Lemons to lemonaid: New favorite audio player

[nstgc]

As some may know, I "lost" a bunch of data. To avoid overwriting what may still be there, I'm using Windows. I like music -- both to listen to and as background noise. I found out that foobar2000 has a feature that Amarok once had -- play random album. Pretty much, it plays through a whole album and then picks a random album. This lessens the predictability while at the same time it doesn't destroy my playlist (I have songs that must be proceeded by another song or they sound like shit). Amurok 1.x does this, but getting it to work is annoying.

Amarok 1.x still has better features, but it also is buggy. foobar isn't.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

I just started using Clementine to replace Amarok 1.4 a few days ago, because Amarok decided it no longer wanted to read my library. >_>

It's a bit buggy as well, and doesn't yet have all the features I'd like, but it's actively developed, so I'm hopeful.  I'm running off of svn, btw, because it's been a little while since they released, so that may be responsible for some of the bugginess.

[xShadow]

I'm gonna use this thread to try to ask if there's a player with a feature I want: not so random randomness.

Bear with me for a sec.

Basically, what I want is something that'll play a random song by a random artist, then play another random song... by another artist (can't be the same one). Then, it'll pick another random artist, but it can't be the same as either of the two previous ones. After that song is done, if it randomly selects the first artist that was played again, the song that is played can't be from the same album that was played the first time, if the artist has more albums than one.

Now, it's fine if it doesn't do ALL of this, but I at least want something that makes it so that I can have a different artist playing for each randomly selected song.

In essence, like the random feature of foobar, but customizable to avoid some negative aspects.

[nstgc]

I think thats what the Amarok 2.x "Random (artist)" feature does. I'm not sure. If you are asking about a windows audio player than I'm clueless. I'm sure that foobar will eventual offer custome scripting. You (xshadow) seem to know some programing so could surely write such a script yourself. I think Winamp allows for custom scripts (not sure though, haven't used it in years). Amarok I know allows for custom scripts.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

Well, Amarok is technically multiplatform... I couldn't get both it and Dolphin to install at the same time, last I tried.

[MrSparkle]

Clemintine looks nice so far, thanks for the link! I will forever be a foobar fanboy, but there will be times I want to play music from something other then windows. The actively developed bit is a big plus...

Well, it wanted 500 MB of ram to make the library, that took a program restart to lose. Before that it froze at 90%. Now it is uses 50 MB (5 MB more then foobar with all my playlists and components)...

[kureshii]

Clemintine looks nice so far, thanks for the link! I will forever be a foobar fanboy, but there will be times I want to play music from something other then windows.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that foobar works just fine in Linux under wine. Pretty much everything works (assuming your plugins are compatible and such), except for kernel streaming and WASAPI, and also native drag-and-drop (which is more wine's fault than foobar’s). With a suitable XP theme loaded, you can even get it to look near-seamless. It’ll take some messing around in wine to get all the niceties enabled (anti-aliased fonts and such); this is a good place to start.

My current foobar-wine setup (with some UI elements hidden):

(GUI glitches are due to the buggy XP skin; KDE4 themes for XP are depressingly rare.)

Ironically, foobar readily managed to read my network shares, while after much messing around in Amarok, network playback with it was still spotty at best. I still remain hopeful for a native Linux app that can replace it.

I haven’t gotten round to looking at foobar’s SDK yet, but I’d think a customisable randomisation plugin could be written with it.

[MrSparkle]

Global hotkeys are out when using foobar in wine, last I heard. I lose half the reason for foobar without those hotkeys. Any other players with similar uber global hotkey support? UPnP over a local network could work? Only used it from another foobar instance, though...

But yeah, Clemintine messed with my shell integration...
(屮 `Д´)屮 Ｙ　Ｕ　ＤＯ　ＤＩＳ ？

[kureshii]

Global hotkeys are out when using foobar in wine, last I heard. I lose half the reason for foobar without those hotkeys.

You still get global hotkeys through command switches for foobar (and your distro’s built-in hotkey features). Just more troublesome to set up.