For the most part, my taste in music players tends to run along the lines of those that are most similar to iTunes. I like to see my music, organized by artist and album, and am not a big fan of the playlist. Sure, sometimes I’ll throw together a few songs and listen to them randomly, but for the most part, I enjoy listening to complete albums, so iTunes is perfect for me.
When using Mac or Windows, then, I use iTunes almost exclusively. In Linux, there is no iTunes, but a couple programs (Quod Libet and Rhythmbox), use the same three-pane organizational techniques, so I’m happy.
Today, however, I’m using a program I’d heard of for a while, but had never tried, called Aqualung. Aqualung is absolutely nothing like iTunes, Quod Libet or Rhythmbox, but in spite of this, I’m enjoying it. If you take a look at the Aqualung home page, you’ll see quite the impressive list of features. Among the features listed on the website are:
The ability to play and rip CDs directly to the library (called Music Store), to WAV, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis or MP3 (both constant and variable bitrate).
Audio podcast support, both RSS and Atom feeds.
A huge number of supported audio codecs, including FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV, AIFF, MPEG audio, and more (anything supported by libsndfile, libmodplug and FFmpeg).
In addition, for Linux users in particular, Aqualung supports output via OSS, ALSA, JACK, and Win32 sound API. Aqualung can also be set to export a playlist (or an entire Music Store), to a different format.
In between what formats Aqualung supports and your ears, Aqualung offers gap-free playback, with absolutely no noise inserted between tracks. This is a huge deal for me, since much of what I listen to is live concerts, and nothing ruins a “vibe” quite like listening to a song and then, suddenly… nothing… for two seconds.
As you’ll notice from the screen shots, Aqualung offers skinning support, so you can change how it looks to suit your mood. Unfortunately (at least from my point of view), Aqualung doesn’t seem to offer a mode where it automatically takes on the computer’s default theme! I like my programs to all share the same look and feel, and at the moment, that’s impossible with Aqualung, unless I want to change the rest of my computer to match one of Aqualung’s included themes.
I’ve mentioned the Music Store a couple times, and for those wondering, no… Aqualung doesn’t actually have access to an online retail website. Instead, think of Music Store as more of a music storage area (ie: library). If you’re familiar with WinAmp, you should feel fairly at home with Aqualung. You have a fairly tiny playback window, with a playlist. This is also similar to many players for Linux.
Unlike most of them, however, the Music Store allows the Aqualung user to maintain a list of all (or some) of the music files on his/her computer. This is a huge deal, at least for me, since the last thing I want to do once I open my music player is go back to the hard drive and search for what I want to listen to. With Aqualung and the Music Store, all you need to do is browse… all your music is right in front of you!
Setting up a Music Store isn’t too difficult, although it wasn’t obvious to me at first. When I first opened the Music Store window, I figured I’d click the big plus sign to add files to it. Wrong. In fact, no button I pushed really seemed to accomplish anything, but after reading the documentation on the Aqualung website, I realize I needed to create an empty playlist first. After doing that, filling the Music Store with music was as simple as pointing it to my Music folder, telling it to use the tagged files for Artist, Album and Song titles, and waiting the few minutes for it to scan through my files. The information gleaned from this is stored in a music_store.xml file on my hard drive. After the relatively painless setup, all my music is now right where I want it!
Having said all this, I doubt very much I’ll use Aqualung much past the next few days. I like it, to be sure, but I don’t think it fits me as well as other players. However, I know from browsing the available music players on Linux software websites that players similar to this are quite popular, and I would expect the same for Aqualung. If you’d like to try it out, head on over to its home page and download it.
