These past few years I’ve been frustrated with the media players that modern Linux distros have been pushing. I have my music organized nicely in a familiar directory structure and I usually just want to play an album. I don’t want to import my music, download cover art, do CDDB lookups, or otherwise integrate my audio into some big iTunes clone.
All I want to do is: 1) browse to directory and 2) play music in directory. Yes, the abstractions/features that iTunes clones offer are cool and useful, but I want simplicity on my Linux workstation. I’ve wrestled around with Amarok and Banshee, but generally end up getting annoyed. I don’t know what happened to XMMS, but when reading Linux Journal I saw a screenshot that contained an Audacious window – the look/feel appeared identical to XMMS.
Grabbing Audacious from my package manager, it’s obviously a fork or evolution or whatever from XMMS. Finally, I’m back to my simple music player.
Browse to directory. Play directory.