I have given up on Rythmbox. Cant get it to reliably connect to an external HDD to save my life. Running uBunto 10.04. On Windoze I run MusicMatch Jukebox a few generations old, and love it. Whats out there easy!

Thanks
Ron

Try Amarok. It's built for KDE, but i've heard it works fine in gnome.

i use VLC on my Thinkpad 23 XandrOS box. works great!

another option is MPlayer.

both of these players handle a wide variety of media formats and are open sourced.

Im not asking for much!
Heck even Windblows media player works better than the 3 I have tried
Amarok, will not correctly read the MP3 files off of a USB HDD
Movie Player, will not load a batch of songs (Import Media)
Rhythmbox, will not load a batch of songs.

Songbird will do what I want in Windoze, but I cant find a copy of 10.04.
Im running a X30 at work off the free WiFi because everything is locked out on the company system. I use a portable HDD for carrying music, because the HDD on the X30 is only 10 gig.

Right now I have the HDD pluged into the doze machine and it works!

Ron

If it's true, it's most likely not Amarok's fault. A correctly mounted USB HDD acts like any other directory. If both Amarok and Rhytmbox share the same problem, then it's most likely not their fault.

I'd take a look at permission issues, auto mount/umount scripts and such things. It might as well be a bug in some library used by both Amarok and Rhytmbox, consider updating your system if it's out-of-date.

Aside from the already-mentioned players, you might try Banshee, Clementine, older XMMS or any other you can find. There are tons of players. As for me, I got used to my custom-skinned MOC player, you might check it out, but it's probably not what a common Ubuntu user wants.

I DO NOT want to BUILD playlists. Either cut and paste, or like Songbird, import media and be done with it. Rhythm will play single songs off the HDD, but trying to import a file or cut and paste, you can forget about it.
In Musicmatch it is File, Open, double click and it plays the entire file, regardless of how many files are in the file. In this case about 1600 songs.

Ron

I haven't tried it yet, but some are finding Clementine useful. Mandriva is considering making Clementine it's default music player (as opposed to Amarok).

Switch from Amarok to Clementine on Mandriva 2011

Please explain yourself, "regardless of how many files are in the file" or "to import a file or cut and paste" makes little sense to me. Are you referring to .m3u playlists? Or just "play everything in <that> directory" feature? I can't think of anything else. Copy&paste feature (ie. select files in a system file browser, control-c, select player window, control-v) might be useful, but I imagine it would need a lot of clipboard<->player interaction, not to mention dozens of file managers. Besides, that's called "building a playlist", ie. something you don't want.

If you are referring to auto-building a music library from a directory structure based on id3 tags, ... then I'm probably not the right person for the job.

http://www.oldversion.com/MusicMatch-Jukebox.html
I use 7.2, seems like it does everything I need, without the bloat.

Once opened, you click on file
Click on open
Navigate to the file you want to play
Click play
If that file is a CD or album, it plays 12 or so songs.
If that file is My Music
It plays (my) 1600 songs
OR
Cut out a section of the 1600 songs, right click and hit play....that cut out section will play

On Songbird and Rhythmbox I have to add each song one at a time (Im not adding 1600 songs)
Amarok appears to add them, but then they will not play

Ron

Sounds like a windows-only path-based hack to determine if the directory is My Music. The CD thing might be easily possible, though I don't think any player supports that - simply because /dev/ managed with udev is dynamic, unless explicitly specified. That means /dev/sr0 might be something else on each reboot, so most players let you choose a drive by it's name.


VLC on windows has two context menu options - Play and Enqueue. And they work. I'm not sure if they're available on Ubuntu as well.

If your habit of using Musicmatch Jukebox is too strong, you can run it via wine. I myself use ImgBurn that way, since there's no "advanced" free burning software available on linux.

Im running a X30 with a 1.1 and 384 memory, adding wine to run windoze is not a great way to fix the issue. Im not that interested in running MM Jukebox, I just want something as easy to use! Im not really asking for much, as MMJb was not particularly an outstanding piece of work!
Researching Clementine now.

Ron

Clementine may be it. Fiddling with it now.


Ron

Ok Clementine, appears to build playlists automagically. Thats ok since figured out the clear all button. It works with my set up, and I think its the one!

Ron

Glad to hear you are finding something that is working for you.