More than a year ago, I wrote a post called “Linux is awesome,” in which I chronicled my move to Linux as my main Desktop platform (I had been playing/hacking with it for many years before that). In that post, I also talked about my disappointment about not having a media player available that could compete with Winamp (2.x) in its simplicity and usability. I tried BMPx, but found it to be too unstable for general use. I ended up using Amarok (an excellent media player, to be sure).
I’ve been using Amarok solidly ever since, but recently I’ve been itching to return to my Winamp roots in usability/simplicity. I got this itch again because I saw an article about the release of Xmms 1.2.11, the first update to the aging media player in over 3 years. As far as I know, it’s simply a point release with bugfixes only (no GTK2 conversion, sadly). While looking into this, I inadvertently stumbled upon Audacious, a fork of Xmms that I had seen a few years back, but it was as unstable as BMPx was at the time I tried it.
I looked at a few of the screenshots of Audacious, and it looked very promising: a media player forked from Xmms, which supported Winamp skins, and the GUI was upgraded to GTK2. So, I downloaded and installed. I was immediately able to pull out my old Winamp 2.95 Classic skin, make a few adjustments to the default settings, and I was in heaven. The simplicity was wonderful. I don’t need a media library (my storage server is quite organized already), and it even supported my Microsoft (gasp!) keyboard’s multimedia keys with an included plugin. I loved it!
So, the moral of the story is, don’t give up on Linux. If you want something, chances are that someone out there wants the same thing, and all you really have to do is wait (or, perhaps write/fork it yourself, if you feel up to it), and it’ll probably show up.