Linux

While the entire open-source world is all praise for the development happening with FOSS these days, and of how Linux will ‘take on the desktop’ market (every) next year, I have a few reasons of my own for not making the complete switch to Ubuntu on my laptop. In this post, I shall talk about sound: music and video players. It is true that a media-player can make or break a user’s choice to switch. My issues:

1. Equalizer: Does anybody using Linux never feel the need for an equalizer? Why isn’t there a system equalizer? I’m not sure how hard it is to code one, but when Canonical had enough resources and developer-time to deliver all the features that make Ubuntu so great, I’m sure it could allot some resources towards creating a system equalizer. Canonical, do you not get it? They should have included this idea with the 100 paper-cuts development program.

2. Proper Media player: And I mean ‘proper’. Windows Media Player, though criticized for God-knows-what, plays a lot of formats, with appropriate codecs, and it has a darn-good equalizer and a bass boost! Right now, Ubuntu has Movie Player for videos, Rhythmbox for music. Inconsistent. Have ONE media player, that actually works. And its not like these players play every format by default. They are worse than WMP for that matter, as you have to install proprietary codecs (including MP3 support)  for formats you intend to play. Note: I KNOW its simple to install proprietary codec support on Ubuntu, but its not like its any harder on Windows. And, again coming back to the point, there is no darn equalizer integrated into either of these players (Totem MP/Rhythmbox).

But hey, Linux is all about choice! Right. List of players I tried:

Exaile:
Pros : Enqueues Files, has mini-view and taskbar icon
Cons: No Equalizer in the latest 0.31 version. Why would ‘development’ remove features?

Songbird:
Pros: Has library support, equalizer, and more
Cons: You cannot select a file and say ‘Play with Songbird’, nor Enqueue files.

AmaroK:
Pros: None
Cons: Its v2.0. Nothing works. Doesn’t even play.
Its a KDE app. Lots of KDE libs needed.

Listen:
Pros: Enqueues files.
Cons: Takes too long to start. Also, I fiddled with some settings and it never showed up again,
though it played files from terminal. Strange.

VLC:
Pros: Lots of formats supported
Cons: Buggy. Some videos open up multiple (blank) video windows and some open up (blank) video windows during play.
Equalizer cannot be saved. Each file opens in a new window, no matter what setting I choose in preferences.

To sum it up, none of these players qualify, even with my minimal player requirements:
-Equalizer
-Minimize to tray
-Enqueue files on double-click
… and thats it! I don’t need libraries, or FM support or device support or anything else!

Aren’t these supposed to be basic qualities of a ‘proper’ media player? Well, with the Windows 7 launch, its full-on war from Microsoft, and in order to make Linux win, Canonical must listen to the community’s cries and must come up with a unique, all-in-one media player that can finally end the hours of time users spend in search of an ideal media-player.

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Update: Tried Banshee after reading some positive reviews. It has a good equalizer, minimizes to tray and enqueues files on double-click. There however, is an issue with the way queues are handled. Everytime I enqueue a file, it gets sorted into the currently playing queue. So, if for some reason the song I enqueue sorts itself above the currently playing song, it never plays.
Nevertheless, I’ve switched to Banshee, it being the closest match to my requirements. Verdict: Half-Pass.

Update2: Banshee now satisfies all my requirements. I had to turn off the sort feature to prevent files from sorting themselves into the queue. However, I wasn’t able to follow the instructions from banshee’s website . What I ended up doing was adding the Date Added column which specifies when the file was added to the queue and using this column to sort the queue. You could then hide the column once you’re done setting it up. Now files added up onto the queue as FIFO and not in any sorted order. The next issue was of the player popping up (stealing focus) each time a file was enqueued. To this, I used the ‘–no-present’ option and got rid of the menace.

I’m not an expert, neither a beginner. If it took me so long to figure out how to turn-off or on some feature, I can’t imagine the plight of new users. Ideally, these should have been options under Edit>Preferences. Where is the usability?