I wondered. Thanks for the info. Centralized per-app config, hey?
You have a valid point though. The KDE UI that controls all of this isn't available on all systems, like mine. This app is broken in the context of my PC because I lack this UI component in my DWM setup. So this app is valid exclusively in a context with separate per-app device control.
Gonna second strawberry as a generally pleasant audio player.
Its not as bad as it's made out to be. The "breakages", almost always are pretty minor, and if they happen to you at all its something like once a year.
I use Clementine, don't know if it has something you need tho.
pavucontrol (pactl if you want a cli program) will offer what you need if you don't have KDE. Its pretty powerful, you can reroute audio from various inputs to various outputs real or virtual. Ends up being a great thing to have if you do a lot of amateur radio. Some other poster here did a great post on the history of the Linux audio systems, but simply (and probably not entirely correct) PulseAudio wraps up all the audio on a modern linux system and you use that as the interface to route the audio around.
The funny thing is that most of the players mentioned in the last 20 posts are just forks of Amarok 1.4, which back when I was using a music player in the KDE 3 days was absolutely the tits.
I must admit, my attitude to documentation probably isn't much better than Mr. Poettring's.
Eh, if you've got a shitload of music it makes sense for it to be handled in a classic interface like MusicMatch Jukebox or iTunes does. In which case there will be a database backend, in which case if you've just downloaded some random crap off SoulSeek with poorly defined ID3 tags it makes sense for you to be able to immediately quickly rename it within the interface and have that immediately reflected without fucking around. Amarok before it was ruined with 2.x was a 2.5 mb download, not some goddawful bloated Electron app.
Pavucontrol is solid. There's also EasyEffects, which does the same thing while also letting you set up effects. Good for applying noise cancelation to your mic, tweaking your equalizer settings, etc.
I was a foobar2000 user for my first 2.5TB. I'm at 6 or 7TB now and just use my filesystem. FLAC, all from private torrent sites. foobar2000 was the last Windows program keeping me on the platform. Now I just organize everything using folders. I spend less time and effort. If I really want to do a full search, I've got a text file with all the metadata, one line per file, from all my files. grep makes short work of it. Redacted/Orpheus tags aren't always perfect, but they're generally decent. I don't even see them any more.
I am still using foobar2000 on Linux, it works mostly fine under Wine with the WASAPIC output. I mainly use it to handle odd gamerip formats like gameboy (yes, I like chiptunes) and PS2 for infinite loops. The best part is simply handling zip/rar transparently since I can't be bothered to extract TBs of FLAC/AAC from them especially when I can play them perfectly fine.
I use EasyEffects and I've never noticed the capacity to route specific apps to specific devices. Where do you find that functionality?
You understand that you're not saving any space (a percent or two tops) by having FLAC or AAC in ZIP or RAR, right? Both FLAC and AAC are already fully compressed. You're just making things load slower and use more CPU. I reckon if you're trying to keep the CRC of an archive the same or something to share, that's a solid rationale, but I find this approach a little hard to swallow given how few the upsides are.
The compression of the format doesn't matter, two or more files in an archive can utilize compression and display a smaller filesize than uncompressed.
I downloaded them over the years long ago in that form, now there's a huge list of them and I can't be bothered to extract and fix up all my playlists. I never went out of my way to compress any of my music. When I moved to Linux, I just kept using foobar2000 with the exact same playlist by fixing up drive letters in Wine, everything just worked for years*.
Just use cmus and you'll never have another issue in your entire life.
