Everyone loves lightweight music players. Well, maybe they don’t but here are 5 less well-known and/or up-and-coming entries well worth checking out anyway.
YouAmp
YouAmp is a self-described “simple and fast music player for gnome …coming from the Maemo Tablet platform“ with a focus on integration with the Gnome desktop.
YouAmp doesn’t boast any fancy features but it does have solid music playback support with replaygain, cover art display and lyrics support.
Main feature list : –
- Album Art display
- last.fm scrobbling
- Replaygain Support
- Gapless playback
- Indicator applet
How light (RAM usage)?
- Playback: 27 MiB
It’s light and featured enough for most. The browsing style is ‘breadcrumb style’ and is surprisingly easy to adapt to.
PPA @ launchpad.net/~rojtberg/+archive/youamp
Pogo
No that’s not DeJa Vu – we have covered PoGo a few times recently. ‘Minimalist music player’ is how we like to describe the elementary-inspired app and looking at it you can see why: clean, simplistic and focused solely on playing music.
Features present in the app include: –
- Search box
- Ubuntu notification support
- Equalizer
- Cover Art
- Easy ability to add folders
How light (RAM usage)?
- Playback: 15.6MiB
Pogo 0.3 can be downloaded @ launchpad.net/pogo
DeaDBeeF
Forgoing the usual feature-schmaltz that bigger apps are famed for DeaDBeeF keeps it simple. If the main feature you seek from an audio player is that it plays audio then DeaDBeeF is worth checking out.
Plug-ins are available for scrobbling, equalizer and notify-osd alerts.
How light (RAM usage)?
- Playback: 5.8 MiB
Download @ http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
Rhythmcat
Another ‘in development’ choice but one that really does differentiate itself from peers.
Rhythmcat has a relatively unique interface, supports theming via custom ‘gtkrc’ theme files and, for the frivilious amongst us, comes with a pretty cool ‘kareoke’ feature that lets you record your voice alongside a playing track then ‘mix’ them down in to one file.
Features include:
- Karaoke mode lets you record and mix your voice with a track
- Equalizer
- Audio converter
- import/export playlists as m3u
- Lyrics display
- Ability to use custom gtkrc theme
How light (RAM usage)?
- Playback: 7.4 MiB
Download @ http://code.google.com/p/rhythmcat/
Foobnix
Ever heard of Foobnix? I hadn’t until researching contenders for this list but what a find it was.
This very powerful music player comes with Last.FM scrobble support, 3000+ radios, play-list creation, customizable hot-keys and tray icons, an equalizer and more.
Foobnix also supports the searching and playing of music and videos on the web. Just enter a term, Foobnix will pull some results then select a track from the resulting list.
How light (RAM usage)?
- Playback: 26 MiB
Download @ http://gtk-apps.org/content/show.php/foobnix?content=136172
Other considerations
All but one of the players, when tested on my system, had minimal CPU usage and/or CPU usage no higher than normal. That said DeaDBeeF certainly was distinctive in that playback barely caused as blip in CPU usage, something to bear in mind if you’re looking for a simple audio player for a netbook.
To put the RAM usage into perspective Banshee typically uses (again, on my system so your usage may vary) 35 MiB to 40 Mib in playback whilst Rhythmbox quaffs 40 MiB.