Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Fuck Buttons and the search for a new music player

I ran across a rave review of Fuck Button's Street Horrrsing album and the article had a free download offer, so I went ahead and grabbed it. I don't know what to call this album, music wise. It's sort of techno/rock/noise/electronic/deathmetal. I've played it over and over, it's very different and quite well done. I don't expect this is for everyone, but it's really worth a listen. Or two.

Like many ambient and classical music albums, the tracks on this should run together, but my music player (currently Exaile 0.3) puts gaps between each track. Searching the bug reports for Exaile and gapless playback, I found a reference to the "Aqualung" music player as a possible substitute until Exaile gets fixed. Actually, it looks like Aqualung is a flatout replacement for Exaile. This is a full-on music player with lots of features, but they stay out of the way. It is gapless out of the box and it supports adding files to a playlist from a file chooser. The interface and controls are easily configurable to be as minimal or as full as the user wants. I've only ran Aqualung for a few hours so far, but it seems to fit the bill as as a music player that just plays music, and does it well.

Update: The only problem I've found with Aqualung is it won't let me add directories to the playlist. I have to open the directory and select the files individually, which isn't particularly handy.

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