I have used Amarok for over 3 years I think, but since Jaunty and Amarok 2 (I did use Amarok 1.4 again but it didn't worked like it should anymore and also no development made me look for something else), I decided to look for another music player. And I'm very picky when it comes to music players, so I tested: Rythmbox (obviously, it comes with Ubuntu), Jajuk, aTunes, the new Exaile and Banshee, Songbird, Guayadeque, GMusicBrowser and Amarok 1.4 and 2 (Jajuk, aTunes and Songbird also work on Windows - a tip for our non-Linux readers).
After testing each and every one from the above mentioned players, at least for me, Gmusicbrowser is the best. I use it in Queue, Library & Context Layout mode (but you can choose between 18 different layouts or customize your own) :
so I have the sorting by title, artist, album and so on to the right and the Queue on the left. Also, finally a player which allows me to queue the same song more than 1 time (coming to think of it, Songbird didn't even had a queue). I can arrange the songs in queue and delete them the way I want easily, or save it as a playlist. You can customize some shortkeys too, for instance I picked Alt+Q to enqueue current selection, but you can set as many shortcut keys as you want for performing any action you want.
Also, another very cool feature which I enjoy a lot is that if you click the album cover next to the music controls, you get to see all the songs in that album and also play them:
Of course, gmusicbrowser also comes with regular plugins such as Last.fm, Gnome Multimedia Keys, Web context (info and lyrics) and some other very interesting ones, like: autosave which automatically saves settings every X minutes, Export - which you can use for custom commands or exporting a playlist, CD ripping plugin and a picture finder.
The library behavior can be customized, a thing which I did not see in any other music player: you can choose to check for updated/deleted songs on starup, only search for new songs on startup, neither, or manually do this when you wish.
The audio part of Gmusicbrowser is yet another interesting thing of this music player: it allows you to choose between gstreamer, mpg321/ogg123/flac123, mplayer and icecast server.
Gmusicbrowser has a lot more features that the ones in this post, I only wrote about the things I liked, but you will find an option for full-screen too, IDtag writer and many many others. Give Gmusicbrowser a try and let me know what you think!
Download Gmusicbrowser
After testing each and every one from the above mentioned players, at least for me, Gmusicbrowser is the best. I use it in Queue, Library & Context Layout mode (but you can choose between 18 different layouts or customize your own) :
so I have the sorting by title, artist, album and so on to the right and the Queue on the left. Also, finally a player which allows me to queue the same song more than 1 time (coming to think of it, Songbird didn't even had a queue). I can arrange the songs in queue and delete them the way I want easily, or save it as a playlist. You can customize some shortkeys too, for instance I picked Alt+Q to enqueue current selection, but you can set as many shortcut keys as you want for performing any action you want.
Also, another very cool feature which I enjoy a lot is that if you click the album cover next to the music controls, you get to see all the songs in that album and also play them:
Of course, gmusicbrowser also comes with regular plugins such as Last.fm, Gnome Multimedia Keys, Web context (info and lyrics) and some other very interesting ones, like: autosave which automatically saves settings every X minutes, Export - which you can use for custom commands or exporting a playlist, CD ripping plugin and a picture finder.
The library behavior can be customized, a thing which I did not see in any other music player: you can choose to check for updated/deleted songs on starup, only search for new songs on startup, neither, or manually do this when you wish.
The audio part of Gmusicbrowser is yet another interesting thing of this music player: it allows you to choose between gstreamer, mpg321/ogg123/flac123, mplayer and icecast server.
Gmusicbrowser has a lot more features that the ones in this post, I only wrote about the things I liked, but you will find an option for full-screen too, IDtag writer and many many others. Give Gmusicbrowser a try and let me know what you think!
Download Gmusicbrowser
