[ILUG] linux music players again

[Justin Mason]

Argh.  I'm still searching for a decent linux mp3 player.

The problem: I have WAAAY too many mp3s, forget I have entire albums by
my favourite bands, etc.  It needs a good front-end.
iTunes is such a front-end.   But that's on bloody MacOS and doze. :(

1. Rating songs (5 star system works fine), then creating a playlist from
  those ratings.

  Rhythmbox 0.6.5 does half of this.  you can rate, but you can't yet *do*
  anything with those ratings ;)

  (Rhythmbox also is painfully half-finished; for example, select
  multiple tracks, pick a rating, and it'll rate one track only -- pretty
  useless if you e.g. want to say "this entire album is good" or "I love
  this artist".  Most of the operations do not work on multiple tracks.
  You also cannot edit tags from inside it; and a good 5-10% of my MP3s
  that play fine in JuK 2.0 (KDE 3.2) and xmms are not playable by the
  gstreamer libs it uses.)

  JuK does not support rating songs, but does have fantastic support
  for editing the metadata in bulk; it even queries musicbrainz
  for this.  (if I recall correctly, Rhythmbox *links* with the mb
  libs, but doesn't do anything with them. ;)   So JuK wins for
  music collection management.  But the rating stuff is the win
  I'm looking for.

2. Browsing by artist.   The iTunes Artist/Album/Tracks 3-pane layout is
  killer for this -- it works great for browsing large volumes of mp3s.

  Rhythmbox does this.  JuK doesn't.   Unfortunately JuK just has
  a bit fat listbox with all your mp3s in it, and as far as I can see
  no way to browse by artist in a usable way.

3. No crashing!

  JuK is good on this point.  Unfortunately, Rhythmbox is not --
  it has keeled over 3 times in the past 2 days.

I'm willing to give up Audioscrobbler support for these features ;)

So Rhythmbox is looking good apart from all the bugs.  JuK *works*,
but doesn't do the best stuff -- rating, 3-pane layout.  (comments
about this being a typical GNOME/KDE situation are anticipated
here)

Anything else I should look at?

--j.