Media Consumption

I wonder what people tend to use to consume their media. Personally I’ve tried a couple ( read: a lot), but my go-to’s have always been Audacious and Smplayer.


2 Likes

I use Strawberry music player and also SMPlayer

2 Likes

Strawberry’s a good one. Better than it’s original, Clementine, me think. It’s a pitty that the Kaffeine player project was abandoned a long time ago. Because, imho, it’s one of the best overalls. Hopefully someone picks it up, maybe ditches the tv part and adds some like an equalizer for example.

1 Like

For playing local music, I use Elisa. I don’t really watch a lot of local videos, so the video player I have installed is KDE’s barebones Dragon Player app, which suffices for viewing screen recordings from bug reports.

1 Like

Strawberry and mpv. Though Elisa and Haruna are quite good nowadays if you don’t need the more advanced features the former offer.

Yes, it comes down to personal needs of course. And in terms of what I need, the ones I use fit the bill perfectly. Audacious, for example, has a qt interface with lots of possibilities and, moreover, it is built for sound. I personally am in no need for a library based one, like say, Quod libet. And the most important thing of course, they need to work. I, for one, never ever use vlc. I’ve been using linux for a long time now and, in my personal experience, it’s absolutely in the top five of most crashing apps. ( Not on my phone though. ). Dragon Player has never worked for me. The last time I checked, a couple of days ago, it still didn’t. At least, not for movies, regardless the format. Think that, if you need a simple and small gui player, you’re better off using gtk Parole. But again, if it works for your personal needs…

1 Like

I use strawberry-qt5 for music and mpv for videos. It fits my needs.

By the way I love your theme(saw other posts as well), I’d love it if you can share it.

1 Like

I use AmaroK since several years (decades?!), and it works mainly perfect for me.
But since some years I not so often listen Music on my PC or Smartphone (only the classic Radio of my Car).

1 Like

Elisa for music I own (two autographed Fox Amoore CDs, half a dozen classical music CDs, lots and lots of videogame OST albums bought from Steam), mpv with --no-video for YouTube song playlists, Haruna for videos. For some time I used to play YouTube videos on mpv or vlc just to make my battery last longer. There’s Stremio for public domain movies and other stuff.

I used to use Cantata for its built-in radio + TuneIn integration, now there’s the Advanced Radio Player widget for that.

Unfortunately I haven’t found a podcast player (preferably in Qt) that works well and sorts from oldest to newest yet, not that I looked hard for those. Zero interest in podcast apps if I can’t follow podcasts from the beginning.

On mobile I use Metro since it’s the only open source Android app I know of that supports LRC-embedded lyrics for music and looks good.

The theme? Well, the light one isn’t a theme. It’s actually a Breeze with a different highlight color.scheme…on Lightly. O, and some tweaks on the transparency settings. As for that dark one, used by both players, that’s a Kvantum theme I kinda put together. It fits the nighttime color scheme I use. I suppose I could put a Drive link to it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iuTCC49HJzqNiSxUaQMknUbhnbEnm1cE/view?usp=sharing
It’s not perfect, by any means. But um, do me a favor and let me know if the link worked cause I’m having some issues with Drive.
See?

:rofl:

2 Likes

I used and really liked Amarok for years, but then it stopped being supported (I know someone tried to bring it back, but last time I tried that, it barely did more than play tracks, other features were MIA).

Now I use Strawberry. When I first tried it, it was not stable (crashed a lot) and for some strange reason, refused to access certain directories. I realized it was a snap package (back with 20.04). I found there was a .deb package, so uninstalled the snap and installed the .deb. No more crashes and no directory problems. And I didn’t realize it but the snap didn’t follow my desktop theme and the .deb package does. With 22.04, it’s now a Flatpak but didn’t try it (I try to stay away from Snaps and Flatpaks, Chromium as a snap wasn’t stable either for a long time).

I’ve tried Elisa, but it just can’t show the correct album covers for my tracks - appears to just pick random album covers from other tracks. Tried getting it to rescan the database, but still gets it wrong. The album covers show correctly with every thing else (Dolphin, VLC, Strawberry, etc.).

1 Like

According AmaroK-Homepage it stops 2018 and there was a alpha from 2021. I expect the project was more or less canceled after about 15 Years :frowning:

same combo here.

Audacious for audio (e.g. flac encoded amiga chip music)

Smplayer with mpv backend for video.

I use vlc for Videos and Music, and I use an app I wrote for my media Database, because I dislike the way the other media/music database apps work.

1 Like

AmaroK’s still being developed (slooowly) but no new release in years.
I have it compiled from git sources and it’s functional for my use case.

Always loved it and keep using it from time to time but nowadays I mostly listen to online music.

For videos, mpv is my poison.

I don’t use local media for anything these days so Spotify + Browser for Netflix/[insert 7 or so other streaming services].

1 Like

Oh I mean the light theme you have… this looks good too so I’ll try it as well. Thanks. The link works…
I’ve never used Kvantum at all so I gotta go look it up.

I see. No, the light isn’t a “theme” in the pure sense. It’s a fully transparent setting of some breeze color. But this can only be done if you use the Lightly application style. That is, as far as I know. The Kvantum theme goes in ~/.config/Kvantum. It can then be set using the kvantum manager. Like I said somewhere, I only use kvantum to have some apps overruled. For example, Audacious would be started like QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE=Kvantum audacious.

1 Like

I use SMPlayer to watch videos and listen to audio. I use yt-dlp to access online videos.

1 Like