JakeT from the Listen to… blog posted not too long ago about a cool file-system based music player called Minirok. Basically, it’s an extremely stripped-down version of the essential media player Amarok, offering only a file-system view (no tags!), so it’s great if your collection is (like mine) already organized into a file tree.

I installed it on my Eee PC as alternative to the more bulky (but GNOME-based) Rhythmbox. Unfortunately it had to pull in a lot of supporting packages for all the KDE stuff, so it was fairly large total download. I started it up, and I was really pleased with the simple and intuitive interface…it just works great on a smaller screen, too. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to play any music (couldn’t figure out how to make it see my Samba share…).

That being said, I could really see how great lightweight, file-system based music player could be if you’re managing a well organized collection on a netbook or other low-resource computer.

For more info and screenshots, check out the Minirok home page.