Since the Gentoo team declared xmms being out of support, I tried some music players for replacing it, which I used for many years now.

I first took a look at audacious, which is a xmms look-alike player written in Gtk, but I had some problems with sticky title bars and I soon abandoned it.

Then I gave Amarok a try, and after some tweaking, it rapidly became my new music player of choice. It of course plays mp3, ogg, wav, pls and m3u (stream radios), and CD’s, and features a great playlist editor, which xmms lacks. Aside of that, it has some nice features like On Screen Display (OSD), covers management, lyrics search tool, etc.

I was reluctant to use any other player than xmms because I heavily used the xmms-shell program to command the player: a small applet on top of my screen allowed me to rapidly pause, switch songs and change the volume. This has now been replaced by the amarok global shortcut capability: you can configure any key combination to trigger the most common actions: play, pause, fast forward, next track, volume, … and that not only within amarok (hence the word global 😉 ).

Now I just have to arrange all my mp3 tags in order to use the playlist functionality the most efficiently :|…Tagtool will be my best friend!