I mentioned over a year ago that I had started using Audacious as my media player. It was based on classic Winamp, wasn’t too bloated and generally did everything I wanted it to.
Unfortunately a while back I ran into an issue with it and playlist size: it seemed to choke on playlists above a certain size (around 2,000 songs – my playlist is just over that). In other words, it would be working fine but then when you loaded up Audacious the next time round, the playlist would be empty. Strange.
Anyway, I have since been using Rhythmbox to play my MP3s (and FLACs, and OGGs… but mostly MP3s). It’s a bit quirky (one strange feature is that there is no ‘stop’ button – only a play / pause button) but so far I have found it to be pretty reliable. I like the fact that it can watch your music collection folder and automatically import any new files it finds there.
It also has iPod support. I’ve found that it doesn’t seem to like copying files over to my iPod (well, dragging and dropping doesn’t seem to work anyway – maybe you’re supposed to do it some other way) so I use GtkPod for that. One thing it does do, though, is sync the iPod with last.fm. If you have last.fm configured in Rhythmbox, and you connect up your iPod, then it seems Rhythmbox will automatically upload the list of songs played since the last time to last.fm. That is actually pretty cool, as I’ve been thinking about doing that for ages!
It just does it silently, without any prompting. Nice.
Anyway, Rhythmbox gets a cautious “thumbs up” from me! So here concludes the review :p
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