Ubuntu Wiki

Desired Features

Here we do a simple comparison of some known and popular media players for linux, most of them are in the repos, the set of minimal desired functions are:

• Having a functional media library
• Having the ability to handle large libraries
• Having a separated playlist (or queue) from the media library
• Having the ability to search the media library without affecting the playing list
• Having the ability to browse/play all albums by artist
• Having the ability to browse/play all artists on album
• Having a sensible default sort order (artist, album, disc, track)
• Having the ability to search the playing list to rapidly jump to a song
• Having the possibility to save playlist to share them or backup them
• Having the possibility of playing podcasts or other streams formats
• Having MPRIS support (for sound indicator integration)

Other considered characteristics are the installed size, toolkit and presence in the repos.

Note: I have only regularly used Rythmbox and Banshee. Rows for other players reflect what I was able to figure out in the first 15 minutes - 1 hour attempting to use them, and may be incorrect. They should however reflect the new user "out of box" experience rather well - ali1234.

The "Import Time" test was the time taken to import a 53GB library with 7184 tracks, 676 artists, and 793 albums; totalling 23 days, 4 hours, 28 minutes of music. The test was performed using an Acer Aspire One netbook with Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz, 1.5GB RAM, and 120GB HDD. As such it reflects a medium-sized library on low-end hardware. The system was rebooted between tests to prevent disk cache affecting results.