Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

listen music player 0.6.5

Listen is an audio player which comes with many very useful features such as Podcasts management, browse Shoutcast directory, provides direct access to lyrics, lastfm (currently playing song info and future events) and wikipedia information:

listen music player future events

One feature I really enjoy in Listem Music Player is it's option to create playlists for you by retrieving information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to. And another feature creates dynamic playlist based on some criteria you choose:

listen dynamic playlist


Here is the list of plugins which currently power Listen:

listen music player 0.6.5 plugins


Listem Music Player 0.6.5 was released yesterday and it comes with many changes and fixes:

* Playlists order are keeped
* Fixed some encoding problem when downloading podcast
* Write a new API to display html
* New preference window layout
* Ensured dialog window are open on the top of main window when it was in fullscreen
* Big code cleanup with pylint
* Updated gajim api
* Suppression current playing song from gajim or pidgin status when exiting
* Fixed flickering in top left screen, when pressing cover button
* Decreased listen load time a lot
* Resolved stream end and stop to this track conflic problem
* Add viewport for webkit


In my tests, Listen 0.6.5 used around 30mb of RAM but I didn't have too many music files on the computer on which I've tested it (only around 1000). As a reference, using the same music library of ~1000 songs Goggles Music Manager used only 14 MB of RAM, Rhythmbox - 17mb, while GMPC only 5,5 MB, but Listen looks a lot better than Googles Music Manager, has a lot more useful and interesting plugins than Rhythmbox and is a lot easier to set up than GMPC so here are 3 reasons why you might want to try Listen Music Player.


Install Listen Music Player in Ubuntu


You can install Listen Music Player 0.6.5 (latest) in Ubuntu either by downloading the following .deb files:

-Karmic:
32bit: listen_0.6.5-0~ppa1~karmic_i386.deb
64bit: listen_0.6.5-0~ppa1~karmic_amd64.deb

-Jaunty:
32bit: listen_0.6.5-0~ppa1~jaunty_i386.deb
64bit: listen_0.6.5-0~ppa1~jaunty_amd64.deb


Or by adding the Listen Music Player PPA so you'll stay up to date (paste the following commands in a terminal):

-Karmic:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:listen-devel/ppa


-Jaunty:
sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/listen-devel/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AA832887


And then to install it either in Ubuntu Karmic or Jaunty:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install listen


If you're not using Ubuntu, get Listen Music Player source code from HERE.


[thanks to: ubuntutips & LinuX Freedom for Live for their posts about Listen]