Why Cantata and (a fixed) YaRock are the best music players

[TabletHater]

Without an album cover grid view (like iTunes') a music player is not really functional, because one cannot remember all his/her albums/tracks, so needs a visual clue to browse and find an album or track, more so with classical music where album titles are rarely meaningful.

So all those Clementines, Rhythmboxes and Amaroks are useless in this resspect (not to mention their other shortcomings); the brilliant minimalist MPD Qt-client, BE::MPC, (along with DeadBeef) works much better without the bloat. Besides, (like DeadBeef) it is very light weight, (thanks to its sorting by album-artist) doesn't scatter compilation albums all over the place and has album mode in playlist view, that is, albums are grouped, not shown as useless track lists. This is a great convenience, because if you've got more than 100 albums you might need playlists containing whole albums as well as only songs. Thanks to MPD, it (like DeadBeef) has gapless playback and bit perfect output features as well. So BE::MPC would be a great addition to the Mageia repository.

Yet, no matter how brilliant BE::MPC is, it's nowhere near as functional as Cantata. Cantata has all the above advantages and additionally has a lovely, very convenient album cover grid view. Yes, Banshee has the grid view too, but beside being a Gnome dependent app, its album cover view is ridiculously sorted by album title. So all your Vivaldi, King Crimson and Beatles albums are scattered all over the place, defeating the logic of album cover view itself. Gmusicbrowser and Guayadeque are better in this respect, but they don't have grouped album mode view and making playlists and generally using them requires many clicks especially in Gmusicbrowser. Elementary's Beatbox was the best of the bunch, but yesterday after building a library of 12000 FLACs and after rebooting its RAM usage has rocketted to around 4 GB. And I couldn't find a global hotkeys option. Besides, all these are gstreamer based apps and gstreamer's gapless capability seems to be shaky. It works now with the latest release, but I'm not sure what the next release will bring.

Cantata (which also happens to have a very kind developer) is in the Mageia repository, but it's two versions behind and KDE-only. Though it is a KDE app, it can be installed as pure Qt too. So Cantata both as a KDE and Qt app would be the most brilliant additions to the repository. Even better, if possible, they should be available as bundled with MPD, so making possible to install the best music system very easy for users.

A very fine non-MPD option will be YaRock once the good developer fixes some bugs and if the new gstreamer releases don't breake gapless audio. Then this app will be as good as Cantata, but without the hassle of MPD configuration.

As for the MPD part, this scheme works for me:

In terminal:

Code: Select all

su
service mpd stop

Edit the file /etc/mpd.conf:

music_directory "/PATH/TO/YOUR/MUSICFILES"
playlist_directory "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/playlists"
db_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.log"
...
state_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.state"

In that file under AUDIO OUTPUT if you use ALSA uncomment the ALSA output part, if you use Pulse then the Pulse part. I use ALSA and an external sound card connected to my S/PDIF output. So mine is like that:

# An example of an ALSA output:
#
audio_output {
type "alsa"
name "My ALSA Device"
device "hw:0,1" # optional
# format "44100:16:2" # optional
# options "dev=default"
}
#
# An example of an OSS output:
#

And under the MIXER heading I uncomment "software" as I don't have a volume control on my sound card:

# An example for controlling an ALSA mixer:
#
#mixer_type "alsa"
#
# An example for controlling an OSS mixer:
#
#mixer_type "oss"
#
# If you want MPD to adjust the volume of audio sent to the
# audio outputs, you can tell it to use the software mixer:
#
mixer_type "software"

Save and close the file.

Create these folders: ~/.mpd/playlists (to see files and folders beginning with a "." you should check "Show hidden files" in your file manager). Create these files in ~/.mpd: mpd.db, mpd.log and mpd.state. Copy /etc/mpd.conf file into ~/.mpd folder.

Create ~/.mpdconf file and add these lines:

db_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.db"
log_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.log"
playlist_directory "/PATH/TO/YOUR/MUSICFILES"
port "6600"
state_file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.mpd/mpd.state"

In terminal start mpd:

Code: Select all

mpd

And in Cantata preferences edit the music directory option accordingly. That's it.

[doktor5000]

I like the reasoninng and explanations (which follows the rather implicit and self-fulfilling title )but this is not needed for bugzilla.
I'd probably just post a bug, mark it as enhancement request and ask the maintainer if it's possible to package cantata in a way that the KDE-features can be added as a subpackage to a pure-QT build (BTW, the description of cantata package mentions that a pure AT4 build is rather untested, as it seems to work finefor you should mention that in the bugreport, too)

Also you should note there that cantata seriously needs updating. As we're currently in version freeze, so anything that is currently in cauldron,
will end up in Mageia 2, if there are no pressing security updates or bugfixes in between, which i don't suspect to happen for cantata. So if
it stays like it currently is, Mageia 2 will only have cantata 0.3.0, because the maintainer did not update it until now, and after Mageia 2 is released
that's not possible, left alone for some exceptions: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Updates_policy

[TabletHater]

I would think that thousands among them good developers and packagers of Mageia reading the post would at once become Cantata converts!!! Then millions of new users would convert to Mageia!!!... So that would make this planet a fairer place!!!

[loqo]

Personally, I like Banshee. I have all my album covers (or audiobooks, whatever) displayed in a scrolling grid and I click them to play. That suits my needs almost perfectly. A bit of customisation wouldn't hurt though. I hope the Banshee devs will add more polish and versatility to an already nice piece of software!

[TabletHater]

Morning loqo!

I can do that in Cantata as well: all my album covers are displayed in a scrolling grid and I click them to play. But in Banshee the titles of the first six albums in my cover art view are "12 Concerti..." by Vivaldi. And the other 30 Vivaldi albums are scattered who knows where (I'd replaced composer tags with album-artist/artist tags). Same with Beatles, same with Yes, same with King Crimson albums etc. I can't imagine a CD shop or library sorting items like that!

Another thing which may have been corrected in the latest release is that all the artists of my compilation albums unnecessarily populates (clutters) the narrow field left of album browser and most of those names don't mean anything to me as I only remember the titles of those compilation albums.

And finally, in non-Gnome DEs one wouldn't want to install Banshee in the first place.

Having said all this, if Banshee meets your needs that's surely fine. (Ignorance is happiness!!!)

I've added an MPD configuration scheme to the first post in case you or any one!..

[doktor5000]

I like Exaile, it's rather lean and just does the job fine, at least what i want to do with it. Only downside is that the project doesn't see much activity anymore, but it just works so far.