Linux MP3 Music Library Managers

Looking for a good MP3 music manager is reoccurring task for me, because so far none has really convinced me, yet. After switching to a new distro recently, it was time to reevaluate the choices. Below is a list of library managers/players available through the Arch package manager.

I installed them all, tried to import my music library¹⁾ and tested a few common tasks. The list below is not an in depth feature comparison. It's just the features/non-features that caught my attention.

All tested players have an iTunes-like artist/album/song browser. I was most interested in their last.fm integration but also had a look at other features. My album cover images are stored as a file named folder.jpg, so I checked if the tools would find and display that correctly.

Amarok

http://amarok.kde.org/
KDE based
Most feature rich player
Automatically rates songs based on your behavior
Great context browser showing Wikipedia info, last.fm related songs and artists, additional albums by the same artist, lyrics…
“smart” playlists
Last.fm scrobbling, neighbor and tag radio, love/tagging for radio only
Radio station browser, podcast support
Album cover support with cover manager to download from Amazon
Plugin system with browser/downloader
Customizable notification window

Banshee

http://banshee-project.org
GTK+ based player
Ripping and burning support
Video player
Last.fm scrobbling and neighbor/recommended radio support, no love/tagging
“jump to playing song” didn't work for me
Notifications

BMPx

http://bmpx.backtrace.info
GTK+ based
Somewhat slow loading
No way to play from all songs!?
Album covers didn't work for me
Full last.fm support with scrobbling, radio (including friends), play similar and love/tagging
Internet radio station browser
Podcast support
Notifications
No “smart” playlists

Exaile

http://www.exaile.org/
Written in Python/GTK+
Aims to be a GTK+ Amarok clone (but has less features, yet)
Internet radio and podcast bookmarks – no radio browser
Plugin support (with browser/downloader)
Last.fm scrobbling built in – no radio, suggestion or love/tagging support
Album cover support with automatic (Amazon based) collector
Customizable notification window

gmusicbrowser

http://squentin.free.fr/gmusicbrowser/gmusicbrowser.html
Written in Perl/GTK2
Layout can be configured in many different ways
Last.fm scrobbling only
Lyric support didn't work for me
Considers all files for playing, allows you to set filters – nice!
Manual song ratings
Album cover support, manual Google cover search
No podcast or internet radio support

Goggles Music Manager

http://code.google.com/p/gogglesmm/
Uses the FOX GUI library – simple but fast
Couldn't get album cover support working
Gapless playback and volume normalization
No last.fm support
Not much more

Listen

http://www.listen-project.org/
Written in Python/GTK+
Freezes when trying to import my library
I previously used an older version which was quite nice, can't say much about the current one

Quod Libet

http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet
Written in Python/GTL+
Different interface layouts
Internet radio station bookmarking
Plugin support – but none available in Arch
No last.fm support (maybe plugin somewhere?)
Cover art didn't work

Rhythmbox

http://www.gnome.org/projects/rhythmbox/
A Gnome project
Last.fm scrobbling and neighbor radio support, send love for radio songs only
Podcast support, radio station bookmarks
smart playlists
Album cover support
Plugin support

Summary

None of the players is perfect. So far Amarok seems to have the biggest feature set and currently is my default player. What I like most is the automatic song rating based on my listening behavior. When I skip a song it gets a lower score than when I listen to it in full. KDE isn't my desktop environment of choice²⁾ so it feels a bit foreign and I'd love to replace Amarok with a GTK based player someday.

Exaile and Rhythmbox made the best impression inteface/feeling wise so far. The best last.fm integration by far is to be found in BMPx – unfortunately it is missing other important features.

Do you know of any other Linux software I missed? What desktop MP3 player do you use? Let me know in the comments, please.

Tags:: mp3,; linux,; software,; mp3player

Similar posts:

¹⁾ about 60 GB mounted via NFS

²⁾ I'm using XFCE

Posted on Friday, May the 9th 2008 (14 months ago).

I use GNOME but there's no GTK application that comes close to what Amarok has to offer.

I think as a GTK user you still have to bite the Amarok apple (and it's a big and nasty one with its huge kdelibs thingy).

2008-05-09 13:47:40

tante

There is the project Juk part of Kde multimedia:

http://developer.kde.org/~whee … r/juk.html

...

2008-05-09 16:58:25

jm_zz

Is there a reason why you left off mpd? mpd is very nice because of the fact that multiple clients interact with it and you can switch on the fly.

I personally use both sonata (an mpd client) and the official lastfm player to listen to music

2008-05-09 18:17:20

Aaron Griffin

Hmm I didn't consider mpd because I was looking for a desktop system for me alone, unless mpd has all the features I was looking for, I don't see the sense in the overhead of a client/server system. But I'll have a look at it, thanks for the reminder.

2008-05-09 23:33:55

Andi

Thanks for trying out Goggles Music Manager! Covers are currently limited to ".folder.png" files, so that's why your not seeing anything. I'm currently implementing Last.fm scrobbling support which should be available in 0.9.4.

2008-05-10 01:01:08

Sander Jansen

gmusicbrowser has been my default player for a few years already, light (therefore fast), handles big music collections (and loads it impressively fast), simple... just wish the development would be more accessible to other developers (sourceforge? google code? wiki, etc...).

2008-05-10 10:32:40

kevin

I just wanted to add that Exaile has a really nice playlist generation feature based on Last.FM suggestions that I really enjoy with my collection, and I think it's probably the best GTK based player I've used once you start configuring it and getting used to the way it does things. Take a second look if you get a chance, I can't live without auto-playlist generation anymore because of the size of my collection.

2008-05-14 05:21:07

Michael

you should take a look at songbird , i use it as my main music player and when nothing else could satisfy my music collection it did

2008-05-14 18:26:24

oleg

My current favorite is gmusicbrowser, for its realy the most comfortable whay of organizing my music collection. And its amazing how much you can customize the GUI to your needs and wishes.

2008-05-20 09:48:20

franz

Not sure if I missed it, but how large is your collection?

2008-06-05 07:06:49

Fiya

There's also xt7-player.
Has cover manager capabilities, tag editing end some other things, does not requires any db and it seems to be lighter than amarok on memory and cpu usage.
It's more oriented to video support by the way.

2009-07-10 13:42:54

Andy