Linux audio players suck

OK, I can't stand it anymore; I have to bitch about this. In the world of open-source software, you'd think it would be easy to find a decent media player. Indeed, there are dozens of them, and the best video player ever (VLC) even has multiple Linux packages available.

But what of audio players? Well, if you like bloatware like iTunes and Winamp (recent versions), then you can be happy. If you don't mind sacrificing half of the features you're used to, this is the jackpot. If you like fighting with bugs and inconsistency, you don't have to look hard. If you want all the features in a nice little package taking up minimal real estate, then you're fucked.

I've gotten used to having a media library on Windows with the later versions of Winamp, and with Rhythmbox on Linux. At the same time, I come from the old-school Winamp 1.x-2.x days, and I really don't need my audio player taking up the entire screen. I want to see controls, an equalizer, and a playlist, with a media library I can open/close on demand. Another feature I'm looking for at the moment is support for Conky (a highly configurable system info "widget"); this boils down to either built-in Conky support, or CLI options that return the info for currently playing songs.

The more recent versions of Winamp are OK, but they're so bloated. Songbird is a great replacement for this, but again, bloated (not to mention dropped for Linux; the Nightingale project has supposedly picked it up, but they can't even seem to keep a website operational, and there are no public downloads available to date). This is not what I'm looking for.

Amarok is another full-featured player, but I've found it difficult to use recently. I couldn't get it to add anything to my library, which makes that feature useless. Also, it's KDE-integrated, so it's extremely bloated on Gnome. Rhythmbox is OK, but not very intelligent when it comes to the library; if I import 15 songs from the same folder with the filename format Artist - ## - Title.mp3, it should be able to determine that the one file with a bad/missing tag is part of that same album, but it doesn't (and I've found that sometimes it just doesn't catch the tag for some reason, which is even more infuriating). The part that really bugs me is that they are full-window players that basically take up the entire screen in order to be useful. So far, I haven't found a way to make either of them display exactly what I want and nothing else. There are many, many players out there similar to this.

XMMS was a great Winamp clone, albeit a little buggy. There were a couple of releases I didn't have any trouble with, though. Now, it's no longer in development. Its successor, XMMS2, is an interesting concept -- a client/server model, where XMMS2 is the server, and you can run any of the supported clients on it. This model allows a client to implement as few or many of the available features into its UI. However, of all of the currently developed clients, I only found one that resembles Winamp 2.x, and it crashes when it stops playing. Fail.

Zinf was promising, but hasn't been updated since 2004 as far as I can tell. Ditto for Beep Media Player (2006) and BMPx (2008). And I was just reading an article that mentioned how open-source projects rarely "die." :-(

Audacity is the most Winamp-like that I've found. It's actually perfect, except that it doesn't support a media library. I read about an external library called Methlab, also no longer developed. It wouldn't be ideal, but if I can find an alternative to Methlab, I'll be in business. Yeah...no luck on that so far.

For now, I'm doing OK with Exaile. It's not quite what I want, but at least it's still usable if I run it in a small-ish window. There's a brilliant Python script out there for Conky for grabbing "now playing" info and album art from it, too. I hate settling for "close enough" when it comes to software I use every day, but this is about as good as it gets right now.

What a pain in the ass! I'm seriously tempted to just run Winamp 2.x in Wine, but that's really not a solution, and it shouldn't be necessary. I guess it's time to write my own fucking player. Great, that shouldn't take long. *eyeroll*