I listen to a lot of music whilst working, and I'm currently having a few… issues with my media players. Namely that I can't find one that's supported and doesn't have issues that make me want to scream at them.

Below, I'll list the media players I've tried, and a brief review. [Updated]

• Amarok
• Amarok 1.4 

  This was my favourite media-player, it did what I wanted it do, and all the information I wanted whilst listening to music was right there at my fingertips. The playlist took priority in the UI, taking up the right 2/3 of the screen, and the library took up the remainder. I could easily drop the odd track from outside my media library into a playlist to listen to it once, and I could get it to rescan my collection (and only my collection) when I wanted it to pick up updates.Screenshot of Amarok 1.4. I would still be using this, except for the fact that KDE 3.5 (and hence Amarok 1.4) is now unsupported and removed from the portage tree. As much as I like it, I'm not willing to fight with my distro to keep it.

• Amarok 2.x 

  This was the result of the change to KDE 4.x, and where the "people want shiney!" brigade took over. The playlist was relegated to the right 1/3 of the screen, made it a little more difficult to quickly scan through. Placed dead-centre was a section for widgets that downloaded lyrics/album-art and so forth.

  I could not make it look like the old Amarok, and eventually gave up trying. I would have just shrugged this off, had the changes also not included the loss of queueing of tracks and other little features that I used a lot. (It's been a while, so I can't name them all.) Screenshot of Amarok 2. The sudden lack of features, and the step backwards in usability to gain a new look, put me off this version.

  Update:
  Giving Amarok 2.x another try, and having a hunt through the various options, I found out how to make the playlist more like the old 1.4 version. Also, you can Queue tracks again, and most likely all the issues I had with it are now fixed. :)
  How to change the playlist layout.. Yeah, I need to calm down and actually work through things. I know, I know...

• Exaile 
  

  Exaile was the music player I changed to upon dumping Amarok, as it is basically an Amarok 1.4 lookalike, only using GTK. It was nice enough, and almost perfect for me for a week. Then, I updated python, and the trouble started.

  Exaile began to randomly lock up. Some times, it would happen immediately after a track change. Other times, it would stop playing after a track, and as soon as I hit play, it would lock up. During these lockups, it would consume 100% of the CPU resources and continue to do so until KILL -9'd. Oh, and it would leak memory worse than Firefox. After a month of this (It was completely random.), I gave up, and moved on to…

  
  
• Songbird

  This player is masked, and is part of the layman overlay. However, not being afraid to unmask things and give them a try, I installed it anyway. And it promptly didn't work.
  tamber@lithium /home/tamber $ songbird-bin
run_moz: /opt/songbird/songbird-bin
xx /opt/songbird/songbird-bin


(songbird-bin:11057): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstapp.so': /usr/lib/libgstapp-0.10.so.0: undefined symbol: gst_buffer_list_get_type


(songbird-bin:11057): GStreamer-WARNING **: Failed to load plugin '/usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstasfmux.so': /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10/libgstasfmux.so: undefined symbol: gst_tag_list_add_value
/opt/songbird/songbird-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/gst-0.10/gst/_gst.so: undefined symbol: gst_task_pool_get_type
Could not initialize GStreamer: Error re-scanning registry , child terminated by signal


  Oh well.

• Banshee

  This was my latest media-player, until a few nagging issues wound me up. Namely:

  • Refreshing/reloading collection scans my entire home folder, and imports any random media files it finds (This is the same issue I have with e16's damned backgrounds import. recursive scan of /home/tamber, and add any images to the backgrounds list. Real fun.)
  • Cannot just add one random track from outside the collection to the playlist/queue. You have to import everything in the folder that contains it or open location. Open location means it plays right now, and none of the info (ID3 tags and so forth) gets loaded. So it's "Unknown Track" by "Unknown Artist"
  • Occasionally, after starting it, hitting play causes the UI to lock up. It has to be killed and restarted to get it back.
  • Memory leaks to challenge Firefox when you played music. If you let it sit there, it hovered at about 50 or 60MB. Otherwise, it'd bloat up to over 600MB.

  Other than this, it did pretty much everything I needed it to (Couldn't get it to play WMA files, but that's not such a big deal. 99% of my music collection is MP3 or OGG anyhow.).

• VLC

  This is still one of my swiss-army-knife media players, and I don't expect it to do everything Amarok did. However, I'm including it for completeness, and because someone will say "try VLC", despite it not doing a lot of what I want.

  For playing the odd track, it comes in very handy, and there's not a lot it won't play. (And for the odd thing it won't, I have mplayer. :>). However, it lacks media-library/collection, so I don't really consider it a candidate for my main media-player.

• Audacious (and/or XMMS)

  This is another one that I'm only including because someone will tell me to use Audacious, completely ignoring the fact that it doesn't have what I want. It's a nice, low-overhead media player, that looks very nice.

  However, no media-library (I'm sure there's a plugin to do that, but I'd rather have something designed around a media-library…), so it's not a candidate. (Also, XMMS is ancient, unsupported and should be dead already. But people just won't leave it be, and still try to shoehorn it onto their system! Dammit, folks, Audacious is XMMS, but updated for this century. You can still load all your skins and so forth.)

So, I'm after a media-player that fills the following criteria:

• Runs on my GNOME desktop under Linux, without looking like complete ass. (-cough-Tk-cough-)
• Music Library/Collection (Whatever you want to call it.)
• Can queue tracks
• Can quickly throw tracks onto a playlist, even if they aren't in my collection
• Scrobbling support! (Yay, Last.fm)
• Minimizable (New word?) to the tray.

So, lazyweb, can you help me find a decent media-player, or am I going to have to write my own and add to the myriad media players available for linux? :) (I'll review all the suggestions, if I can.)