Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!
In the concluding article of this series, we will go through alternative media managers and audio players found in the Ubuntu repositories along with some comments from their contributors and users. In the second part of the article, we briefly cover some less used alternatives as well as some other topics related to media.
Amarok
Amarok is a powerful media manager that integrates well with web services like Last.fm, Magnatune and more. Amarok comes with many features, like support for community-developed scripts, dynamic playlists, context views and more.
Amarok contributor: The people who love Amarok are those who want to dig more deeply into their music; they want to know about the artists, want to rate and tag their music, and have statistics about their listening habits. Amarok users want to be able to stream music as well as listen to their collection on disk.
Read more on the Amarok website.
Note: Amarok uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Amarok on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 500Mb of additional disk space.
Audacious
Audacious is an audio player based on XMMS. Like its predecessor, it’s designed to be light but configurable and supports Winamp skins. It is extendable through plugins.
Read more on the Audacious website.
Banshee
Banshee is designed for the GNOME desktop it can, amongst other things, import and burn audio CD’s, synchronize music to and from media devices.
Read more on the Banshee website.
Exaile
Exaile is a music player with a simple interface and powerful music management capabilities. It is easily extensible via plugins and is distributed with over 50 plugins adding extensive functionality. Features include tabbed playlists, smart playlists, advanced tagging, album art and lyrics fetching, streaming internet radio, podcasts, ReplayGain, secondary device output support, and more.
Read more on the Exaile website.
Guayadeque
Guayadeque is a lightweight audio player that supports smart playlists and large music collections. Amongst other things, it features extensive labeling tools as well as a smart play mode that adds similar tracks to the queue.
Read more on the Guayadeque website.
Quod Libet
Quod Libet is especially popular with power users, with support for very large libraries, Replay Gain, regular expression & conditional logic searches, Unicode, command-line usage and advanced tag editing. It supports podcasts, internet radios and nearly all music formats and comes with over 80 plugins.
Read more on the Quod Libet website.
Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox is an audio player designed to be easy to use. Inspired by iTunes, it supports internet radios and podcasts, media device integration, music sharing and more.
Read more on the Rhythmbox website.
Tomahawk
Tomahawk is a music player that plays and manages not only your local collection, but also streams from SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, music lockers and many more. You can even connect Tomahawk with your friends via Jabber, Google Talk or Tomahawk’s new online community, Hatchet, to share your tastes, playlists and collection.
Tomahawk contributor: Tomahawk is basically a music metadata player. In short, given the name of a song and artist Tomahawk will find the right source based on the users available streaming music services and collections. This fundamentally different approach to music enables a range of new music consumption and sharing experiences previously not possible.
Read more on the Tomahawk website.
Note: Tomahawk uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Tomahawk on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 260 Mb of additional disk space.
If you didn’t find your favorite player in the list above, don’t worry! In addition to the software mentioned above, there are many more media players and media related applications in the repositories.
If you want to play your media from the command line, try out cmus, moc, or mplayer. Alternatively you can set up MPD, the music player daemon, that allows you to connect several frontends to your music library, even from remote devices.
If you want to make your media available to other devices like your gaming console, you can use one of the UPnP servers available. These include Mediatomb, MiniDLNA and Rygel.
Finally, if you want to produce music on your computer, check out Ubuntu Studio, which is an Ubuntu flavor directed at artists of all kinds and largely based on Xubuntu.