In this post I will talk about a new open source music player which I have fallen in love with. It's name,
Guayadeque. Sadly I don't know how to pronounce it, nor do I know why it has such a peculiar name, but I know that this music player does what I want it to do and I highly recommended it.
Before I tell you about how great this music player is, I have to say a little thing about my music preferences and habits. First of all, I listen to a lot of Asian music including Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. For those of you who listen to this genre, I am almost positive that you have also encountered the same issue I have, that is, music filenames, and meta data are in unreadable and corrupt characters.
This problem is very annoying and itches my slight ocd for perfectly uniform and correct tags. I can't leave the track as is because I don't understand Japanese, Korean, or Chinese, and it becomes impossible for me to find it in my collection of songs. I found a great solution to this which I will post about in the future, but lets fast forward a bit and assume that I have perfectly tagged tracks.
Even if my songs are correctly tagged, a new problem arises: there are just no music players that can display and manage the correctly tagged music either! I have tried all the popular media players such as banshee, rhythmbox and amarok but all of them fail to display my tags correctly.
This is when Guayadeque comes into play. As described from the sourceforge page:
Guayadeque is a music management program designed for all music enthusiasts. It is Full Featured Linux media player that can easily manage large collections and uses the Gstreamer media framework
This music player has a very simple and clean design, and as I eluded to before, it does a great job at displaying my music tags correctly. It does most everything a media player should do and has a host of other features such as a crossfader, last.fm audio scrobbler, and a very customizable interface (though a little buggy).
I can see that this player has lots of potential so go try it out! If you are using Ubuntu, installation is very easy. Just search for it in the Ubuntu Software Center to install it.