Anything besides XMMS?

BradDaBug · 2004-10-13T20:32:49

The more I use XMMS the more I realize it's junk. WinAmp can play just about anything you throw at it, but XMMS can't even figure out how to play files that don't have the right extension. This is Linux, right? Extensions optional? I don't suppose anyone knows of a different Winamp clone that works better, do they?

Everything Unix Technical

Started by BradDaBug September 20, 2004 07:05 PM

28 comments, last by DarkHamster 19 years, 11 months ago

flukus

138

September 22, 2004 02:31 AM

I can't believe juks been on my computer all this time and I only just realised, its the best media player I've ever used. The search feature being it's best part.

A visualization window and a random button (yes, I know it's in the menu) and it would be perfect.

btw, whats the MP3 library that all these apps use? Theres an annoying skipping "effect" in mine (in xmms and juk).

kagey

180

September 24, 2004 02:49 PM

you can queue things in xmms/bmp by pressing q. you can search for a song in your playlist by pressing j.

Pxtl

354

September 24, 2004 02:53 PM

I always laugh when people talk about "extensions optional" in Linux as if it were a good thing. We're not talking about intelligent type-information encoded within the file as an alternative. Nope. Its more like "what if I was coding in C and all variables are handled with void*, and we just decided that Hungarian Notation was a bad idea".

-- Single player is masturbation.

bobstevens

204

September 29, 2004 03:43 AM

A flexible filesystem *is* a good thing. Renaming all your music to get rid of the extension... isn't.

And looking at the first few bytes of a file to determine the type is what we call "unreliable."

Fibonacci One

284

September 29, 2004 02:00 PM

Quote: Original post by bobstevens
A flexible filesystem *is* a good thing. Renaming all your music to get rid of the extension... isn't.

And looking at the first few bytes of a file to determine the type is what we call "unreliable."

As opposed to looking at the last three characters of the name? =)

seanw

254

September 29, 2004 02:56 PM

Quote: Original post by flukus
I can't believe juks been on my computer all this time and I only just realised, its the best media player I've ever used. The search feature being it's best part.

A visualization window and a random button (yes, I know it's in the menu) and it would be perfect.

I use Juk as well, it's simple and effective I find. Some good tips: set some shortcut keys for next/previous track etc. (you can use the new keyboard multimedia keys) from "Configure Shortcuts" and select the "Popup Track Announcement" option for a little system tray popup telling you what track your listening to when it starts.

Quote:
btw, whats the MP3 library that all these apps use? Theres an annoying skipping "effect" in mine (in xmms and juk).

This can be a common problem in some distros so you might want to check google. Normally, you have to set your sound playing thread to have a higher priority so the scheduler doesn't keeping stopping it and causing skips.

flukus

138

September 29, 2004 08:16 PM

In the KDE control center it says the sound system is set to realtime priority but it was using open sound system, isn't ALSA the newer/better one?

seanw

254

September 29, 2004 08:35 PM

Quote: Original post by flukus
In the KDE control center it says the sound system is set to realtime priority but it was using open sound system, isn't ALSA the newer/better one?

I've got mine on auto detect and I don't get skipping. I'm not too sure what the difference between them all is. It's easy to switch system though so just go through them all and see if it helps. You could also try setting your buffer size a little larger from the same control panel (first tab). When does your music skip? If it does it during hard drive access, it might be because DMA access is not on (this allows transfering chunks of data from the drive without using the CPU). It could be a lot of other things too, such as the type of schedular your kernel is using. Try checking on google for "sound skipping <your distro name>" on the web and newsgroups and you should probably find lots of people with similar trouble to help you.