Music Players

[nackk]

Hi there,

I have a music collection on my server shared with samba. The collection is about 20,000 songs totaling 120GB. I have tried the following:

Banshee
Rhythmbox
Exaile
Gmusicbrowser
Audacious
Listen

Unfortunatly I got better results using WinAmp under wine. The native clients crash out, perform partial imports or are unable to read from the network. The music collection is clean, tagged, has album artwork and is DRM free. All files are named correctly with extensions. Mainly flac, ogg and MP3. I will not go into details of each problem here because I am past reconsilation after much trying. My question is, is there a music player which can create a library from a large collection of music which is hosted on a network via samba. At the moment I'm using wine/winamp or file browser and vlc.

[Flemur]

I've tried most of those players, and they're all fair to poor, not good.

I use foobar2000 with wine: far(!) more versatile, more reliable and smaller footprint (mem and CPU, including the wineserver).

Edit: I haven't used foobar with samba, just regular disk files. hydrogenaudio.org has more info on it.

[nackk]

Thanks for your reply. I'm glad it's not just me who found those programs poor. I'm wondering if there is some common reason as to why this is so. For the moment I'll give Foobar2000/Wine a try

Cheers.

[caf4926]

Banshee
Rhythmbox

Both work fine here

[nackk]

Banshee
Rhythmbox

Both work fine here

I think for me it's the number of files and that it's on the network which is causing the problem.

[nackk]

I've tried most of those players, and they're all fair to poor, not good.

I use foobar2000 with wine: far(!) more versatile, more reliable and smaller footprint (mem and CPU, including the wineserver).

Edit: I haven't used foobar with samba, just regular disk files. hydrogenaudio.org has more info on it.

Giving FooBar2000/Wine a try now. Its not the most elegant solution but it does work! Importing all files with no problems.

[nackk]

SOLUTION.

After thinking a bit more about why I was having a common problem in separate programs I surmised it was most likely the share it's self causing problems. I was mounting the share via Caja 1.4.0 by browsing the network and creating a book mark. Instead I used /etc/fstab and cifs in the following way. This is for shares which need username and password.

1. Create a login credential file. This is to keep the username and password hidden rather than plain text in fstab. From the terminal:

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pluma ~/.smbcredentials

Enter your username and password as:

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username=myusername
password=mypassword

Save and exit.

Change the permissions via terminal:

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chmod 600 ~/.smbcredentaials

2. We need to create a mount point for our share.

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sudo mkdir /media/myshare

3. Now we need to edit /etc/fstab as root.

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sudo pluma /etc/fstab

Now add the following line, replacing severname, sharename, myshare and localusername as appropriate.

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//servername/sharename /media/myshare cifs credentials=/home/localusername/.smbcredentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0 0

Save the file and exit.

Test with:

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sudo mount -a

I got this from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently

It seems creating a permanent share solves the problem, for me at least. Rhythmbox, Banshee and Exaile all work for me now. Haven't tested the others as of yet.