Today is day 2 of my “10 Days of Ubuntu 10.10 Feature Requests” series.  See the series introduction here ^[1].

Day 2 – A Music Player That Doesn’t Suck

There are plenty of enemies to be made when discussing Linux music players, but I hope most everyone is in agreement that Rhythmbox is hardly a suitable replacement for Windows Media Player <gasp!> let alone something like iTunes.  The interface is clunky and ugly, the lack of proper device syncing is unacceptable, and playlist management is nothing short of torture.

There is currently strong momentum to have Banshee replace Rhythmbox ^[2] as the default player in Ubuntu, but this couldn’t happen until at least 10.04.  Out of fairness, I should also mention that there has been a recent spurt of work on Rhythmbox (see here ^[3], here ^[4], and here ^[5] for example) despite the fact that the lead programmer has left the project ^[6].

Now I’m not a huge fan of Banshee (mostly because of its inability to monitor music folders, although that is hopefully changing ^[7]) but it’s certainly an improvement upon Rhythmbox.  Personally, I believe that Songbird ^[8] will be well worth a look by the time 10.10 rolls around.  At present there are some key missing features – CD ripping, for example – but by early next year Songbird’s feature set ^[9] will be impressive.  It’s even built on Gstreamer, although its non-GTK+ GUI could complicate it’s adoption as a default player.

Regardless, I hope the Ubuntu team realizes that the music player world has evolved dramatically over the last several years.  You can bet that most people trying Ubuntu have used iTunes or Windows Media Player 11, both of which make Rhythmbox look outdated by leaps and bounds.  Further compounding this is the fact that after the web browser, the desktop music player is arguably the most-used piece of software for a typical PC user.

Regardless of which music player is ultimately selected as the default, the next 12 months need to see improvement to the out-of-box Ubuntu music experience.  New users should be given a great default option, because not everyone wants to try out 15-20 possible music players just to settle on one that doesn’t do half of what iTunes does.

(Disclaimer: I am not an iTunes fan, and haven’t used it since version 7.2. – so please don’t accuse me of favoritism.  I simply appreciate the fact that the iTunes interface is uncluttered, easy-to-use, and visually appealing.)

<< Day 1 – A Great Package Management (Add/Remove Software) Experience ^[10]

Day 3 – Improved Visual Aesthetics >> ^[11]