I updated a few packages in the WebUpd8 main PPA as well as in the Unstable PPA so I though I'd let you know what's going on.

Audacious2 is a audio player that looks a lot like Winamp 2.x and it also has some similar features such as "J" for searching the playlist, song adding functions are similar to Winamp and it even supports Winamp 2.x skins. Audacious also comes with a GTK interface so if you don't like the way Winamp looks, you can always make Audacious look like your current GTK theme.

Besides the usual features every music player has, Audacios also comes with a lot of great plugins: Audio Compression plugin (AudioCompressor AGC) to keep volume normalized at a specific level, Echo enhancing plugin, Crystallizer enhancing plugin, Voice Removal plugin, Sound stretching plugin, lots of visualisation plugins (Blur scope, Spectrum analyzer, RockLight and so on) and even a stream browser plugin which includes the most popular streaming directories. There's a huge list of plugins so better install Audacious and try them for yourself.

Since the new Audacious2 is becoming an amazing audio player, we've backported Audacious2 2.4 from Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick (so if you're running Maverick, you can install it from the official repositories) to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 9.10 Karmic Koala. Update: since Audacious 2.4 final has been released and is not yet available in Maverick, we've updated the PPA with Audacious 2.4 final for Ubuntu Karmic, Lucid and Maverick!

Amarok 2.3 was released yesterday and I wanted to see how the new version is working, the system resources it uses and so on.

I've installed it (see here Karmic and Lucid PPAs), and then tried to load my ~30.000+ music collection. Now that's a nice memory usage:

and it took Amarok 2.3 about ~30 minutes to index my music collection. So my review ended here. There's no point in using such an application when we have so many to choose from. I'll be sticking with GMPC.


Now, I realize Amarok is a KDE application and I was running it in Gnome, but I used to do that all the time with Amarok 1.4 and it worked just fine.

Exaile 0.3.1 has been released today. There are no new features since the beta, but a lot of bugs have been fixed.

Exaile 0.3.1. brings some pretty exiting new features (since 0.3.0):

Banshee 1.5.5 was released just a few hours ago. Like we told you a few days ago, Banshee 1.5.5 (aka 1.6 RC1) got a very nice new YouTube extension but the new version also brings some other new features like Grid View and Gapeless Playback:

Banshee 1.5.5 was just released, including gapless playback, a grid album browser, and a YouTube extension! It contains lots of good bug fixes as well - those of you burned by the 1.5.4 SQL crash will be pleased with the additional QA given to this release.

(the official announcement)

Speaking of Banshee extensions and Jabber, I've recently came across a very interesting Banshee extension which I'm sure many of you will find to be useful.

The extension is called Banshee Telepathy Extension and you can use it to share or stream music through Empathy instant messaging client with your contacts (Jabber (including GTalk) only) through a p2p protocol.

Gnomeuser @ubuntuforums reports that Banshee just added a new Youtube plugin to GIT that allows showing related Youtube videos in the context pane.

I for one didn't get a chance to play with this new plugin as GIT is blocked where I work, but it should be available soon in the Banshee daily PPA.

This makes the future development of Banshee (1.5.5) - a music player written in MONO - which is supposed to be released tomorrow even more interesting.

Banshee 1.6.0, the stable release should be out on March 31.

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:

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: