[Zanth]

Since a recent article listed mainly programmes that are compatible with Windows and are audio related, I thought it might be nice to have a thread that lists the top ten linux apps out there that folks are using for playback, ripping, recording, tagging etc.

I'm still hunting for the perfect set but lately I've been using:

Banshee for audio playback (quod libet is great too but it was crashing too much with my massive library)

Songbird (very much like iTunes, cross platform, plays everything and handles big libraries)

k3b for burning

Rubyripper or EAC via Wine/Codeweaver's Cross over office

dbpoweramp for converting files (via Wine)



Unfortunately for me, as I see it windows has it best:

EAC, dbpoweramp, foobar, Nero

That combination is awesome. Throw in one's preferred tagger and game over.

Mac is coming on strong with Max, Cog and then Toast for burning but I still feel psychologically safer using EAC for that guaranteed rip and dbpoweramp for the proper transcoding, foobar for awesome playback and Nero for perfect burning.

 

[C38368]

I rip to FLAC with Sound Juicer, convert to Ogg Vorbis SoundConverter, and listen with amaroK.

No burning to speak of.

If I happen to be in Windows, it's EAC/dBpowerAmp and foobar. But I'm rarely ever in Windows.

 

[jsaliga]

I thought this was the music forum.

--Jerome

 

[goldenratiophi]

lol, why did this one get moved but the Windows one is still in Music?

 

[Zanth]

Quote:

Originally Posted by goldenratiophi /img/forum/go_quote.gif lol, why did this one get moved but the Windows one is still in Music?

Your wish is my command

 

[goldenratiophi]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zanth /img/forum/go_quote.gif Your wish is my command

thanks! it was bugging me

 

[DrBenway]

There is a version of Audacity for Linux.

I use it under XP for editing/track splits of live/streaming recordings. Haven't tested it under Linux.

 

[Ech0]

I think K3b is a good program for burning all types of files both video and music.

I use MythMusic, part of MythTV, to play flac, mp3's... It's okay, but, the larger your database becomes the more of a pain navigation is. Probably true of all players of this sort though. Amarok would be my first choice if it had an automated virtualization program that started after a song / album begins playing.

Audio-Convert is a simple, effective program for converting files.

Others I've played around with would be Jinzora, and MPD with different gui's just to throw out a couple of names.

My better half uses gtkPod for managing her Ipod.

 

[rustbucket]

I think I posted in the Windows thread, but I use:
Amarok for playback
abcde for ripping (command line encoder that's highly configurable and eerily good at finding the right track information. I rip to FLAC for home and 128 VBR MP3 for portable use (abcde lets me do both automatically).
When I need to burn stuff, I go with K3b.

Personally, I really like Amarok. It's got a few rough edges (as do most graphical Linux apps), but by and large it gets the job done really well. I have an iPod that I use with Amarok as well, which works great.

 

[krmathis]

Some nice recommendations in here. I'll give a few of them a try..

 

[fwojciec]

I used to miss Windows apps like foobar2000 at first but not anymore... At this stage I would say that Linux is as good if not better than Windows as far as playback and music management is concerned. Here are some apps I use:

1) Music playback: mpd with sonata as the client. Perfect solution, especially if your collection is arranged using filesystem/directories. Ncmpc is a nice CLI client for mpd that I also use from time to time. Mpd does gapless without any problems, plays any audio format, and handles huge libraries very well while using next to nothing in terms of resources.

2) Music conversion tasks -- a variety of bash scripts using command line tools like flac, lame, mac (ape de/encoder), cuetools, shntool, and others. Bash scripting makes this entire setup so customizable and powerful its ridiculous. No combination of Windows tools comes close -- especially for big jobs, since in Linux I can chain the apps together, script what needs to happen and leave my computer alone overnight to do the dirty work.

3) Tagging -- EasyTAG

4) Burning -- I prefer command line tools generally so I use bashburn -- makes burning music to CDs completely effortless.

5) Ripping -- Rubyripper -- not sure how it compares to EAC but works fine for me.

There are other things which are nice in Linux -- like being able to set up my laptop to automatically switch audio outputs when I plug my Total Bithead in and and switch them back to the internal soundcard when I unplug it (I always needed to fiddle with the settings in foobar manually when I wanted to use Bithead in Windows)...

In general terms -- I think the trick to becoming comfortable with Linux as audio playing/managing system is not to look for replacements for particular Windows apps, but rather to try and do things the Linux way (bash scripting when possible, one app per functionality rule and such).

 

[joze7205]

For playing a few files, I'm happy with either XMMS or Audacious.

For a database handling apps, I like Gmusicbrowser. I've found Amarok with mySQL to be good to. Unless you have a large music collection (+20k), Quod Libet is pretty good as well. For larger collections it is far to slow (uses SQLite).

For tagging, I prefer Audio Tag Tool of Ex Falso.

For conversion, I prefer command line tools like lame and flac.

For ripping I prefer EAC in Windows. I have used Grip, but I prefer EAC.