Episode: 658
Title: HPR0658: Music Management Consoles
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0658/hpr0658.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:31:05

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Music
Hey everybody!
Welcome to another episode of Half Public Radio.
Thanks for Ken Fallon for allowing us to record the show today.
And my name is Courtney and I'm here with my partner in crime Mark.
Hey I'm Mark and we're going to be reviewing some music management consoles today.
Forging new slash Linux.
That's a big long word basically meaning things that can play your music and store it.
And you can sort through it and find whatever you want to listen to.
So the first music media management console we're going to be talking about
is RhythmBox which I believe is the default in Genome.
It was the default in Ubuntu all the way back as far as I can remember.
Although it sounds like they're going to be switching to Banshee for their next release.
RhythmBox is fairly broad, it's a store all your music.
It plays Og, Flak, MP3 if you hate freedom and all sorts of other music codecs.
And it's a fairly heavy weight.
It allows you to store podcasts and all sorts of other things in it.
Courtney, what do you think?
Well generally because I'm currently running Ubuntu 1010.
It was the default music player that came when I installed.
And I'm fairly familiar with it.
I like the fact that it is very user friendly and that's something that a lot of times can't get lost
with a different software downloaded on Linux.
For example, I really like that the library is very simple to navigate.
All my podcasts automatically update the system to update them.
To get my latest hacker public radio and all that is it updates automatically.
I don't even have to think about it.
So those are some pluses.
That's true.
I do notice that it has a large button just to import your new music.
You can rescan your library.
I think on startup it actually rescends your library.
The buttons are all very easy.
You can jump.
You can change the shuffle or to random.
They're all very obvious.
It also has the familiar pain for iTunes users where you can change from artist or album
kind of filtered by those different locations.
Yeah.
I mean, it does kind of have the iTunes for Linux sort of feel obviously toned down a lot and much more free.
But I mean, I think there are some little gems.
I mean, the control over add-ons.
They don't bombard you with too many add-on choices, but you still have enough custom ability
for things like lyrics to pop up last FM.
And they give you a bunch of different stores to choose from online to get online sources.
So I think those are some pluses.
Also, I actually kind of really like the radio feature.
So I don't even have to log on to Pandora or something.
I can just click on the radio button and listen to all my 90s good hits.
And it's all right there in one my one music player.
All right, so now let's talk about some disadvantages of rhythm box.
I know for one I really dislike how it crashes on me all the time.
That's why I eventually stopped using it.
I think that rhythm box is a really memory footprint kind of has a Firefox syndrome.
It tries to do everything and be everything to every user.
And I think that's a big disadvantage for it.
Yeah, I have had instances where it crashes and that can be annoying, especially if you're in the middle of, you know, importing 20 new albums at once.
That can be annoying.
But for me, one thing that really gets me and this might be because I'm kind of a design aesthetic freak is that it's not very pretty.
Even when it opens up right compared to some of the other ones we're going to talk about.
The interface is very, very simple.
And I don't know to me that's kind of a disadvantage when you're talking about things like media and music.
You want to kind of get in the mood to play and listen to your music.
And I think that I don't know, at least for me, it turns me off.
That's fair. I totally understand that.
I really do like very simple looking music players, but at the same time this one's kind of simple to a point where it looks clunky.
It's not that it has slim, clean features. It's more of buttons are very obviously buttons. They have large boxes around them.
And while that makes things very user friendly at the same time, it also makes kind of a non-standard interface.
Although it does match the default GNOME interface fairly well.
If you have something like Ubuntu using it, it doesn't match any of your themes by any means or stretching the imagination.
Yeah, I definitely think it should be OBGYN at least. I mean, come on, Ubuntu.
Alright, so the next one we're going to be looking at is Songbird, which traditionally has had completely cross-platform support.
The version for Windows, Mac, and Linux. I think it was about a year and a half or two years ago.
They discontinued their Linux branch. And that's a big downside to me.
I mean, I can't, if I can't run out and get a new slash Linux, they're probably not going to support it.
I probably not going to use it or support it for other people.
But I guess that if someone's trying to make a switch to open source gradually, they want to switch to free open source software.
I guess it's better they do than they don't, I guess. So what do you think about that, Courtney?
Actually, Songbird is kind of an interesting issue for me because I've only been part of the Linux community for a couple of years.
Songbird was actually, I used to run it on my Windows machine as an alternative to iTunes because I hated iTunes Interface.
And it's actually what kind of started exposing me to the whole open source community.
And I was like, wow, this is really cool. They not only offer it for Windows, but it's for Mac and for Linux, what's Linux?
And the fact that they've now just kind of, I don't know, I don't necessarily think I read on some forums somewhere that Linux is open source, but open source isn't Linux.
And that was kind of a, I don't know, kind of a drawing statement.
I don't want to necessarily say that they are evil and, you know, damn the man that they've abandoned the community, but it is a slap in the face to their roots.
I don't see any advantage really to not offering it in Linux anymore, like what would be the benefit of now streamlining it down to two different platforms. It doesn't really make sense.
That's true. And to be fair to Songbird, they did not like close it off so no one can do it. They still completely open source.
And I think there actually is a project called the Nightingale project that's trying to pick up a new slash Linux support for this, but we'll see if that actually ever takes off.
It's been kind of waiting for the first release for at least six months, probably more, but there's always potential, I suppose.
And it is open source that's always better for people that are stuck in Windows for some reason.
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think regardless, it is a plus that there's an alternative to the iTunes monopoly out there for people on Windows or Max OSX machines.
So I don't think in all its existence is a problem to me, but it just kind of sort of is kind of weird.
But I guess I haven't really had much interaction with it since I stopped using Windows. I do remember it was very, very pretty.
So maybe if we can get that sort of design aesthetic in some of the other music management systems that are open source, I might be a lot happier.
But that's just me.
That's true. And I do like the software. I think that it had a lot of add-ons, which I always very much like.
I think that when it has extensibility, that's always a good thing.
And Songbird had a huge number of add-ons and themes that you could add to. I think they called them feathers or something to fit with their odd naming system.
But people could kind of make it look however they wanted. It had the Firefox aspect.
And underneath it, it was actually built on top of, I believe, the Mozilla suite, but it was on some kind of web browser underneath, which caused some security vulnerabilities, I know.
But I can't really say I haven't looked too much into the songbird issue. But whatever, it doesn't work on new slag Linux, so I don't care about it.
Well said.
And the next one we're going to talk about is the Genome Music Project, which is kind of a very slimmed down music management console.
It does have the ability to keep track of what songs are new music folder and keep track of artists and albums and record those things.
It was able to import all my music just fine after I finally figured out how it kind of starts off with a basic VLC style where it only shows the current song that you play.
And you can kind of play one song at a time.
And then you have to dig through menus in order to pull up the big screen that everyone's used to seeing with the filters for album artist and genre, kind of the iTunes style.
And that was a huge dissad to me. I just couldn't really focus on two separate windows at once. It kind of is the whole problem with the GIMP, where every window is separated into four different windows.
And it made things very confusing for me. I don't know.
All I have to say is Yuck, no offense, but Yuck. To me, the concept behind it is almost backwards, right?
Like many music players have the large screen and then they have an option to boil it down to a skin or like a little window that pops up so you don't have to constantly have your entire library open.
And it seems like this music player has it completely backwards. They start by opening just the skin of the player and then you have to fumble around for five minutes to try and figure out how to get to the larger program.
So maybe in concept, it was trying to be innovative. It does function. It is streamlined. Those are pluses to any open source project. And that's why it makes them preferable to their options. But man, the efficiency in use, I think, makes it a non viable option for a sustained music player.
Yeah, it does just seem to me that somebody had a view of how they wanted their music player to work. They made the music player and then they kind of dumped it out there and let anyone else that wanted to use a try to.
But they were just really tough to figure out and do anything. None of the buttons have labels underneath them and takes five minutes to hover over them.
The buttons are not the similar to anything else I've seen. For instance, this shuffle. It just looks like two boxes stacked and stacked in half of each other. And it was just a bad experience for me to use it.
Agreed. That's really all I can say on that subject. If you installed it and you disagree, I'm glad you found a streamlined player. But if you're thinking of installing it, I would recommend not.
But this is a new slash Linux. So you can always try installing it. And if you don't like it, just uninstall it. It's a simple one command option.
There's no real disadvantage to trying it out. And if you disagree with us, please let us know. Leave some comments and send us hate mail because it's better than no mail.
So the next one on our list is Banshee. And me, I don't have a lot to say about it because in my opinion, it's kind of a different flavor of rhythm box.
I mean Ubuntu is even going to switch over to it from rhythm box for the next distribution. So I don't see very much difference between them.
I don't know. I haven't had a lot of experience with Banshee because after I installed it, I was like, hey, all right, I have another copy of rhythm box to sort through. So I ended up just uninstalling it. But maybe I just don't know enough about it.
Well, I don't know about that. But I certainly do think Banshee is quite a different beast. Let's start with the obvious controversy that's kind of in the GNU slash Linux community about this. Banshee is this is getting a real nerdy talk. It's written in mono. So it's a kind of dot net for GNU slash Linux, which some people see as traders to the GNU slash Linux way and hating on freedom.
I don't know about all that. I don't personally use it, but it seems like I might be a minor disadvantage. But I do agree that it certainly does have some of the same design elements that rhythm box has.
But when you look a little under the surface, the add-ons for Banshee are just insanely diverse. There are all sorts of things that you can do with it. It can fetch your lyrics. You can compress down into your tray.
It has all the same kind of features that rhythm box does and more, I think. But I certainly see why the first look it does look like rhythm box and blue.
I mean, I didn't know a lot of that. So that kind of gives me a new perspective. I don't know if the add-ons would be enough for me to switch over from the current music players that I'm trying out.
But it is nice to know that in the broad sense, all of those add-ons exist that, I mean, you just really can't find with programs like iTunes, just the amount of custom ability that you have over your music, over your media, over how you want it displayed to you. That's commendable.
So the fact that Banshee has provided so many that maybe other music players don't have would definitely be a pro.
The huge advantage of Banshee was, at least for me, back when I was a freedom hater, I noticed an iPod. It was the only music player I could find that could import and export music to the iPod.
And I know they've worked hard and stay on top of that. We've been able to do it with the iPod touch, which I know Apple tried locking down pretty hard.
They also allow for D-A-A-P music sharing. That sounds nerdy, but at the bottom line, it just means that you can listen to other people's shared iTunes libraries if they let you.
And you can, or sorry, not iTunes, iTunes is locked down and doesn't let you do that, but you can listen to music sharing servers.
And it allows for a lot of really cool types of things you can do with network music that most servers don't.
So if you want to get into the low level, kind of things, or just want a really easy iPod transfer medium Banshee is a great piece of software, it's very much you started up and everything's very obvious. I think it's very user-friendly.
Alright, so next we have Amarok, which I would say is probably in my top list of players I've come across so far.
Most of all, I think it's one of the prettier ones out there. I also like the way that it's set up because I feel a lot of times, one of the disadvantages to a lot of these players is they have so much stuff, which is so cool.
But there's not enough screen to effectively manage where all these things you might want to see go, right? Like when you imported the song into your library, when the last time you played it, etc.
I think that Amarok, if nothing else, has the best utilization of their space as efficient and pretty that I have seen.
So that's one of the biggest pluses for me, is that once again, that design aesthetic, which I'm sure a lot of you guys share it with me.
Yeah, I liked Amarok for the 15 seconds I could get it to stop crashing. I think that it really looked really good, but realistically I could listen to a 3-4 song before it crashed on me.
And to be fair, when I actually did review this for a long period of time, it was about six months ago.
And when I tried it out, again, this last week, kind of updating and refreshing myself, I had no issues at all with the crashing.
So apparently they've been doing some pretty heavy releases of this and making it more stable.
And I definitely agree that it is one of the smoothest and prettiest looking ones when you start it up.
It has a very clean interface, and it does. If you're running KDE, you just can't get a better music player for it.
Yeah, I definitely agree. I did have those same crashing problems. It seems like the latest version has fixed them.
I think something that helps is, I think it's important for developers to keep in mind that when you're developing software streamlined or whether you want it to be very aesthetically pleasing, you should have some sort of theme.
And I think Amorock does that really well from the moment you open the program and the image pops up. All the icons are cohesive.
It's very much together. And I really like the way that the add-ons are present when you open up the program, like the current track, the lyrics, the Wikipedia, the search at the bottom.
But it's not overwhelming you with all of the add-ons at once.
It kind of lets the user really take a look and explore the program while still having all of the necessary features right there and easy to find in use.
Yes, that's certainly true. One thing that is going to be kind of different for people coming from iTunes or Winemp or one together, kind of Windows-based music management consoles, is that Amorock doesn't really have a filter pane, at least not nearly as obviously as other software compilations do.
So Amorock has more of a list of artists. It kind of filters by artist and then down to genre, and you have to select the songs inside of there.
And then you add them to a playlist that kind of just plays through. And you have to keep updating that playlist if you want to.
You can't just randomly sort through all the artists, at least in the way that I found it.
So it's a little bit different experience, but once you get used to it, it's really no different. It's all user preference.
And one last thing, at least when I installed it under GNOME, that's a different window management system. It had some issues.
So it comes pre-installed, or if you're running KDE out of the box, it's, Amorock is just fantastic. It looks great.
But if you're installing GNOME, there's going to be some issues. Like when I minimize it down to the tray, or I guess it's not called the tray anymore. It's the panel or something.
But when you minimize it down, it didn't have the same kind of pretty icon that I'm used to seeing on KDE. It needs to have some dependencies added to it, at least in the Debian that I was running.
Yeah, I haven't run into that, but I have the latest version of Docky. So the icon, the wolf icon, is there present on my dock when I have it open.
But I have heard that that is one disadvantage is that when you do focus on the design so much, sometimes the little details that aren't perfect,
just then detract away from that kind of whole idea. So maybe that's something that they're going to try and fix for the next version. Hopefully, because I'd really like to keep using Amorock.
But we'll see. That's pretty good point.
That's fair. They do a really nice job of making it look nice. And I guess, equibbling about one tiny little icon is the least of things.
If that were true, one of the other programs, I wouldn't even think to mention it. Just that Amorock does look so great in general.
Those little things do stand out. All right, this next one is kind of a music management console and kind of not. It's called Miro.
And really, it's more of a web, it's more of a web-based music player. It has a torrent software built into it that it can download your torrents that you want to either that you find for reputable sources or reputable sources.
It also has video feeds. So you can grab things off Vodo and wildlife highlights. It can grab audio feeds from this American life and PR other type of things.
But you can also store all your local music in there. So it's kind of a cloud-based music management console, but then also has the ability to store your music and videos.
All of the things we've talked about so far have at least some ability to play video, but Miro really focuses on it and kind of makes it a web browser inside of a music player.
Miro does a great job, in my opinion, of handling music and video, but it's not the easiest to sort through if you want to find one specific song or just listen to a bunch of tracks.
It's a lot more about having a feed that you watch something once and then it goes away. In that you have all of your podcasts and you listen to all of them, your favorite hacker world radio episodes.
And then once you're done, you never want to listen to them again. So it's more of a feed listener as opposed to a management console, I think.
I personally love Miro and I think that it's great in that it's the program for people who love add-ons.
And I think that if you're really someone who every time you install a new music player, a new media player, and just constantly go and update your add-ons and look at all the different ways you can customize that, I think that Miro is a really good choice because it has all the different feeds available.
It has the different stores available. It still allows you to have the music there, but it allows for people who really want to kind of go nuts on all the different ways you can access media, all the ways that you can manipulate the web kind of to your advantage on how you want your media presented.
It has a really great interface for that. As far as I know, it doesn't, the bugs in it as far as I can tell are very minimal, doesn't crash. It is very efficient for the kind of program that it is.
Like you open it up and for a second you're like, did I open the iTunes store? What's going on? These graphics, the way it's connected to the web just looks so phenomenal and runs so efficiently that I think it's great that they have something like this. It's definitely not like all the other players on our list.
Absolutely. They have a great ability to find new content if you want it. You can search through videos that you've never heard of before. I was just reviewing this one. I found two different video feeds that I started listening to now. It's a great way to add things that can distract from you, what you want it supposed to be doing, and you can listen to them when you have time.
In addition to that, Miro is also a truly cross-platform. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu out of the box, and then they also have other distros available as a secondary thing there. It's in every package repository I could find.
So Miro is pretty great across the board, but it is, I think, more one-shot listening as opposed to managing the music you already have downloaded. You probably want to throw that in a different kind of place. But if you want to discover music or listen to a feed, Miro is the way to go.
Which new video feeds did you kind of stumble across once you tell the listeners?
Well, one of the, I found a couple of torrents that I really would like. I like the Pioneer One, which I know is advertised on the Pirate Bay a while back.
It's a kind of a pilot of a show of basically a mysterious spaceship shows up in Earth, and they have to investigate it.
There's also a great documentary about Warcraft called Beyond the Game. It has some of the best Warcraft 3 players in the world.
As Miro made his obsessed with Starcraft 2, it was interesting to see how professional players deal these things.
And then also this American life is just always a great audio feed to have. It automatically keeps up with it, and I hadn't been listening to it in a while, so it's nice to be able to catch up on old things that I like.
Lame that I personally would have many more interesting feeds to talk about, but I won't bog down this podcast with talk of that sort. Maybe my standards are just a little bit higher, but that is certainly a topic for another podcast with my wonderful co-host here.
The next one I'm pretty happy to be talking about is Guaidecay. I think it's how you pronounce it. It's a weird spelling for a music player, but it is my personal favorite.
It certainly doesn't look pretty when you first open it up. It's kind of everything's thrown mishmash about, and the import options aren't very simple, but once you get a set up, I think it's amazing.
The really great thing that Guaidecay offers under the surface is they have a really good algorithm for calculating what your next song should be.
So if you just play one song out of your library after importing it, it will predict what it thinks you're going to listen to next, and then based on how you listen to music, if you dislike a song, it records that, and then we'll be less likely to play it after other songs of that type.
So if I'm listening to Daft Punk, it probably isn't going to start playing nine-inch nails immediately after.
It'll probably place something else in the electronic genre, and that's just the music management.
Then it also has tabs for radio, lyrics, Wikipedia, podcasts. It's just a great all-around music management console, but it certainly does take a long time.
It took me an hour and a half to import all my music. Granted, I have quite a bit, but at the same time, it does catalog everything, archive it, and get it ready to go.
So once you start playing, it just won't stop until you stop it, and I think it manages music and manages my listening much better than anything else does.
And I certainly agree with everything you said there. And I actually think that even though the design is a little bit boring, once again, it does have that cohesive theme.
The buttons are all in the same family. The style is on the same family, so that doesn't bother me.
The only real problem I have with quite a decade, and it really is in that top short list I have with music players, is that the problem with the interface is that there's so much on the screen that there are so many windows to size.
So if you go in and click the radio tab, not only do you have the list of radio, but you also have to reformat the sidebar that comes up with different options.
And if you go, it kind of seems like there's so much stuff, but there's not a place to put it. So it really does take a long time to sort of, even just in your library settings, it literally shows like 12 different categories by default.
You have to go in and choose, well, do I want the star rating to show up automatically or do I want to hide it? Do I want the number imported or the last time I played it to show or just the artist and the genre and the title.
So there's really a lot to think about, and that sort of custom ability is really great, but it also is super time consuming.
So I say that it's user friendly and that it does a lot of cool things for users, but it's not so user friendly and that it takes such a long time to set up.
Yeah, this really is kind of the epitome of the GNU slash Linux philosophy that you just have to customize everything to exactly what you wanted to look like.
And it might look like trash out of the gate, but by the end of it, you can have it set up exactly how you want it.
And when everyone else might hate the way you have it set up, it's certainly yours. And really, you can do anything with this music player.
You can set up the screen however you want it to. There are no bars that that you can't change their size, whereas iTunes gives you one look and it says you have to like it this way.
Quiet decades says you can change me however you want and I will adapt to it.
Alrighty, so we've reached the last of our list for today.
A itty bitty tiny music player by the name of Meween or Meween or Meween.
I'm not quite sure how to say it, but it's a very streamlined music player and it's very different from all of the ones we've talked about in that.
You can import all of your music, but it's you can never see it in one big cohesive library. So you can never really access all of your music at once.
You either have to access it by song by album or by a playlist.
So in that sense, the playlist feature is really good and it tells you, you know, exactly how much time you have left in the playlist, which a lot of Linux music management systems do, but it's very small.
It opens easily. It hasn't crashed. So I think it's really good for like if you're just having people over and you want to quick play them a new song you found or just put on a playlist to chill.
I think that it's very good for that because sometimes a lot of the bigger ones can get overwhelming and sometimes crash.
So it's good in that aspect, but I really dislike not being able to see all my music at once.
Yeah, I agree. I do really like the most music management consoles. And that's really what most music management consoles are.
There are large groups that show all your music at once. You can filter it down by artist and then by album or by album than an artist.
This Muayn doesn't really try to do that. It tries to have all your music in its memory and then you can play a full album or you can play one song and it doesn't really give you many options beyond that.
So if you want something that you want to only play one album at a time and not really mix things up.
Muayn is a great way to do that. It opens quickly. It stores everything, but it does limit you in what you can do.
It's very much a single driven one-purpose music player. And I think that's really what it is. It's much more of a music player than it is a management console.
You can't rename things particularly easily. When you import something, it takes a while to import and then you never really see that it's imported until you want to play an album.
Then it lists all of your album at once. It certainly doesn't have the iTunes aspect to it. It just approaches the way you want to store your music from a completely different perspective.
It's maybe good for some people, but to me at least it's not the way I like to manage my music. I like to be able to see all of it and then kind of be distracted by the song I'm listening to and want to jump to something else.
It gives you the options of jumping from two-pock to Tom Petty and Muayn doesn't really give you that option. It kind of wants your stock on one album. It doesn't distract you. You can keep doing whatever you want to be doing.
So it's not so good for changing your mind or changing your perspective. It just kind of plays what it's told to play and doesn't.
I definitely want to think of this music player. I think of my father who's very, you know, averse to technology, averse to computers, doesn't even want to try and learn anything about Linux or anything.
But whenever he even tries to open iTunes on his Windows machine, he's always just like, well, why can't it just play an album straight in order? Why do I have to shuffle through all my songs?
I just want to listen to all my music straight through and what's with this new generation and always jumping from song to song.
And so I think in that regard, it's definitely good for the user who wants everything presented to them in a very easy, cohesive way.
And you know, even some people who like to customize their music might want that some time. If I buy a new album and just want to listen to it through, instead of having to go through, import it into my full library, go click through my library to find it, then reset my settings from randomized to straight through.
I can just open up new in, play it through and enjoy it. So that's a little quip, but I think it serves the point of showing that these kind of programs definitely do serve their purpose and they're not like anti the spirit of the community at all.
Right. And I agree. I think that the way you can search through is actually fairly decent. It's not like it's hard to find an album if you know the album name, but if you are looking for, oh, I want that one album by this one artist, it's a little more difficult to find.
It's not, it's not the kind of broad sea, everything at once. It very much is if you know what you want, you can find it, but if you don't know what you want, you might take a little while to find it.
Thank you for listening to Half the Public Radio. HPR is sponsored by Pharaoh.net, so head on over to C-A-R-O-D-E-T for all of us here.
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