Today is day 2 of my “10 Days of Ubuntu 10.10 Feature Requests” series. See the series introduction here.
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 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, here, and here for example) despite the fact that the lead programmer has left the project.
Now I’m not a huge fan of Banshee (mostly because of its inability to monitor music folders, although that is hopefully changing) but it’s certainly an improvement upon Rhythmbox. Personally, I believe that Songbird 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 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can bet that most people trying Ubuntu have used iTunes or Windows Media Player 11, both of which make Rhythmbox look outdated by leaps and bounds.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
Day 3 – Improved Visual Aesthetics >>
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What do you think on Amarok? And what do you think about the fact that Ubuntu usually skips very well written apps (like Ubuntu or K3b) just because those are based on Qt?
Most of the people that want just something simple are very happy with like vlc.
Err… (Rhythmbox) “the lead programmer has left the project.”? He made a new release less than two weeks ago.
The problem with replacing a current choice (whether music player or something else) because of a lack of features, is that the proposed alternatives lack a different set of features.
For some people the features RB doesn’t have are important. For other people, gapless playback (missing in Banshee iirc) and CD ripping (missing in Songbird) are important.
You’re just trading one set of dissatisfied users for another set of dissatisfied users). Regardless of what you pick, there will be a pile of people clamouring for a change. If they changed to SongBird in 10.10, what happens when lots of people want you to change to Banshee in 11.04, are you going to swap apps again?
– James, former Rhythmbox maintainer
Thanks for the comments, James. I agree that feature parity is a significant aspect of distro software decisions.
Part of the reason I chose to examine possibilities for Ubuntu 10.10 is that too many FOSS writers focus solely on current versions of software, when distros really need to be looking toward the future. When I compare Rhythmbox, Banshee, and Songbird, I want to know which project has a clear vision going forward. Which project has a roadmap with a specific timeline. Which project promises innovation with both features and design, instead of just playing catch-up with existing music programs.
When I examine available Linux music players using that criteria, I have a hard time justifying Rhythmbox as the best long-term investment. Feature parity between these three music players is close – so all things being equal (as they likely will be a year from now), which one offers the best long-term plan?
My vote lies with Songbird.
Songbird, at least the one in the linux mint repository, doesn’t respond to keyboard multimedia keys. This is one of the must-have features for me, so my vote is for Banshee to replace Rythmbox.
I think Banshee is shaping up really well. As soon as they have folder monitoring down it would be perfect. (IMHO)
I’ve been a fairly happy user of rhythmbox for a while now. I rip CDs and have an MTP mp3 player. I also use Banshee on one of my computers and Rhythmbox on the other (no good reason for this, just felt like I’d take a look at Banshee). I was quite shocked to see this sort of attitude towards Rhythmbox, esp. in terms of what is perceived as a missing feature-set, or uglyness.
I find that it looks… er… fine? It’s supposed to play music, and I mostly just use the search and select an artist and / or album I want to listen to, then press play. The most I see of it is the little icon.
In terms of missing features, the rant you link to lists missing features in Banshee, not Rhythmbox. I don’t really know what Rhythmbox doesn’t do that Banshee does. They both appear to have a pretty good feature parity. I actually kind of prefer Rhythmbox’s less cluttered UI.
I guess all I’m saying is that I’d like a little more info for why Rhythmbox isn’t as good as Banshee or Songbird, especially since all I’ve seen is people talking about features which Banshee and Songbird DON’T have. I mean maybe it’s just one thing that’s causing everyone to dislike the player (maybe a lot of people plug in their iPod or something, click a button and something goes wrong? They hate it from that moment on?).
I hope they don’t adopt Banshee. It is overrated.
Now Exaile 3.0 is out, that is the best music player experience I have had on Linux.
I wrote an in-depth review of various music players for Gnome although that was before Exaile 3.0 was released. My experiences with Banshee were less than satisfactory.
Sorry, forgot to link Exaile:
http://www.exaile.org/
Anyway, as of 3.0, it’s got good features, is lightweight, is easy to use, and (importantly) it’s robust.
Outside of Songbird (which I have not yet tried) it’s the only music player I can say that for. The rest all have issues to vary degrees.
My vote lies with Songbird too. It’s going to be the de facto multimedia client (yes, including video) at least for me. I have tested the other players but can’t afford the GUIs. They seem so obsolete.
Ubuntu can’t use Qt/KDE apps due to size constraints, for one thing.
Even if that was not the case these apps use completely different infrastructure and look and work very differently. Although much work has been done to integrate the two and sometimes you can’t even tell the difference from a screenshot it becomes obvious when you start actually using the app.
I think that whichever one is chosen, it would be good if they put some effort behind that decision.
* pick Rhythmbox, and do some work fixing the things people complain about.
* pick Banshee/Songbird, and then work on adding the missing features that RB had.
* decide they’re all no good, and start a new one.
Given how much people argue and complain about music players, the various Linux companies put very little effort into developing them. I know Novell hired abock (Banshee maintainer) but I don’t think he’s been doing a lot of Banshee work of late, and bnocera (Totem maintainer) is employed by RH but he does a lot of other things too.
No doubt Rhythmbox is not ideal, but it’s not bad either. The problem is that most people have modern-ish iPods and Rhythmbox’s current plugin for that is lousy. The Banshee one is quite actually, even if it may require that you recopy all your music in the library over. (This isn’t necessary but it may make things run smoother for syncing–at least this has been my experience.)
I would definitely NOT recommend Songbird as default. Yes, it has some useful features like adding/deleting cover art as metadata, but it’s bloated and has no GTK integration. (The very useful notification icons of Banshee and Rhythmbox are, well, very useful!)
I use Songbird and Exaile. I think Exaile should be the default.
I also do not want Banshee as the default as it depends on Mono. I think we should carefully watch how many eggs we place in the Mono basket.
Songbird is such a bloated mess, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to use it.
i do not want a linux clone of windows media bloatware player (same for itunes)
i do not want mono reinstalled in my pcs so i will never use banshee
I moved from RB to Banshee when I found out that RB didn’t connect covers in my iPod.
Then it also messed up some metadata.
I am not sure if I reported it as a bug.
I am not that satisfied with Banshee as I find the GUI rather cluttered. And you can’t remove, replace stuff.
I did like the layout of Rythmbox, and I might return to it.
I agree with the author that Songbird looks promising. It is one project that I return to from time to time. I do how ever feel that the project is not progressing fast enough.
One thing I would like though, is for Open Source software to become something you pay for. Most of us like the idea of free and open, but even those of us who program, find it hard to get into a project as big as RB, Banshee, Songbird etc.
I’ve written this many times on other forums as well, I don’t mind paying for software. I believe that having “making money” as one motivation to create software is a good motivation. Another one is of course that people uses your software.
Having a company that is thinking commercial behind the software is also not a bad thing. Then we know that we will be getting the most important – what people want – features first, then _maybe_ nice to have features later. Now I feel that those nice to have features comes first.
I must applaud those who do this type of work for free without any thoughts regarding making money, but I do believe that having a solid company structure behind it is the right way to go.
I’ve seen a few OpenSource/Free promising projects stall because of lack of motivation. When you know that there are $$ on the way to your bank account, I believe that projects will last longer.
Just my $0.5
T
Another good post, Tanner! I agree with you re: songbird vs. Rhythmbox. Pretty much the only thing the latter does better is support for podcasts — something Songbird has foolishly decided not to focus on for the time being, even though they had previously promised it in an upcoming release. The Songbird devs have also made some questionable decisions with the UI in the 1.4 release (Good God is it ugly!). That said, though, Sognbird’s my player of choice. On Windows and Linux.
What will always be a problem with the “out of the box Ubuntu music experience” is exactly that Ubuntu can’t play mp3s and other proprietary formats without some random package.
For a newbie, this is difficult to solve, and he will simply turn away from Ubuntu. I think Ubuntu *really* has to allow packages that aren’t purely open. Consider Arch Linux.
i like exaile. Anyone know how to configure it behind a proxy..?