Trying to Find a Music Player

Wednesday, March 02, 2005, at 08:35AM

By Eric Richardson

I'm getting lazy in my old age. There used to be a day when I would write my own mp3 players, but these days I just want something that works and that I don't have to fuss with. I've run xmms since 2000/2001 or so (before that I ran a little perl client called smartplay for a while), but I really do want something more these days. Particularly I want something with easier/smarter playlist handling. So just a few minutes ago I decided to give a shot to rhythmbox on the GNOME side and juk from KDE. The short answer: they're both good starts, but both have issues.

I tried rhythmbox first. I pointed it at /media/audio, a directory I have nfs mounted from my server in the living room. It chugged away for a while, adding songs to the library. The first thing I noticed was that ipod functionality was part of the interface. I don't have an ipod, but I couldn't find how to disable that. The second thing I noticed was that the whole identifying artists functionality is about as dumb as could be. Different capitalization or different punctation led to multiple artist entries. My favorite? Eek-A-Mouse got seven different entries. Sure, those represent seven different ways the files were tagged, but i would think you could at least understand that "eek a mouse" and "Eek a Mouse" were the same thing.

Then the real fun. I selected a song, hit play, and... Doh. :

** (rhythmbox:21206): WARNING **: No GConf default audio sink 
key and osssink doesn't work

Sink? I don't even know what that is. After exploring via google I found that to be gstreamer functionality, and it was implied that gstreamer-properties could let me change that. So I ran that app, selected ALSA, and... nothing. The test button reported failure. There were no other options.

So I left rhythmbox unable to play sound and headed over to try juk. It too struggled mightily importing my mere 2000 songs, but it finished after a few minutes. The interface confused me until I figured out how to put it in tree mode so that I didn't just see a huge list of 2000 songs. The artist handling was slightly smarter; Eek-A-Mouse only got four entries here.

I got a couple interesting error messages on the console, but I ignored them. For instance:

juk: ERROR: Couldn't resolve the mime type of 
"/media/audio/ogg/tricky/blowback/14-track13.ogg" -- this 
shouldn't happen.

I appreciate them telling me its an odd error, but the fact is it did happen, like it or not.

Both rhythmbox and juk list as albums any string that shows up in the Album: part of an id3 tag, but I quickly found that juk would let me delete album entries from its database. I was going through doing that when I found a couple songs from a real album had been tagged slightly differently, so they showed up under their own album. But juk seemed happy to let me drag the files into the proper album. It popped up a little confirming dialog box, I clicked ok, and then... It crashed; hard. I got a KDE crash dialog with an option to save a backtrace.

I tried going back into the app, but now it only sees 115 songs. If it's going to lose my work when it crashes I don't see the point in really trying again.

So I'm still stuck with xmms for right now. It still just works, even though not with any of the flair I'd like.