See This, Now Read This

After trying almost every audio media player out there for Linux, I finally found the most versatile and user friendly one – BMPx. What especially won me over about BMPx was the user interface. It is intuitive and organized with almost no settings to configure and no menus to get lost in. This is thanks to the fact that BMPx is fresh and it’s not trying to throw in a hundred useless features like the competition. It gets better, BMPx gives you 7 music sources: Shoutcast, Icecast, MP3′s, Podcast’s, Last.fm, audio CD’s and Jamendo. BMPx stands for Beep Media Player experimental and it is mainly coded by Milosz Derezynski. It’s an evolution of the previous Beep Media Player which was based on XMMS and Xine, now BMPx is all original and gstreamer based. You can download BMPx from its’ official home page and compile it yourself. If your distro is Debian based you are in luck, you can download the package from getdeb.net. I wouldn’t recommend downloading it from the universal repository as it will give you an older version of the player. To use it you will also need the appropriate codecs. You can download the individual gstreamer codec packages, but the easiest thing to do if you are using Ubuntu is to download the restricted extras package using “sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras”. Finally, on to my review!

I use the radio feature most of the time as I quickly destroy my own music collection by repeatedly listening to my favorite songs. BMPx has two of the most popular radio station directories to choose from: Shoutcast and Icecast. They are both integrated into the graphical shell, so there’s no need to open your browser to start a stream. Since Icecast doesn’t have that many stations, all 1,500 stations are loaded for you; but you will have to update the list manually from the menu during your first use. Shoutcast stations are loaded by genre due to the fact that there are a total of over 20,000 stations. If you are looking for a particular station, you can simply use the search bar at the top. The Shoutcast functionality is a bit more refined and it makes it easier for you to find a good station by giving you a list of the top 500 radio stations. Once you’ve picked out a few stations that you like you can then add them to your favorites; but unfortunatelyyou cannot later remove them from your favorites due to BMPx’s beta stage. As a bonus, most internet stations don’t have commercials, they don’t have any annoying chit-chat and they are streamed in CD quality sound.

If 21,500 radio stations are not enough to satisfy your music hunger, there’s Last.fm. What makes Last.fm unique is its’ audioscrobbler feature. The Last.fm audioscrobbler personalizes the music stream based on your personal music taste. You simply input the name of a song or artist and the audio scrobbler will try to match the exact initial song and then it will try to match the same taste of music in the following songs. Once you get Last.fm going, the top-left box will display relevant matches allowing you to choose exact track you had in mind. The right box will display all of the tags (eg. funk, rock, etc…) related to the song you are listening to; you can click on one of these to further fine tune your radio stream. The left-bottom box displays your information such as your personal music tags and what your friends are listening to. Once Last.fm has started playing your music you can skip songs and fine tune your stream even further by letting the audioscrobbler know what songs you like and dislike by pressing the appropriate button in the menu. In addition to that, you can let the audioscrobbler know which personal MP3′s and Jamendo tracks you like and dislike to further fine tune your radio stream. This all sounds great in theory, but I still prefer the playlist a live music DJ provides. In actuality, Last.fm makes listening to music boring as each track is almost like the previous one – variety is good.

Your personal MP3 collection is displayed in a systematic manner where by you first select the artist, then album and then the track, thus allowing you to manage your music accordingly. It couldn’t be any easier, but there were some problems. I did have a problem with one MP3 which was causing BMPx to crash, in addition to that I couldn’t get the cover art to display in the album box. Anyhow,besides having MP3 support, BMPx supports Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MOD, MPC, MP4, AAC, M4A, WMA, SID, WAV and SPC codecs. You can explore your existing collection by right-clicking on the track to get more information about the artist from the internet. And if you would like to sing along, you can right-click on the track and download the lyrics from an internet server. The two former features are actually available globally, including in the radio, CD player and in Last.fm. Navigating through your music globally within BMPx is easy with a few keyboard shortcuts, there even is an option to enable global Linux hotkeys. BMPx minimizes to your tray while still giving you full control of the player. Right-clicking on the tray icon give you full track control and left-clicking restores the BMPx window. Hovering your mouse over the tray icon displays the track information, including cover art. For those of you who have a large MP3 collection, search is simply enabled by typing on the keyboard.

Managing your playlist in a single album is a breeze thanks to the boxes you check and uncheck to select the song that you would like to play. If you are creating a play list from multiple albums you have to right-click on the tracks the you would like to enqueue. What is really annoying about this feature is that you first have to left-click on the track before you can right-click on it. The playlists can be saved and exported in a variety of popular formats, but what is really impressive is the ability to create a playlist based on a Last.fm tag.

The podcast feature in BMPx is just as intuitive as all of the other features in BMPx. Your podcast link is even automatically pasted into the URL entry field when you select to add your podcast via the menu. Once added, the top pane will display your different podcasts, the left bottom box will display the actual downloaded podcasts and right-bottom box will display the actual podcast info. To delete an old podcast you simply uncheck the box beside the podcast. And when you are going to reformat your hard drive you can export your podcast list to a file.

Now I come to the most original BMPx feature – the Jamendo integration. Jamendo allows artists to share their music online for free based on the principal that if you like the music you will later buy it. To get Jamendo started first you will have to download the Jamendo music database onto your hard drive via a menu shortcut; this only takes about thirty seconds. Once you have downloaded themusic database you literally have over 6,000 original virtual albums on your computer. When you play your Jamendo music there only is about a three second delay between you pressing play and the song playing. Due to the fact that most of the artists are relatively new, you will not be able to retrieve any lyrics and artist information. As you start browsing through Jamendo’s large list of artists you’ll be blown away by the amount of good independent music.

I have presented to you the good and the bad of BMPx. The good news is that BMPx is only at version 0.40.13 so it is going to keep on getting better and the few bugs will eventually be eliminated; I’ve only experienced a crash once. There are a few features that I can think of adding, with a radio stream ripper being one of them. Also, BMPx does have an equalizer, so a few equalizer presets would be nice. The lack of not being able to delete favorite radio stations has been addressed in the forums, so that feature should be coming in the next version. Besides these minor issues BMPx is a full featured audio player that cannot be matched in ease of use and functionality by any other piece of software at this current time.