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Music Open Source Software Media Technology Entertainment

Media Player Nightingale Reaches 1.12.1; First Release Since Songbird 79

Posted by timothy from the by-any-other-name dept.
ilikenwf writes "The Nightingale developers have announced version 1.12.1 of the media player, forked from the now defunct Songbird (RIP). Improvements include a new localization infrastructure, enhanced stability, battery drain fixes for OS X, Unity integration fixes, libnotify integration, new first run pages, and more (Release Notes). If you already use Nightingale, the automatic update feature should have notified you of the release. If not, get the new version here."
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Media Player Nightingale Reaches 1.12.1; First Release Since Songbird More

Media Player Nightingale Reaches 1.12.1; First Release Since Songbird

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  • Firstly, autoupdate notifiers suck - they randomly chew bandwidth, and send an indeterminate amount of information to ... someone.

    Secondly, whats wrong with whatever applet your OS provides for music? What do all these dot-release version 3rd party players do?

    • So you trust Windows Media Player? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      So you trust Windows Media Player? I don't, it is like having a local miniture MPAA/RIAA in your computer.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Secondly, whats wrong with whatever applet your OS provides for music?

      iTunes doesn't support FLAC

    • Generally an autoupdate notifier isnt sending information, its receiving it. The updater already knows what version you are on, and the remote server has no need to know.

    • Re:update feature, and eye candy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Nemyst ( 1383049 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @02:50PM (#45954557) Homepage
      If you don't see the point of a proper music player, then you're not targeted by proper music players anyway. I couldn't fathom using the default OS-provided options. This is like someone saying that nano is just fine as a primary text editor or that IE6 was a perfectly capable web browser.

      • Seeing as how Win8 does not have a proper music/media player, I had to install Foobar2000/VLC to handle those files plus Irfan View as my image viewer. I also added Fox-it Reader and set it as my default printer (don't have one and PDF is fine).

        I was using Netscape in WFW 3.11 so I never considered IE to be a useable browser. IE 5 worked fine then I moved to Firefox 1 when it was released and have been using Firefox since.

    • On windows, your default player is Windows Media Player. It is cumbersome to use, doesn't support a wide array of formats, and it's full of content advertisement. So I install Foobar and VLC for a better experience. Or I can use XMplay for music if I want a media player that has style. My current XMplay install looks just like the old classic Winamp which is awesome.

      On Gnome, your default player is Rhythmbox. Its shoutcast support, just sucks. It's never clear if its buffering, or timing out, or what. I hat

  • Linux sorely needs a decent media player (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vm ( 127028 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @02:20PM (#45954027)

    I didn't realize there was a Linux port of this -- can't wait to try it as everything I've tried to date has been less than desirable in terms of complete, usable functionality that I'd expect of a mature application.

    • I'd kill for an equivalent to foobar2000 in Linux. "Just run foobar in Wine" isn't really a solution, as it's not quite well-behaved in some particulars, and doesn't solve the root problem. VLC's dependable, but still feels like a stopgap. C'mon, guys - where's loobar2000? *cringes*

      • Re:Linux sorely needs a decent media player (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @02:34PM (#45954265)

        I personally like to use MPD/MPC (gmpd).

        It covers all my usage scenarios, is very reliable and can hold vastly more music while still being quick than any other mediaplayer I know off.

        It can take a minute or 2 to setup, but after that, its wonderful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Qzukk ( 229616 )

        an equivalent to foobar2000 in Linux

        I used foobar2000 in windows before switching to Linux (years ago), and I use QuodLibet [google.com] now. I don't know what foobar2000 does now, but it seemed to me at the time that QuodLibet did everything I did with foobar2000 back then (not that I was a foobar2000 power user back then).

    • I never looked back at Songbird after switching from XP to Ubuntu. Songbird was indeed a sorely needed decent media manager* on Windows (where the choices at the time were WMP, iTunes and a few other, moderately usable open-source programs). On Linux, it wouldn't have matched Rhythmbox and Amarok at the time.

      But I haven't had occasion to try Nightingale again since then; since you mention having tried several programs, I guess you have a more up-to-date basis to say which is better. But Rhythmbox is still a

    • I know everyone isn't a fan of Amarock, but its a thousand times better than songbird/nightengale.

      • Back in the 1.x days, Amarok was in my personal opinion, one of the best pieces of open source software around. I convinced several folks to try Linux based on that software alone by just describing the features (i.e. you play a song and it auto-fetches the lyrics & opens the wikipedia page of the band). For large music collections, you could use a real DB like MySQL or Postgres so it's performance blew everything out of the water. At the time, I was a complete Gnome user, and I would install KDE lib

        • you play a song and it auto-fetches the lyrics & opens the wikipedia page of the band

          The newest version seems to do that just fine.

          For large music collections, you could use a real DB like MySQL or Postgres so it's performance blew everything out of the water.

          I've never tried this, but why on earth would you want this? Are you talking about storing the music files themselves in the DB, or just other data (like how many times you've played the song, etc.)? RDBMS systems aren't optimal for handling ve

          • Metadata can be stored in databases, which makes searching for artists/songs/etc faster than trying to go through the file system, loading each file and parsing the meta data out like some programs did.

            • than trying to go through the file system, loading each file and parsing the meta data out like some programs did.

              Did they do this continuously, or just once? If they did it over and over, that's pretty stupid, but I'm not sure how a database would make anything faster in this regard, compared to scanning for this data once (or when new songs are added) and storing the data in a dedicated file (like an .rc file or .ini file or whatever), instead a database. The main advantage of a DB for storing data lik

              • Just doing it once sucks if you have a lot of media in a single folder ( which I did at some point). I'm trying to remember what I used before switching full time to linux. Maybe it was songbird? For years I used MusicMatch which was pretty good, but yahoo killed it off leading me to a period of time where I was really unsatisfied with any media players so I changed them frequently.

                If you aren't using a database, you also need to do searching/sorting in code as well. I don't think a lot of them did this wel

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by aliquis ( 678370 )

        I know everyone isn't a fan of Amarock, but its a thousand times better than songbird/nightengale.

        It likely uses a thousand more times RAM as well ..

        (Nah I know nothing about Nightingales memory requirements. I know enough about Amarok's..)

        • I don't think you know enough about songbird. Its pretty terrible. I have memories of finding it using 150+ Mb on a system with only 1 Gb ram.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by aliquis ( 678370 )

            I've tried Songbird and I believe my impression was it wasn't for me (kinda no player is..), the exact reason I don't know. Was it written in Java too? I googled this one with java but it was written in c++... so.. That's that.

            Anyway I still think they are quite bad. I think an interface like the one in JuK works pretty well. I earlier noticed Rhytmbox/Gnome (whichever) also had the data mining stuff which (rather: likely for similar purpose as) KDE does.

            I tried some player which someone suggested recently

      • And Clementine is what Amarok USED TO be. Simply the best.

    • With is passing in to "no longer developed/supported" land I wish they would open source winamp. Winamp does so many things wrong right out of the box but once you beat it into shape its really a nice music player.

      Yes, music player. It tries to do video too but its so poor at it, it never should have been put in to start with.

    • I use Deadbeef. It has a playlist (well, multiple if you like), it plays all formats I use, and it doesn't try to be more than a music player. Audacious used to do the trick too, might still work fine.
      I prefer the winamp-style approach than the slow, bloated nature of "library" music managers. I prefer to organize music in folders, I guess I am old.

    • I've yet to find a player I like as much as wxMusik, which is abandoned, sadly. It handled every music file format I cared about, the shuffle function was intelligent, and it had a decent library management system and a database--an actual database, which accepted SQL queries if you liked.

    • Have you tried Clementine [clementine-player.org]? It's cross platform and open source (started off as a QT port of Amarok 1.4) and IMO is the most useable music player around right now.

  • vs. Clementine? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How does this compare? The last time I tried Songbird, it managed to out-bloat iTunes in RAM use and was slow as sludge.

    • You should try it. nothing beats Clementine(okay maybe GMusicBrowser) if you have a decent internet connection, and you manage your own MP3's. That said Nightingale is still a three pane browser it always was, although it is looking slick. you can see the screenshot on the front page. If you haven't looked at it since songbird you are into a pleasant surprise its fast. I am running this on a old single core atom on a large collection. Initial import did take a while but it is quick. As for iTunes I would sa

  • Does anybody know if it supports writing POPM (ID3v2 ratings) tags?

    I was just about to switch to Clementine-trunk for this, but if Nightingale has it, I might give that a spin. Or use both, since my metadata would be in the files now anyway.

  • Best example in a long time (Score:4, Insightful)

    by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @03:54PM (#45955857)
    Nightingale is a superb example of exactly what is wrong with Linux software.

    When you go to the website, you have many options for downloading. With Windows you get a .exe to download and install. With Mac, you get an image file. With Linux you get a tarball. A bald, naked tarball - just a bunch of files. No instructions, no readme, no clue whatsoever about how you get the thing to play music.

    Some users might stumble across the nightingale file and, out of curiosity, try to run it. However, for all the effort that people have put into writing code for this thing, would it have been so difficult to write a single-line README file, sayinf "run the file called nightingale"?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shaman ( 1148 )

      Uhm...................... why is it bad? You could get nightingale directly from your dist, or a PPA.

      I agree there should be an easy way to add PPA's, though.

      • Re:Best example in a long time (Score:5, Insightful)

        by petes_PoV ( 912422 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @04:07PM (#45956071)
        Why is what bad? The point that thousands of hours went into developing this software, but not a single minute into making it easy for a Linux user to work out how to run the wretched thing?

        Just to be clear THAT'S THE PROBLEM.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by hattig ( 47930 )

          You won't be able to convince some people that this is a problem.

          Yeah, I know (having used Linux for 15 years) to untar the tarball, how to untar a tarball, where to put it, how to symlink it, etc.

          What we need is a downloaded script that add a PPA and apt-get installs the software using that PPA, and thus integrates that software with the standard application management software. Not that this wouldn't be a shocking way to introduce a million horrible bits of malware, etc, onto a system. Maybe third-party

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Trogre ( 513942 )

          True, though to be fair most software for Linux is available in repositories specific to the distribution.

          This doesn't help with programs where nobody can be bothered rolling a package (like this one) but nearly every program a Linux user could want is a couple of clicks away in a package management GUI. Or an apt-get or yum for those familiar with command-lines.

          This is a major difference between Linux distributions and other systems such as Windows and OS X. Every application is installed, removed and up

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaman ( 1148 )

      Also that brings to mind the biggest problem with Window$.

      VIRUSES, MALWARE and TROJANS hiding in a .exe file which requires Administrator access to install.

    • You're an idiot. Linux software isn't normally downloaded (in executable form) from websites, it's distributed through your distro's repositories. Just "sudo apt-get install nightingale". The only reason you'd go to a website for Linux software is if you just want to read about the project, or if you want to download the source code from the project maintainers directly.

      • You're an idiot. ...

        And you're a perfect example of the second-worst thing about Linux: not the software this time, but the so-called "community". Arrogant, offensive and ignorant. Not only have you made some completely incorrect assertions, but your tone would do nothing to make a newcomer want to be involved with anything to do with Linux. It's also clear that you haven't even taken the time to check out whether what you are suggesting is valid for the software in question.

        • Not only have you made some completely incorrect assertions

          Bullshit. Nothing I wrote was incorrect.

          but your tone would do nothing to make a newcomer want to be involved with anything to do with Linux

          The OP wasn't a newcomer, he was obviously some kind of shill or anti-Linux activist. People like that need to be slapped down when they write obvious lies. True newcomers don't run around bashing Linux for some perceived fault.

  • Just hung and crashed the system on very nice machine. Perhaps I will re download it.

  • Here is what I need: Replaygain, Crossfade, Stability. Preferably it will also be in a major distro repository so its signed and reasonably safe to install.

    Amarok 1.4 had all of those things, yet there is no mention of them on the nightingale features page (which is a pathetic run-on about frameworks and such).

    Still sticking with iTunes for now.

  • How does it compare to other players?
    The most obvious one is VLC, which can play any format known to man, and is also cross platform. The only issue is that the UI isn't as clean because it is so powerful.
    As I primarily using a Mac, I personally like to use Vox for audio, and Movist for video, for a variety of reasons (most of which boil down to 'I happen to like the way it does X or Y')

    As a computer geek I'm happy that there's another option out there, especially an open source one.

    But from an end user pe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by g1zmo ( 315166 )
      VLC is (mostly) a media player. Nightingale is a media library manager similar to iTunes or Windows Media Player.

      • and Windows Media Player is a PoS now. Unstable, crashes, hogs the CPU while indexing images instead of music and videos. Looks through the entire system for files that it's supposed to play and hands that info to MS/RIAA/MPAAA so you can get those nice Infringement notices. Thankfully, it's no longer part of Win8-Pro and it's unavailable so I'm using foobar2000 and VLC with Irfan View for images.

    • The only issue is that the UI isn't as clean because it is so powerful

      There are countless applications that are more powerful than VLC that also have cleaner UIs. Power does not precipitate bad UI; bad UI shames power.

  • I followed link after link at their site - forum, wiki, blog, etc. Lots of technical stuff for developers & fans. Not a word about what it is, what it does, why I might want to have it. No contact/feedback link. It is any wonder that open software lives in a dark corner of civilization?

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