Multimedia in Ubuntu

By | August 29, 2009

Juk Player (audio)

Juk represents another decent player for KDE, which is capable of managing a large music collection. It’s not rich in features, but is very easy to use. Juk player can hardly be compared with Amarok, still its simplicity may be considered as an advantage by the users who don’t like complicated multifunctional applications.

Let’s see the screenshots of Juk. The main window:

060_Juk_mainwindow

It mainly consists of the playlist detailed view.

Different settings:

061_Juk_preferences

These settings allow you to customize shortcuts and main toolbar.

As for the main characteristic features, they include:

  • Music collections and smart playlists
  • Tag editing support, including the ability to edit multiple files at once
  • Tag-based music file organization and renaming
  • CD burning
  • Album art using Google Image Search and etc.

If you would like to check it out, please go to Add/Remove panel to install Juk Player.

Kaffeine Player (all-in-one)

Kaffeine is a media player for KDE, which support a lot of different player engines. Due to this fact it supports a great deal of media types, ensuring playback of CDs, DVDs, and network streams easily. Frankly speaking it does not have the greatest interface, but it’s very rich in functionality. Moreover Kaffeine can keep track of multiple playlists simultaneously, and supports autoloading of subtitles files for use while playing video.

Here are the screenshots, which will help you better understand what kind of player Kaffeine is. The start window:

070_Kaffeine_mainwindow

It gives you the opportunity to start the most common actions.

Playlist view:

071_Kaffeine_playlistview

To add a song to a playlist you can simply drag and drop. In addition to that there are: visualization panel, filter option, managing multiple playlist option and etc.

Watching a movie:

072_Kaffeine_movie

Of course there are much more things to mention. If you would like to check more screenshots, please visit official website.

The nice thing about this media player is that there are no excessive functions, which you’ll never use. No doubts it totally depends on your needs, but the majority of users will find everything (as far as the functionality is concerned) they need.

As in previous cases you can install it from Add/Remove panel.

Listen Music Player (audio)

Listen Music Player is a great application for organizing your music collections. It has very intuitive panel structured interface which is extremely easy-to-use. The functionality is very decent offering many cool features including: podcasts, management, access to lyrics, last.fm and Wikipedia information (you can check it directly in the player instead of opening a new tab or window in browser). Moreveor Listen Music Player automatically creates playlists for you using the information from last.fm and what you most frequently listen to.

Here are the screenshots prepared for you to show the way it looks. The main window you get at the first start of given application:

080_Listen_mainwindow

Playlist view of Listen Player:

081_Listen_playlistview

As you can see in the panel located in the center the above mentioned features are listed. By choosing the one you like or need, you get the specific information in the right panel.

Preferences panel:

082_Listen_preferences

There are a lot of options to configure and customize this player.

To learn more and check some extra screenshots, please visit this page.

In fact there are just a few things, which can be regarded as disadvantages of Listen Player (the lack of video playback is among them), so you should try it for sure, because it may be the app you were looking for.

You can install it in different ways:

  • from Add/Remove panel
  • by entering the following command in terminal

sudo apt-get install listen