the pro one, which costs some dollars. You can read more about this program on it’s official website: http://www.rainlendar.net. I suggest you to have a loot to the FAQ section, really useful expecially for Linux users. The installation for Ubuntu users is really simple: you only have to download the *.DEB package, click on it, insert your admin password (sudo password) and install it. There is a version for Windows;
• BMPX: I love it’s simply, light and complete interface. This player lets you play your own music from your hard disk (library), listen to internat radios (shouthcast, icecast), listen to lastfm (if you don’t know what it is I suggest you do discover it: http://www.last.fm), Podcasts, CDs and finally Jamendo, a really intresting music database on internet (http://www.jamendo.com). It is still in a quite early stage of the developement and it sometimes crashes (it happens to me when I listen for hours to lastfm) but I’m sure that if a lot of people will download and use this software the community will fix the bugs and provide new intresting and useful features. To get this software: http://bmpx.backtrace.info/site/BMPx_Homepage;
• Pidgin: this IM (Istant Messaging) comes preinstalled (If I’m not wrong) with Ubuntu. If it doesn’t you can install it via terminal typing sudo apt-get install pidgin. I love it because it easily lets me to use different accounts (Messenger, GMAIL, ICQ) at the same time. It’s interface is really simple, so that this software is nothing for you if you love spectacular effects and complex interfaces. It still doesn’t support audio/video call and this is really a pity. But for the rest is really nice. It functions without problems even behind proxy: it can use the system’s (GNOME’s) settings (System->Settings->Proxy). Website: http://www.pidgin.im;
• Skype: not much to say about this software. I use it quite a lot, both for calling other computer and normal phones to good rates (expecially cheap if you have to call fix mobile numbers around the globe). As for Rainlenard2, you can install Skype downloading the *.DEB package from the official website. With this newer versions, Skype starts a good support of webcams. http://www.skype.com;
• OpenOffice: it’s simply a wonderfull application, containing a really powerful set of tools to handle many kind of documents (databases, written documents, excel files, presentation and much more). You simply have to try it out, as it comes preinstalled with Ubuntu. If you were used to Microsoft Office it will take you a while to understand how OpenOffice really works (there are some differences, of course) but after that you will love it. On the net there is a lot of material and tutorials teaching you everything you need. If you want, try to go on Youtube and type “OpenOffice” to get some tutorials! Website: http://www.openoffice.org;
• Stardict: a really powerful dictionary on your desktop. It can both function with local and remote databases. I make it start automatically when the computer stars and if I don’t know a word I just have to select it and click the WIN button (you can set this behavior in the options window). Stardict opens a small window telling me what the word means (of course, I installed some dictionaries on my computer). To check out more about this software visit: http://stardict.sourceforge.net/. There is even a version for Windows.

That’s it, if you liked my description the best thing to do is to go and get the software and to try it out yourself!These are just opinions and you maybe like other software better than these ones!

Now, back to my studies.

En un post anterior les comentaba que despues de casi un mes de usar openSUSE decidi volver a cambiar mi distro, la distro que elegi fue LinuxMint, y tengo que decir que estoy perplejo, nunca me senti tan a gusto con una distribucion. Pero antes, para que no digan que me rendi sin argumentos, les dejo las razones que me obligaron a dejar opensuse:

• Una de las cosas que me irritaron fue la instalacion de software por medio de Yast2. No creo que RPM resuelva correctamente las dependencias, en algunos casos, durante la instalacion de algunos paquetes descargaba otros que no estaban relacionados de ninguna manera con el software que estaba siendo instalado. Y cada vez que abris yast2 –install el programejo actualiza todos los repositorios, y este es un proceso condenadamente lento.
• Banshee es un buen reproductor de musica y viene in-the-box con opensuse, pero algo que le falta a banshee es poder re-ordenar los items de la playlist, que clase de reproductor no te deja ordenar los temas de la lista de reproduccion. Mi reproductor favorito es BMPX, y no pude instalarlo en opensuse, ni desde los repositorios ni desde el codigo fuente, me baje como 700 librerias y aun asi no lograba compilarlo. Fue realmente frustrante, no tener bmpx es algo que me dolio, necesito estar comodo con mi reproductor de musica, la escucho mientras trabajo. Ademas banshee me consume demasiada capacidad de procesamiento, bmpx pasa desapercibido, hace lo suyo sin restarle poder de procesamiento (lo necesito para lo que estoy developeando) a mi host. Mas adelante quizas escriba un post mas detallado sobre banshee vs bmpx.
• Skype no va ni para atras. Lo instala sin problemas eso si. Pero era insufrible, inentendible, cuando en los otros programas la captura de sonido era perfecta, en skype era como estar hablando dentro de un lavarropas con un mapache mientras te caias por una cascada. H O R R I B L E. Este es un punto fuerte, necesito skype para el trabajo, y no pienso levantar una VM con windows solo para usar el skype, eso es inconcebible.
• Lo otro y lo peor, es que tenia constantes congelamientos y overloads en la carga de la cpu, se me freezaba todo, y el procesador al 100% all the time, la temperatura se me iva a valores altisimos (93°C). No se si fue culpa de la version de firefox, del flash player o de opensuse, solo puedo decir que esto no pasaba en ubuntu, y no me pasa ahora con LinuxMint.

Asi que aqui estamos, anoche a las 2:30 de la madrugada decidi migrar mi opensuse a Mint, en cosa menos de media hora lo tenia instalado, instale desde los repositorios bmpx (soy feliz de nuevo), instale el vmware-player sin ningun problema (otra cosa que se me habia complicado un poco en opensuse), intale el build-essential package y el skype, apenas inicie session el sistema me sugirio instalar el driver para la placa grafica nvidia que tengo, lo hizo todo automatico, reboot y excelent. Todo andando en menos de hora y media. Y lo mejor de todo, tengo el maldito cubo que da vueltas, y sin siquiera repercutir en la carga del procesador. En opensuse por mas que activabas las opciones de efectos de escritorio nunca me funcionaron. Aqui les dejo una screenshot de mi nuevo entorno de trabajo. Hasta la proxima.

In my everlasting quest for the best audio player available to man, I’ve fallen in love again.

This time with BMPx.

Its a delight to use.

Unlike most audio players today, that copy the Itunes layout to some degree, this media player is painfully easy to use.

On their website they put it like this:

You want to be able to use the player even when totally drunk and otherwise drugged, without constant crashes or weird behaviour that actually requires you to think?

The gui looks cool and is unlike anything I’ve seen.

This screenshot will tell you more than words can.

(click for full screen)

The reason I like this program that much is because it very large radio station list.

I find myself listening to internet radio for the first time since I knew such a thing existed.

I would say try it out for yourself and see if you like it.

Go to applications -> add/remove and search for “bmpx”.

This application is available for linux, bsd and solaris.

Bueno he tenido la oportunidad de probar varias alternativas para la reproducción de archivos de audio tanto en KDE como en Gnome, y aunque todos estos softwares se pueden usar en ambos entornos de escritorios, uso Gnome por lo tanto la mayoría de los que aquí pondré son de él.

XMMS igamos que es el Winamp de Gnome, sencillo, pequeño, soporta múltiples formatos y plugins y se puede personalizar con varios Skins.

Audacious: Para mi es una versión mejorada y más estética de XMMS. Reproduce los formatos MP3, OGG, WAV y Flac, entre otros, además tiene soporte para las pieles o skins de Winamp 2 (también conocido como Winamp Classic).

BMPX: En realidad es el sucesor de BMP un software basado en XMMS también. Este también soporta los skin de Winamp pero además funciona más bien como una biblioteca al estilo de iTunes. Soporta distintas extensiones de audio como: Mp3, Ogg, Mpc, Flac, Wma, Wav, Mod, Cdda..entre otras.

Noatun: Es un reproductor multimedia del proyecto KDE. Noatun está basado en una arquitectura de plugins, los cuales pueden ser cargados y descargados durante la ejecución. Los plugins en Noatun se encargan de todo lo “utilizable” de la aplicación. Sus categorías son: interfaces gráficas, listas de reproducción, visualizaciones y otros. (Texto extraído de la Wikipedia)

Banshee: Es un reproductor de audio para sistemas operativos Linux, que usa Mono y Gtk#. Además usa la plataforma multimedia GStreamer para reproducir, codificar y decodificar formatos tales como Ogg, MP3 y otros. Banshee puede reproducir e importar CDs de audio y reproducir y sincronizar la colección con iPod. Adicionalmente, es capaz de enviar las canciones reproducir para compartir gustos musicales en Last.fm. (Texto extraído de la Wikipedia)

Amarok: El reproductor más famoso del Sistema Unix. Está orientado más bien para el entorno KDE y muchos lo toman como alternativa para el iTunes de Apple. Pueden ver más características desde su sitio web o en la Wikipedia.

Listen: Es la alternativa de iTunes para Gnome. Funciona como biblioteca, grabador de CD entre otras cosas. Se pueden ver las carátulas de los albums, obtener información de la canción que se reproduce desde Wikipedia, así como la letra de la misma, también reproduce radio online mediante streaming además de que tiene acceso directo a la información en Last.FM.

Quand on me demanda de tester BMPx, la première chose qui me vint a l’idée fut “Arrrrrggghhhh noooooon! ENCORE un vieux clone de xmms!” Mais les clients ayant toujours raison, les bras pendant et la mort dans l’âme, j’inscrivis la commande telle une pénible sentence: sudo apt-get install bmpx.

Adieu donc, monde cruel, me voila reparti dans ces ères antédiluviennes où les lecteurs audio étaient inséparables des navigateurs de fichiers, où il fallait compiler des sources pour lire une liste de lecture et où les seules fonctions étaient “play” et “crash”. La souris tremblante je m’approchai donc du menu, cliquai sur “Son & Vidéo” et là, horreur! Deux icônes se présentèrent a moi! Offline mode, Online mode, sérieux dilemme, que faire?.

Ne pouvant m’empêcher de me cacher les yeux, je pris le risque et cliquai sur la première icône passant sous le curseur encore tremblant, qui vivra verra me dis-je. Est-ce la fin? Où s’arrêtera donc le cauchemar? J’écartai alors mes doigts et mes yeux tout d’abord aveuglés s’habituèrent peu à peu à la lumière crue de l’écran. Et c’est alors que je la vis, la Chose…

Un cris étouffé s’échappa de ma gorge irritée (pour cause d’angine) et sans que je puisse me contrôler, m’exclamai:

“Nom de Dieu de bordel de merde!”

Quelques années auparavant, Beep Media Player, aka BMP, ne ressemblait à rien: carré, inodore, incolore et sans saveur. En gros un player dopé a l’eau dont le seul interêt était de pouvoir lire des fichiers audio sur un Altair 8800 sans faire chauffer le CPU*.

Aujourd’hui avec un X en plus, BMP a de la gueule et trouve enfin sa place sur les ordinateur dignes de ce nom. Un navigateur, un spectrogramme, des covers, du last.fm, du jamendo, de la vidéo et des plugins tant qu’on en veut. L’expérimental se la pète et ça lui va bien. D’autant plus qu’au niveau ressources, il tient bien de son prédécesseur: léger et rapide et pourtant plein de peps. Bref un lecteur de bureau qu’il est bien et qu’il irait même dans mon top 5 des lecteurs. Comme quoi, même les projets libres les plus old-school peuvent donner naissance a de petits joyaux. Chapeau bas aux développeur, je suis impressionné.

Allez hop, tout le monde installe!

Un petit scrineshotte pour la contemplation (et plus encore sur le site de BMPx):

*boutades, boutades, huh huh huh!
Beep Media Player est d’ailleurs le papa du grand Audacious, ce qui n’est pas rien

After trying almost every audio media player out there for Linux, I finally found the most versatile and user friendly one – BMPx. What especially won me over about BMPx was the user interface. It is intuitive and organized with almost no settings to configure and no menus to get lost in. This is thanks to the fact that BMPx is fresh and it’s not trying to throw in a hundred useless features like the competition. It gets better, BMPx gives you 7 music sources: Shoutcast, Icecast, MP3’s, Podcast’s, Last.fm, audio CD’s and Jamendo. BMPx stands for Beep Media Player experimental and it is mainly coded by Milosz Derezynski. It’s an evolution of the previous Beep Media Player which was based on XMMS and Xine, now BMPx is all original and gstreamer based. You can download BMPx from its’ official home page and compile it yourself. If your distro is Debian based you are in luck, you can download the package from getdeb.net. I wouldn’t recommend downloading it from the universal repository as it will give you an older version of the player. To use it you will also need the appropriate codecs. You can download the individual gstreamer codec packages, but the easiest thing to do if you are using Ubuntu is to download the restricted extras package using “sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras”. Finally, on to my review!

I use the radio feature most of the time as I quickly destroy my own music collection by repeatedly listening to my favorite songs. BMPx has two of the most popular radio station directories to choose from: Shoutcast and Icecast. They are both integrated into the graphical shell, so there’s no need to open your browser to start a stream. Since Icecast doesn’t have that many stations, all 1,500 stations are loaded for you; but you will have to update the list manually from the menu during your first use. Shoutcast stations are loaded by genre due to the fact that there are a total of over 20,000 stations. If you are looking for a particular station, you can simply use the search bar at the top. The Shoutcast functionality is a bit more refined and it makes it easier for you to find a good station by giving you a list of the top 500 radio stations. Once you’ve picked out a few stations that you like you can then add them to your favorites; but unfortunatelyyou cannot later remove them from your favorites due to BMPx’s beta stage. As a bonus, most internet stations don’t have commercials, they don’t have any annoying chit-chat and they are streamed in CD quality sound.

If 21,500 radio stations are not enough to satisfy your music hunger, there’s Last.fm. What makes Last.fm unique is its’ audioscrobbler feature. The Last.fm audioscrobbler personalizes the music stream based on your personal music taste. You simply input the name of a song or artist and the audio scrobbler will try to match the exact initial song and then it will try to match the same taste of music in the following songs. Once you get Last.fm going, the top-left box will display relevant matches allowing you to choose exact track you had in mind. The right box will display all of the tags (eg. funk, rock, etc…) related to the song you are listening to; you can click on one of these to further fine tune your radio stream. The left-bottom box displays your information such as your personal music tags and what your friends are listening to. Once Last.fm has started playing your music you can skip songs and fine tune your stream even further by letting the audioscrobbler know what songs you like and dislike by pressing the appropriate button in the menu. In addition to that, you can let the audioscrobbler know which personal MP3’s and Jamendo tracks you like and dislike to further fine tune your radio stream. This all sounds great in theory, but I still prefer the playlist a live music DJ provides. In actuality, Last.fm makes listening to music boring as each track is almost like the previous one – variety is good.

Your personal MP3 collection is displayed in a systematic manner where by you first select the artist, then album and then the track, thus allowing you to manage your music accordingly. It couldn’t be any easier, but there were some problems. I did have a problem with one MP3 which was causing BMPx to crash, in addition to that I couldn’t get the cover art to display in the album box. Anyhow,besides having MP3 support, BMPx supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MOD, MPC, MP4, AAC, M4A, WMA, SID, WAV and SPC codecs. You can explore your existing collection by right-clicking on the track to get more information about the artist from the internet. And if you would like to sing along, you can right-click on the track and download the lyrics from an internet server. The two former features are actually available globally, including in the radio, CD player and in Last.fm. Navigating through your music globally within BMPx is easy with a few keyboard shortcuts, there even is an option to enable global Linux hotkeys. BMPx minimizes to your tray while still giving you full control of the player. Right-clicking on the tray icon give you full track control and left-clicking restores the BMPx window. Hovering your mouse over the tray icon displays the track information, including cover art. For those of you who have a large MP3 collection, search is simply enabled by typing on the keyboard.

Managing your playlist in a single album is a breeze thanks to the boxes you check and uncheck to select the song that you would like to play. If you are creating a play list from multiple albums you have to right-click on the tracks the you would like to enqueue. What is really annoying about this feature is that you first have to left-click on the track before you can right-click on it. The playlists can be saved and exported in a variety of popular formats, but what is really impressive is the ability to create a playlist based on a Last.fm tag.

The podcast feature in BMPx is just as intuitive as all of the other features in BMPx. Your podcast link is even automatically pasted into the URL entry field when you select to add your podcast via the menu. Once added, the top pane will display your different podcasts, the left bottom box will display the actual downloaded podcasts and right-bottom box will display the actual podcast info. To delete an old podcast you simply uncheck the box beside the podcast. And when you are going to reformat your hard drive you can export your podcast list to a file.

Now I come to the most original BMPx feature – the Jamendo integration. Jamendo allows artists to share their music online for free based on the principal that if you like the music you will later buy it. To get Jamendo started first you will have to download the Jamendo music database onto your hard drive via a menu shortcut; this only takes about thirty seconds. Once you have downloaded themusic database you literally have over 6,000 original virtual albums on your computer. When you play your Jamendo music there only is about a three second delay between you pressing play and the song playing. Due to the fact that most of the artists are relatively new, you will not be able to retrieve any lyrics and artist information. As you start browsing through Jamendo’s large list of artists you’ll be blown away by the amount of good independent music.

I have presented to you the good and the bad of BMPx. The good news is that BMPx is only at version 0.40.13 so it is going to keep on getting better and the few bugs will eventually be eliminated; I’ve only experienced a crash once. There are a few features that I can think of adding, with a radio stream ripper being one of them. Also, BMPx does have an equalizer, so a few equalizer presets would be nice. The lack of not being able to delete favorite radio stations has been addressed in the forums, so that feature should be coming in the next version. Besides these minor issues BMPx is a full featured audio player that cannot be matched in ease of use and functionality by any other piece of software at this current time.