My media manager: Other alternatives

April 14, 2016 — —

Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!

In the concluding article of this series, we will go through alternative media managers and audio players found in the Ubuntu repositories along with some comments from their contributors and users. In the second part of the article, we briefly cover some less used alternatives as well as some other topics related to media.

More media managers

Amarok

Amarok is a powerful media manager that integrates well with web services like Last.fm, Magnatune and more. Amarok comes with many features, like support for community-developed scripts, dynamic playlists, context views and more.

Amarok contributor: The people who love Amarok are those who want to dig more deeply into their music; they want to know about the artists, want to rate and tag their music, and have statistics about their listening habits. Amarok users want to be able to stream music as well as listen to their collection on disk.

Read more on the Amarok website.

Note: Amarok uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Amarok on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 500Mb of additional disk space.

Audacious

Audacious is an audio player based on XMMS. Like its predecessor, it’s designed to be light but configurable and supports Winamp skins. It is extendable through plugins.

Read more on the Audacious website.

Banshee

Banshee is designed for the GNOME desktop it can, amongst other things, import and burn audio CD’s, synchronize music to and from media devices.

Read more on the Banshee website.

Exaile

Exaile is a music player with a simple interface and powerful music management capabilities. It is easily extensible via plugins and is distributed with over 50 plugins adding extensive functionality. Features include tabbed playlists, smart playlists, advanced tagging, album art and lyrics fetching, streaming internet radio, podcasts, ReplayGain, secondary device output support, and more.

Read more on the Exaile website.

Guayadeque

Guayadeque is a lightweight audio player that supports smart playlists and large music collections. Amongst other things, it features extensive labeling tools as well as a smart play mode that adds similar tracks to the queue.

Read more on the Guayadeque website.

Quod Libet

Quod Libet is especially popular with power users, with support for very large libraries, Replay Gain, regular expression & conditional logic searches, Unicode, command-line usage and advanced tag editing. It supports podcasts, internet radios and nearly all music formats and comes with over 80 plugins.

Read more on the Quod Libet website.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is an audio player designed to be easy to use. Inspired by iTunes, it supports internet radios and podcasts, media device integration, music sharing and more.

Read more on the Rhythmbox website.

Tomahawk

Tomahawk is a music player that plays and manages not only your local collection, but also streams from SoundCloud, Spotify, YouTube, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, music lockers and many more. You can even connect Tomahawk with your friends via Jabber, Google Talk or Tomahawk’s new online community, Hatchet, to share your tastes, playlists and collection.

Tomahawk contributor: Tomahawk is basically a music metadata player. In short, given the name of a song and artist Tomahawk will find the right source based on the users available streaming music services and collections. This fundamentally different approach to music enables a range of new music consumption and sharing experiences previously not possible.

Read more on the Tomahawk website.

Note: Tomahawk uses the Qt toolkit and will pull, relatively, many dependencies when installed on Xubuntu. Installing Tomahawk on a clean Xubuntu installation will use about 260 Mb of additional disk space.

More alternatives and related topics

If you didn’t find your favorite player in the list above, don’t worry! In addition to the software mentioned above, there are many more media players and media related applications in the repositories.

If you want to play your media from the command line, try out cmus, moc, or mplayer. Alternatively you can set up MPD, the music player daemon, that allows you to connect several frontends to your music library, even from remote devices.

If you want to make your media available to other devices like your gaming console, you can use one of the UPnP servers available. These include Mediatomb, MiniDLNA and Rygel.

Finally, if you want to produce music on your computer, check out Ubuntu Studio, which is an Ubuntu flavor directed at artists of all kinds and largely based on Xubuntu.

The small details: Panel layouts

April 13, 2016 — —

In this series the Xubuntu team present some of the smaller details in Xubuntu to help you use your system more efficiently. Several of the features covered in this series are new for those who will be upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. We will also cover some features that have been in Xubuntu for longer, for those that are completely new to the operating system.

In 2015, the Xubuntu team created and introduced the Xfce4 Panel Switch, a tool that allows you to work efficiently with panel layouts. The tool allows you to either choose from presets available, and create and backup your own. Let’s have a look!

Switching panel layouts

Xfce4 Panel Switch is an intuitively simple tool to use. Simply select one of the presets and press Apply Configuration (first button from the left) to immediately start using the new layout. On the default installation, you can choose from Xubuntu Classic, Xubuntu Modern, Xfce 4.12, GNOME2 or Redmond.

Saving, exporting and importing

If you’re someone who prefers to create a completely customized layout, the tool has something for you as well. To put the tool to the test, why not create a new panel setup?

To edit panel preferences, go to Settings Manager → Panel and from the opening dialog, add and remove panels and change panel settings as you like. You can even change its orientation or even have it as a Deskbar so you can move it about the desktop.

When you are ready, go back to the panel switcher and press Save Configuration to save the setup. You can now switch between your newly created layout and the presets whenever you want.

Finally, you can use the Export and Import options to move your layouts to and use them on any machine with the tool installed.

My media manager: The cloud

April 12, 2016 — —

Xubuntu 16.04 LTS will be the first Xubuntu release without a default media manager. To help those without a favorite one, we’ve put up this series where some of the Xubuntu team members talk about their favorite media managers. Later in the series we discuss some cloud services and other media manager options in the Ubuntu repositories. Enjoy!

In addition to the more traditional media managers which manage local collections, more and more people use cloud based streaming services. In this article, we talk about the cloud services and players used by the Xubuntu team.

Google Play Music

Google Play Music is available widely in the world, coverage areas including most of the Americas, Europe, Australia and more. You can use Google Play Music for free, but paid subscription options are available. Their song catalogue covers 35 million songs.

David: I mainly listen to music locally, CDs and vinyls. At work I usually use Google Play Music. Apart from their huge catalogue, there’s also the possibility of uploading up to 50000 songs, using the Google Play Music Manager API.

Elizabeth: I also listen to a lot of music locally, typically MP3s I’ve bought or created from CDs. However, I also have a monthly subscription to Google Play Music for the latest music I don’t feel compelled to buy directly. I’m using the web-based player in Google Chrome on Xubuntu, but it also seamlessly integrates with all my Android devices (including my watch!) via the Android apps.

Pandora

Pandora is available in Australia, New Zealand and the United States only. Their song catalogue is between one and two million songs.

The easiest way to use Pandora on Xubuntu is the web interface at pandora.com. For those seeking tighter or geekier (read: more fun) integration with the desktop, there are unofficial GTK+ and terminal clients available. The GTK+ client, Pithos, includes sound indicator and notification support. The terminal client, pianobar, allows station management and playback, as well as keybinding support. Both clients are available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Sean: I stream all of my music. I have a small music library from when I was younger, but became bored with my own lack of variety. While I occasionally use Spotify, I almost always stream Pandora, switching between the web interface, Android application, and the Pithos GTK+ client. If I’ve got music playing, it’s coming from one of my 50+ Pandora stations.

Spotify

Spotify is available widely in the world, coverage areas including most of the Americas, Europe and Australia. You can use Spotify for free, but paid subscription options are available. Their song catalogue covers about 30 million songs.

Currently, the easiest way to use Spotify on Xubuntu is the web interface at play.spotify.com. Playing and browsing works well with the web interface, but if you want desktop integration (sound indicator and notifications), you will have to install the desktop client. The desktop client isn’t available from the Ubuntu repositories directly, but Spotify offers their own repository and instructions on setting the desktop app up at the Spotify website. Please note: The desktop client is unsupported by Spotify. Since it’s closed source, it is also unsupported by the Xubuntu team. That said, our experience says it works well for most of the people and is totally worth trying if you want to use Spotify with desktop integration.

Pasi: While I mostly listen to music locally, I occasionally use Spotify to listen to new music that I want to try before I buy. For this purpose the web interface is more than good enough – the collection is also large enough to find most of the things I’m looking for.

The small details: Personal information integration

April 11, 2016 — —

In this series the Xubuntu team present some of the smaller details in Xubuntu to help you use your system more efficiently. Several of the features covered in this series are new for those who will be upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. We will also cover some features that have been in Xubuntu for longer, for those that are completely new to the operating system.

We have talked about customizing in this series before, but now we take a look at another aspect of it; personal information and its integration.

The Xubuntu team has created an application called Mugshot to manage your personal data. With Mugshot, you can change your personal information, including your user image, name and initials and it will take care of integrating the information in supporting applications like the login screen, LibreOffice Writer and Calc, Pidgin.

Adding your personal information

To run Mugshot, go to Settings Manager → About Me. To add your personal information, simply fill in the form.

The first installed user and any added admin users will be able to change any field. Normal users can change their image and most of the fields, this type of user will not be able to change phone numbers.

To add a user image, click on the placeholder image on the left side of the dialog and select your preferred user image. If you have a webcam connected, you can use it to take a photo of yourself to use.

Finally, click Apply and you are done!

The small details: Text editor and terminal color schemes

April 8, 2016 — —

In this series the Xubuntu team present some of the smaller details in Xubuntu to help you use your system more efficiently. Several of the features covered in this series are new for those who will be upgrading from 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. We will also cover some features that have been in Xubuntu for longer, for those that are completely new to the operating system.

Customization is one of the strengths of Xubuntu and Xfce alike. Along with the customization options and sensible default settings, the Xubuntu team is committed to shipping some alternatives where appropriate.

Today we take a look at two color schemes Xubuntu provides for the Mousepad text editor and the Xfce4 terminal emulator: Xubuntu Light and Xubuntu Dark. As the names imply, these are themes with light and dark backgrounds. The rest of the color schemes are designed to visually integrate with each other – and with the rest of the operating system.

Changing the color schemes

To change the color scheme in Mousepad, go to Edit → Preferences, and from the View tab, select your preferred Colour scheme.

To change the color scheme in the Xfce4 terminal emulator, go to Edit → Preferences, and in the Colors tab, use the Load Presets… dropdown to select your preferred color scheme.

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