Tryst with a MP3 player

Having moved over to Fedora a couple of years ago, one of the first things I explored in Linux was a MP3 player. I had heard a lot about installing a lot of software just for playing MP3. With some help I had gotten Rhythmbox running and had my entire collection worth 9 days of playing time imported into it. I was using it well and regularly till lately, when I began doubting it's shuffle feature. Rhythmbox ended up playing the same songs over and over. In short it was repeating only a small subset of my collection. The rest of it was not touched at all! I realised I was being deprieved of my favourite tracks, so decided to switch for good!

Confirming this was a long standing bug with Rhythmbox I set out looking for a better player. So yesterday evening I tried out XMMS which worked very satisfactorily. After spending a while on XMMS i started missing the most important functions of chaning the next and previous tracks. Evidently the shortcut buttons on my Lenovo 3000 N100 did not work, which were able to control Rhythmbox properly. Obviously shuffling was more important than control so XMMS had to remain, but some googling, and i had the following packages that allowed me to put a little bit of control on the taskbar

yum install xmms
yum install gnome-applet-music
yum install pyxmms

Once installed, you just need to add the applet to the taskbar

Set the default player to be XMMS and then clicking on the icon launches the payer. Once you add songs and get the player running, the buttons become active and you can control the tracks! The controls are seen on the upper right area in the screen shot





I don't usually like the Wine-ish look that XMMS has, so I also tried out gXMMS2 but after it would not even import my collection I let it rest in the repo server itself.