Linux Was Clearly Never Made For Audiophiles
I am not an angry man. I have absolutely no discretion and I am almost always correct in whatever it is I am saying (disregard all previous posts here and that statement remains mostly true) but rarely do I really lash out, until I come across the topic of sound in Linux. It’s not like the situation is bad enough with sound servers (OSSv4 is awesome but doesn’t support the card I want, everything else can go burn for all I care) but what REALLY shits me off is that lack of good media players.
My current media player? mplayer-uau. It has no support for tags in FLAC or TTA but otherwise it’s by far the most stable player I have, and it’s not even that inconvenient to use it from CLI either. I recently picked up an album by one of my favourite artists, Alstroemeria Records, and was a little sad to find it so flat in mplayer, because I’m pretty damn sure it sounds excellent on the Cambridge Azur 650C. I decided to try some Qt based media players and see if any of them could make me happier, but I figured a player wasn’t going to make much difference, I really hate equalisers but something told me to try anyway.
My first step was Amarok2. My last experience with Amarok2 left me with an intense hatred of the thing. It continually crashed, it’s media collection and tag reading/writing system is worse than WMP7′s (yes really), and it has on more than one occasion permanently deleted tracks from my harddisk. This sorta gave me a bit of “don’t go near amarok2 ever again” vibe but I decided I had all my shit backed up and it would be worth a shot. For once it didn’t crash, and has only done so once in the past 72 hours. It seems to be fucking up sending things to last.fm but otherwise fairly ok. Seeking is shitty in FLAC and TTA somewhat refuses to seek at all. I did try using different phonon backends and none of them made me any happier. mplayer, xine, and gstreamer for anyone that cares. Seeing as this gave me no advantage over mplayer, I moved on.
My next try was Clementine, the Qt4 fork of Amarok 1.4. The UI was familiar enough but the complete lack of features pissed me off, so I didn’t really get much real testing done here. I did take the opportunity to try configuring a library in it to which is stalled for 20 minutes and eventually crashed. After this somewhat half-assed attempt at a media player, I decided to stick with the theme of doing half a job and tried Prismriver. I actually intended to use this name myself elsewhere and may still do (that or Alstroemeria, so I can name something after what I intend to use it for) but regardless, my first 4 attempts at compiling the thing failed. Eventually I got it to go, and had some nice segfaults. Not even able to test the player’s fabled cuesheet reading which is a feature I really need when I’m too lazy to split and tag my stuff manually.
7 shitty players later, I realised I had qmpdclient and ncmpc installed so I promptly decided that GUI’s for media players in Linux are all terrible and went with CLI. Working fine for the moment. ncurses is an excellent invention and makes the best GUI’s I guess. Before people ask why I didn’t try GTK+, it’s because GTK is a horrible piece of crap and every developer that uses it is a retard that deserves absolutely no recognition for their work which nobody should even use anyway. Qt has Phonon too, which I bet could be implemented into GTK but that would give people a reason to keep using it, and that would be bad.
ITP: I make my own media player using phonon and a backend that isn’t a load of cancer inducing shit. Except it would take forever because I suck at anything not on embedded chips.
On a side note:
Dear Open Sound System Developers,
Please support the ASUS Xonar Essence STX in OSSv4 so that I may use it with my sexy amp and DAC and headphones and be a huge audiophile dickwad.
Love,
Emess
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4 Responses to “Linux Was Clearly Never Made For Audiophiles”
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Try foobar2000 under wine :>
Amarok 2.3 Works very well =) All of 2.x branch is bugged but its seems thats the 2.3 is stable.
@edogawaconan: Can’t say I like using wine for anything audio. Tried briefly, found it too painful to run. Some things just shouldn’t be chrooted :/
@benpro: I found 2.3 to be stable yes, but that was about all. It still didn’t have the features I want and it’s library was terrible. I’m just happy it didn’t delete my music somewhat randomly like 2.1 did.
Not sure if it would help or not, but have you considered pulling OSS out and just going ALSA/JACK? I was running OSS on Arch for awhile and noticed similar issues like you’re discussing with my m-audio audiophile 2496. Come to think of it, me and Phonon always had issues.
Take into consideration the resource usage with KDE too… I was doing KDEmod and noticed a quick end to music latency or sound hiccups when I went with LXDE and/or Openbox. May not be as flashy, but again, it’s fully functional.
In the end for a media player, I just went for something light weight like Goggles Music Player that isn’t trying to do 80 things at once when the music is going. It’s got a pretty straight forward gui and will do the job.