Do you want a player or an all-in-one organiser/player/web-browser/radio?

For an audio player, my choice goes to mplayer. When I want a little
more (playlist) I  choose herrie And when I want to browse and play my
music library, mpd (with mpc or sonata as interface) is my choice.

Concerning configuration in mpd, I am quite surprised! Apart from
telling it where to find the files (which for me consists in making a
symlink), there is no configuration to be done!

Wait till you try to use M4A/ALAC files. I'm using mplayer nowadays
because no audio player seems to play them correctly, with the exception
of mpd (but mpd and pulseaudio don't play very nice).

Some GStreamer-based media players refuse to play M4A/ALAC files
(Banshee for instance) because they don't recognize them and assume M4A
could only have AAC inside. And in general, the way the plugins are
split in Gentoo, you need the GST faad plugin to be able to play
M4A/ALAC (the ALAC decoder is provided by FFmpeg instead).

As much as xine sucks (and I say that as a xine developer!), Amarok 1.4
using that as backend was the nearest thing to iTunes for what concerns
playing stuff without hassle that I have ever seen.

-- 
Diego Elio Pettenò — “Flameeyes”
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

If you found a .asc file in this mail and know not what it is,
it's a GnuPG digital signature: http://www.gnupg.org/

[ omitting part 2: file MIME type is application/pgp-signature, not text/html ]

Apparently Jason Clinton doesn't like my comment system. Also, apparently mentioning "mac" was some kind of trigger.

For the record: I just went and tried Rhythmbox and vlc, and at least on debian sid, they also don't play m4a out of the box. Probably this is a problem with the gstreamer configuration. I have the following gstreamer packages installed; it is possible there is some gstreamer-faad package that is not packaged for debian or in the debian-multimedia repos.

ii  gstreamer-tools                                  0.10.24-1                       Tools for use with GStreamer
ii  gstreamer0.10-alsa                               0.10.24-1                       GStreamer plugin for ALSA
ii  gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg                             0.10.8-2                        FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer
ii  gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs                           0.10.24-1                       GStreamer plugin for GnomeVFS
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-base                       0.10.24-1                       GStreamer plugins from the "base" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-good                       0.10.15-2                       GStreamer plugins from the "good" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly                       0.10.12-1+b1                    GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio                         0.10.15-2                       GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
ii  gstreamer0.10-tools                              0.10.24-1                       Tools for use with GStreamer
ii  gstreamer0.10-x                                  0.10.24-1                       GStreamer plugins for X11 and Pango
ii  libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-0                  0.10.24-1                       GStreamer libraries from the "base" set
ii  libgstreamer0.10-0                               0.10.24-1                       Core GStreamer libraries and elements

By the way, if you follow the link, the other player I had m4a troubles with was Amarok 1.4.7.

Hey there,

For applications using GStreamer such as Quod Libet you might need to install
the gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad package from debian-multimedia.org.
That is, if you're alright with using non-free software ;)


Cheers,
Markus

You wan't libre m4a software? You can't....
You should make sure you have installed that package. You might need to
restart Qoud libet..... (isn't it a twopart deamon/client, so make sure
the daemon is restarted)... Otherwise rhythmbox is friendly/simple
itunes like music player.

Also, distro's like fedora and ubuntu will show a dialog in, say
rhythmbox, to install the needed decoder software, when needed. Debian
probably doesn't. 

>For applications using GStreamer such as Quod Libet you might need to install
>the gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad package from debian-multimedia.org.
>That is, if you're alright with using non-free software ;)

Thanks for the hint. I'd rather not use non-free software if I can avoid it. In this case though, it doesn't help, I still get 

   ERROR: from element /GstPlayBin:playbin0: You do not have a decoder installed to handle this file. You might need to install the necessary plugins.



-- 
Frej Soya <frej.soya@gmail.com>

Two quick comments:

a) alac-in-m4a plays just fine for me with GStreamer on debian sid with
the following packages installed:

ii  gstreamer0.10-alsa                    0.10.24-1
GStreamer plugin for ALSA
ii  gstreamer0.10-doc                     0.10.24-1
GStreamer core documentation and manuals
ii  gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg                  0.10.8-1
FFmpeg plugin for GStreamer
ii  gstreamer0.10-nice                    0.0.9-2                    ICE
library (GStreamer plugin)
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad             0.10.13-1
GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-base            0.10.24-1
GStreamer plugins from the "base" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-doc        0.10.24-1
GStreamer documentation for plugins from the
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-good            0.10.15-2
GStreamer plugins from the "good" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad      0.10.13-0.0
GStreamer plugins from the "bad" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly            0.10.12-1+b2
GStreamer plugins from the "ugly" set
ii  gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio              0.10.15-2
GStreamer plugin for PulseAudio
ii  gstreamer0.10-tools                   0.10.24-1
Tools for use with GStreamer
ii  gstreamer0.10-x                       0.10.24-1
GStreamer plugins for X11 and Pango

If you have a file that doesn't play, please file a bug in bugzilla
(http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/bugs/) and we'll fix it as soon as we
can.


b) gstreamer0.10-plugins-really-bad etc. are all perfectly Free
Software. Distribution of parts of these packages may be restricted due
to presumed patents and/or trademarks though (which would then also
affect all other similar FOSS software as well).

Ok, you blogpost was not really fair:

minirok and bluemingo are not known by most people, very small projects  
which of course have less features. (Guess what: there are windows players  
that can ONLY play mp3)

exaile just got a complete rewrite - judging it right now is unfair

mpd is not hard to setup at all. changing a minimum of 1 (!) line in the  
config should be doable. (path to database) - then change permission of  
/var/lib/mpd/ to the user configured (ok - thats a 2nd line) - done

mocp can play m4a just fine. If you link a bug report, you should read it  
yourself - that bug is fixed for months now.

quodlibet is kinda dead

the others were just not fitting your optical taste - hardly a fail for  
audio on linux (and many ppl prefer the winamp look)

m4a on Linux is a 'pain' because it's a patented codec (AAC). No
sue-able distributor can ship AAC decoding in their official
repositories, it has to go to unofficial Evil Patented Stuff
repositories like rpmfusion, PLF etc.

With gstreamer0.10-faad installed from the appropriate such repository
for your distro, any gstreamer-based music player will play AAC files
fine. With libfaad, most other mainstream players (audacious, mplayer,
xine etc) should do too.

-- 
adamw