A Man and his Penguin

Lots of people use Amarok. Lots use Banshee, Rhythmbox, Exaile, Quod Libet, Songbird, JuK, or Audacious. Some even prefer "lightweight" solutions such as mpd or xfmedia.

Poppycock. The perfect audio player for Linux is none of these. It’s not even very well known, but it has a huge install-base. It’s called Play. But don’t go typing "sudo apt-get install play", because it comes packaged with a very useful program called Sox.

A quick "sudo apt-get install sox libsox-fmt-all" will get it for you. Once it’s installed, it’s so easy to run:

• play "Britney Spears - I’m A Slave For You.mp3"

(assuming you have an even less credible taste in music than me)

Play, or rather your X terminal window, supports drag and drop:

• play <drag your file in and press enter>

Play supports the playback of multiple files in sequence, much like a playlist:

• play "JS Bach - Organ Fugure in G Minor (little).mp3" "Hi5 - The Alphabet Song.ogg" "Judas Priest - You’ve Got Another Thing Coming.wav"

To stop playback when playing a single file, press Control-C. When playing a playlist, press Control-C to go to the next track, or press it twice quickly to completely stop playback. To pause, press Control-Z, and to resume type "fg" and press Enter. (actually, that sentence is true for all programs started on the terminal - try it some time!)

Play supports a huge variety of formats, including many obscure ones that you haven’t heard of, and theoretically any audio file that ffmpeg supports (use the -t ffmpeg option before the filename). Co-incidentally (or not), anything that sox can accept as input can be played. The unfortunate exception appears to be WMA files - the ones I have would only play if I put them through ffmpeg, and even then they were stuttery.

Still, WMA isn’t a popular audio format for Linux, for obvious reasons.

Play even allows you to add cool effect filters to your playback, including echo, chorus, flanging, karaoke and fade-ins/fade-outs. There’s even an "earwax" effect where, when you’re wearing headphones, that makes it still sound like the audio is coming from speakers in front of you. I haven’t tried this one myself, but it sounds interesting.

You get all these top-notch features, yet Play is still lightweight, and if you start playback on the Alt-F1 terminal, it will continue to play even if X crashes! In fact, you don’t even need X, much less GTK or Qt. The interface is simple and uncluttered, and very easy to use.

Why not try Play today?

EDIT: I just discovered how to pause and resume playback. Welcome to the FS Daily readers!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 at 3:59 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.