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Audiophile Linux software

post #1 of 71
4/14/08 at 12:40am
Thread Starter 
I just switched to Linux. I was using Foobar2000 to play my music in windows, but it isn't supported in Linux. I would like Asio output, the best sound and a good way to sort through music like Itunes or like Foobar.
So what is the best player for Linux?
While I'm at it what is a good ripper to flac for Linux, and what is a good writer?
Thanks
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post #2 of 71
4/14/08 at 1:29am
I just switched too. There are billions of players. I use rhythmbox right now, it's nice and simple; I used Amarok before.

I don't think ASIO applies to linux. I think you just have the player hand the data off to ALSA and it does the rest. I'm not all that sure about how it works though. I'm having trouble finding any sort of crossfeed plugin, which is quite a bummer.
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post #3 of 71
4/14/08 at 12:26pm
I'm using amarok. CDs ripped with Sound Juicer to -q 9 Ogg Vorbis (around 300kbs). ALSA should treat the sound ok. I'm having to use dmix (kinda like kmixer in Windows) because my soundcard doesn't do hardware mixing, but unlike kmixer, I can force dmix to run at 44100, so there's no sample rate conversion to muck things up. I've done AB (not ABX, since I can't programitcally switch over) between dmix and direct bitstream output, and I can't tell a difference, where as I could readily tell the difference between kmixer and kernel streaming in XP (One of the reasons I switched).
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post #4 of 71
4/14/08 at 5:45pm
Actually there IS a program like ASIO in Linux. Its called Jack. It brings the latency down to ASIO levels. I highly advise you get it working. It has trouble working with amarok, so I would suggest going with Audacious or Juk
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post #5 of 71
4/14/08 at 5:46pm
I would also suggest switching from ALSA to OSS (not OSS emulation, real OSS). Get that here opensound.org
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post #6 of 71
4/14/08 at 11:12pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks for all this info. I tried using Juk, and it won't play any music. And I didn't like Audacious. I installed jack, and OSS, but I can only get amarok to work right now.
Do you have any idea how to get Juk to work? Once I do have it working how do I set up Jack with it?
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post #7 of 71
4/15/08 at 12:16am
MPD with the NCMPC front end is my favorite music player in Linux by far. I haven't tried to hook it up to Jack but I am pretty sure it can be done, ALSA is good enough with my current setup.

I would only recommend you check it out if you prefer keyboard driven interfaces though, or if you have a separate music server.

MPD: Music Player Daemon

--

Also why do you prefer OSS n4k33n, sound quality I assume?
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post #8 of 71
4/15/08 at 12:35am
Thread Starter 
I think I tried every single player available in the Add-remove programs list. Only amarok and audacious will play all my songs and I hate the playlist in audacious. Everything else seems to crash randomly, and I couldn't get any of them to output to jack.

Can I just run Foobar through wine and set up asio for that?
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post #9 of 71
4/15/08 at 12:36am
Thread Starter 
Thanks for the suggestion terandle, but I don't want a player based on the cl.
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post #10 of 71
4/15/08 at 11:58am
I use Exaile which is pretty good, and has a few interesting plugins.
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post #11 of 71
4/15/08 at 1:48pm
Thread Starter 
I tried that one and it kept crashing on me.
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post #12 of 71
4/15/08 at 2:37pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by terandle View Post
MPD with the NCMPC front end is my favorite music player in Linux by far. I haven't tried to hook it up to Jack but I am pretty sure it can be done, ALSA is good enough with my current setup.

I would only recommend you check it out if you prefer keyboard driven interfaces though, or if you have a separate music server.

MPD: Music Player Daemon

--

Also why do you prefer OSS n4k33n, sound quality I assume?
I second the vote for MPD. The server has very low resources, and there a plethora of front ends to use.

My current setup sounds pretty darn amazing. ALSA output is direct to the hardware device, so it bypasses all mixing and up sampling.

I don't know if I would recommend OSS though...
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post #13 of 71
4/15/08 at 4:55pm

correction to Open Sound System link

n4k33n's link to the Open Sound System should be

http://www.opensound.com/oss.html

I'm in the process of working my way through the list of players as well, and am using "Listen" right now. It seems pretty good. Quod Libet is decent also.

For those of you looking for the functionality of EAC under Linux, check out rubyripper. It does multiple passes to verify and correct for bad block reads ala EAC.
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post #14 of 71
4/15/08 at 5:05pm
I didn't realize until after I posted that OSS is a commercial product, not that there is anything wrong with that, and its free for personal use, but you need a license for 6 months and then you have to re-install it.. who needs that kind of pain. I'm still trying to get their driver compiled for my M-audio Audiophile 24/96 so I can rip my LP's.

nyc_paramedic: Are there any tricks to getting ALSA to output directly to a device? I'm using a Silverstone EB01 USB dac at work to output FLAC to my headphone amp, and am working on getting a FREENAS/SqueezeCentre server running at home with a Squeezebox 3 and then use a Nokia N800 as a controller. (or the squeezebox remote..)
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post #15 of 71
4/15/08 at 9:44pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrSlim View Post
nyc_paramedic: Are there any tricks to getting ALSA to output directly to a device? I'm using a Silverstone EB01 USB dac at work to output FLAC to my headphone amp, and am working on getting a FREENAS/SqueezeCentre server running at home with a Squeezebox 3 and then use a Nokia N800 as a controller. (or the squeezebox remote..)
The only "trick" is to give ASLA the hardware address to output to.

In my MPD condiguration file:



# An example of an ALSA output:
#
audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "My ALSA Device"
device "hw:0,0"
# format "44100:16:2" # optional


Yours might be hw:0,1; it depends.
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