Take A Modular Approach to Managing Your Audio (Use MPD, Sonata, and Gpodder)
When managing your music collection, podcasts, playlists, and internet radio streams, it’s tempting to go for all-in-one approach with apps like Rythmbox, Banshee, Exaile, and Amarok. While each of these applications is, IMHO, a fantastic app…non of them excel at everything. If you’re running a system with limited resources (say, an Eee PC, or a low end used system), you could also run into performance problems with any those applications. Recently I decided to take a modular approach to managing my audio, and I think I’ve actually saved time and hassle because of it…while using a much smaller memory footprint! Keep in mind that some advanced features like iPod sync will require one of the big boys. That being said, here’s my current system:
Collection Managment (Playlists, Radio Streams, Looking up Artist Information, editing ID3 Tags)
Backend: MPD - This a music player daemon that runs in the background. It’s super light weight (no gui!), and doesn’t depend on X at all, so you can move between X and no X with out missing a note! In addition you have several choices for a commandline or gui interface.
Frontend: I chose Sonata, a masterpiece in my mind of GUI design. It’s elegant, functional, and lets me do virtually everything I want to do with my music collection. Did I mention it only uses about 20mb of RAM? Compare that to 30mb for Rhythmbox, and 50mb for Banshee!
Podcast Managment & Device Syncing
Gpodder does the job fantastically. It’s easy to add podcasts, have new ones downloaded automatically, and synced to a special PODCAST folder on my Cowon iAudio 7. And since I do have a player that plays nice with Linux, transferring music in GNOME is as easy as drag ‘n’ drop!
Ripping & Burning CDs
I use the Serpentine Audio CD creator to burn playlists created in Sonata, and Sound Juicer to rip new CDs into my library.
How do you manage your audio library?
I’ve got to say, I really miss Foobar2000. You got any advice for something that tags a/o converts as well as it does?
I hear that Foobar2000 is hard to beat on any platform! You might try Quod Libet:
http://www.sacredchao.net/quodlibet
It has advanced tagging features you might find useful.
abcde (A Better CD Encoder) is great for ripping CDs if you don’t want to bother with a GUI. Once you’ve fine-tuned your config file the way you like it, you just run the command “abcde” and it does all the work for you. I’m not sure if its actively developed anymore, but because its just a shell script that works as a frontend for a bunch of other utilities, there isn’t much to be improved upon.
[...] public links >> daemon Take A Modular Approach to Managing Your Audio (Use MPD, Sonata, and Gpodder) Saved by CL34N3R on Thu 13-11-2008 Update 8.21: HDA control daemon updates, installer [...]