What's your music player of choice?

[JavaJones]

Has anyone tried Banshee? Just found out about it and it looks promising, though I haven't had time to test yet...

- Oshyan

[iphigenie]

I find myself returning to Jriver Media Centre - a lot of stuff works really well especially all the multi node, network setup.

I know there are a lot of criticism about the support but I have never encountered it first hand, and they do give older versions for free which have just about everything that can be needed.

It is mostly a thing of habit, I guess, and the newer version has slowed down tag editing a bit too much

[housetier]

Has anyone tried Banshee?

-JavaJones (March 22, 2011, 12:01 PM)

I have, and it has many features I like, many features that are nice. But it also used to crash suddenly, frequently enough to turn me to rhythmbox or mpd (I can't really decide).

[JavaJones]

Has anyone tried Banshee?

-JavaJones (March 22, 2011, 12:01 PM)

I have, and it has many features I like, many features that are nice. But it also used to crash suddenly, frequently enough to turn me to rhythmbox or mpd (I can't really decide).

-housetier (March 22, 2011, 09:18 PM)

Good feedback. Do you remember what version (ish) you last used? Rhythmbox is Linux only (I think) so that's out for me. Might still give Banshee a try and see if I have better luck on the crashing front...

- Oshyan

[housetier]

It probably was version 1.6 or 1.7.

Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files it had its hands on: deleting, moving, fixing tags, all made it crash but never when I wanted to demonstrate.

Banshee's tag editor had some nice features for mass editing. And you can write scripts that change its album organizing feature, at least one version I had let you do it.

I'd say give it a spin, even though is a bloody fat .net application.

[iphigenie]

Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files

That is one of the things I don't want to have in a music manager (or player) - the imposition on the media file structure.

I have noticed many tools want to "import" your files into their own structure. Especially on linux

I have near 100Gb of music, i have spent time ever so slowly cleaning up dupes and badly tagged files, and I have it sync'd between network drives, local drives and USB drives, and I dont want my program to change it all and create DAYS of work for me. Yet so many do.

I encounter that I dont even try the soft.

[housetier]

I have only encountered banshee to do this. None of the other media players I have tried changed files or directories 'behind my back'. I don't remember if you can turn this off.

OTOH if the collection is in really bad shape, a tool like this might actually help sorting the mess.

[JavaJones]

The current Banshee release I'm looking at (called an "Alpha", 1.9.5) has options for whether you want it to reorganize your files. It's *off* by default.

That being said one of my favorite radio stations has a nice AAC stream which I tried first and it didn't play it, so that was a disappointment. I haven't played with it much more, but may do more soon.

- Oshyan

[skwire]

What's the stream URL?  I'm curious if Trout can play it.

[JavaJones]

Radio Paradise: http://www.radiopara...iclinks/rp_64aac.m3u

That's for the 64kbit AAC stream, which gives high quality sound without using too much bandwidth (theirs as well as mine).

- Oshyan

[Edvard]

Banshee was very delicate with external programs touching media files

That is one of the things I don't want to have in a music manager (or player) - the imposition on the media file structure.

I have noticed many tools want to "import" your files into their own structure. Especially on linux

-iphigenie (March 23, 2011, 07:49 AM)

Which ones on Linux?
I haven't noticed it on Linux any more than Windows, less so in fact.
Or maybe I'm also very turned off by media players that want to play librarian and so I pre-emptively steer clear and thus haven't encountered such.

My media needs are very simple; open this, play that, thank you very much, goodbye til next time.
In that respect, VLC has never done me wrong.
I mourn the loss of Shoutcast access, but I fully understand the reasons why.
No worries, I saved my favorite .pls files long ago and they still play.

[skwire]

Radio Paradise: http://www.radiopara...iclinks/rp_64aac.m3u
That's for the 64kbit AAC stream, which gives high quality sound without using too much bandwidth (theirs as well as mine).

-JavaJones (March 23, 2011, 01:01 PM)

Cool, Trout plays it fine.  I like AAC streams as well for the reasons you gave.   

[JavaJones]

I have to try Trout one of these days. Though I have to admit I'm not one of those "minimal is king" people so I suspect it may not be for me, just as Foobar never was. But it's a damn fine player nonetheless, that much is clear.

- Oshyan

[skwire]

Though I have to admit I'm not one of those "minimal is king" people so I suspect it may not be for me, just as Foobar never was.

-JavaJones (March 23, 2011, 03:54 PM)

I'm not the type to toot my own my horn, but I think you'll find that Trout tries to strike a balance between the extremely minimalist players and the completely overstuffed ones.  The one thing that I've tried to maintain from the start is an intuitive load-n-play mentality.  Load files via the menu or drag-n-drop, click the play button and it should just work.  There are sooo many players I have tried that don't do drag-n-drop or even basic multi-file selection; it astounds me at times.   Anyway, enough blathering from me.  If you try Trout and don't like it, you won't hurt my feelings any.