It appears to have returned from the dead. A good music player will get a 10 based on this scheme.

So I'm going to give the first feature a maximum mark of 5 and the rest 1 each. Should present good-to-great overall organization, layout, and performance.įor me, the first item on the list is the critical feature the rest all enhance the experience to a greater or lesser degree. Should show the signal level and effective bit rate as the music plays.Ħ. Who wants to re-curate their music every time they switch a player, just to see the correct album cover when music is playing?ĥ.

There are so many weird frustrations about cover art in so many players.

Use the embedded cover art, fall back to cover.jpg (or.Should provide a simple approach to cover art. Allows you to double-click on an album and have it play, without requiring a bunch of extra clicks to reorganize the playlist.Ĥ.Should not force the user to always interact through playlists. Keep the great tunes coming while you're cooking that wonderful dinner.ģ.Should have a good 'smart playlist' feature.

Makes it simple to put the signal into an external digital audio converter dedicated to high-fidelity music reproduction, and capable of driving good headphones.Ģ.Allows music to switch bit rate and bit depth on the fly.Must be configurable to pass the music through unchanged to Alsa.

6 key features of laptop-based music players 1. With all this input available, I decided to formalize my 'six things' list and apply it to a list of candidates for my laptop music playing needs. Meanwhile, several kind readers have offered other suggestions as to their favorite music players. Since that time, I have been living with gmusicbrowser on my laptop, while continuing to use mpd on the computer attached to the home stereo. I described the six things I really liked about Guayadeque, and looked at two obvious alternatives: Quod Libet and gmusicbrowser. Linux offers an abundance of music players how do you choose which one to use?īack in June, 2016, I wrote about the apparent passing of my favorite open source music player, Guayadeque.

Music player ex