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My dad is soonly scrapping his old windows machine and I'm going to install linux and turn it into our living room's main source of music. I'm looking for the best audio player for this situation. It doesn't need to be feature heavy- I want my mom to be able to use it with little instruction.
Suggestions?
It really depends on you or your families taste and preferences. I'd say if you want a minimal but fully functional player go with XMMS, it's a Winamp type interface. Amarok or Rythmbox, perhaps even VLC are more on the heavy end, lots of features and extra stuff all with very nice interface skins.
I've always had good success with xmms and rhythmbox.
You can find about 4 pages of potential options here:
Audio/CD Players | Linux App Finder
Thanks, I think I'm going to go with Rhythmbox as it seems to have a simple, intuitive interface.
If I upgrade to a better sound card, do I have to make sure it has linux supported drivers? I want to plug directly into out stereo receiver and keep everything sounding good. What's a good card?
Mostly useless without the latest codec
If you are running ubuntu you can oreder fluendo 4 like 26 dollars
it works
Don't order anything. There are tons of free linux distros that include plenty of proprietary codecs (yet thay are still free) Linux Mint would be good. And for a pure media center XBMC is great and does movies, music, and more. Amarok is a music player for KDE which many people like (even on GNOME) and Rythymbox is also great.
You don't need to buy anything, you can even play apple's proprietary formats on linux (.m4a and .aac).
I'm throwing my support to Rhythmbox. It's interface is like iTunes, but much faster than Songbird on my little netbook. If your family is familiar with iTunes, and has a fairly modern computer, I could reccomend Songbird, however. It's one of the best media players I've ever used.