I really liked using XMMS (2?) in Lubuntu 20.04 but I’ve noticed it isn’t in 24.04. Is there a way to install it with a GUI? I installed the base version but it seems to just be a CLI.
Thank you so much for your time!
- Mike
Unfortunately, XMMS(2) seems to be a dead end.
And yes, I kinda liked Winamp on Windows, and when I moved to Linux (a very long time ago already). I thought that nothing could beat it.
It is strange that Lubuntu does not install a proper music player by default. Or is it?
You could try audacious. It is also old, and can mimic our so loved Winamp skin (via Settings → Appearance → Interface). I will not recommend it, but if you just want to play some locally stored music or CD’s (?), and enjoy the mini-it-never-gets-in-my-way-interface, it could be what you want.
I could recommend Strawberry. In the long line of music players on Linux (XMMS, Amarok, Clementine, and others) it seems that Strawberry is a good option, although its visual appearance is a bit old stylish already. But it does what it needs to do: play local music, CD’s if your system still has that, and streams.
I’ve been using it a lot in the past. But not anymore. Six, seven years ago, I moved on, and got a subscription to one of the major online music providers (“Starts with ‘S’, ends with ‘potify’”).
Seems that the previously existing niche of dedicate flavours of music players has been nicely occupied with at least this player (sic). No need for keeping audio files on various systems. It works everywhere (desktop, laptop, phone), it has very good audio quality (if you tweak a setting a bit). And it is affordable, trust me.
Very un-me, but this time I do not recommend any local music player.
It’s strange that you think it doesn’t. It’s called VLC, which will play just about anything under the sun from just about any source you could imagine.
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I see. Skipped that one; it’s the good ol’ Swiss Army Knive!
But my point was really about how the horizon has changed. VLC, or any other player are not that prominent on the desktop anymore. My music is in the cloud. Even most of my movie content is in the cloud. When I see some interesting clip (technical stuff mostly) on Youtube, I’ll try to download it. And then mpv is my friend, not VLC.
I’m slowly moving back to local storage for all of my digital media, as the policies of the cloud are becoming less about ownership and more about temporary rental and memberships. But, to each his own. However, vlc is excellent and it’s getting better e.g. with the RT subtitle blurb, it certainly is competitive for any kind of media.
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I can understand this tend towards streaming. It certainly requires less storage space. I use Bandcamp a lot, which is much better about paying artists than any other streaming platform. Plus, for the collectors and audiophiles alike, you can even get physical vinyl (and other formats/merchanidise) to go with your digital downloads.
Still, I’ve got some super rare records that I’ve digitized. The resulting files can’t be played on streaming services, so that leaves me to use something like VLC.
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Thank you everyone for the replies. I like XMMS because it is nice and light weight. Audacious seems to be pretty good too though. VLC I usually use for movies though I suppose it would be fine for music as well. It is a little more memory but I don’t think that much.
When did XMMS get phased out of Lubuntu?
And this talk about the cloud is very interesting. I’ve been using it more for data storage but I didn’t think about it for music.
I hope you all have the best every day ever!!
Actually, now that I look at this, I’m not sure why you had troubles with xms2. It definitely exists in Noble/24.04. In fact, it exists in all supported releases.
That said, you already have VLC. Why add something else when that does it fine? If you really want to save on resources, you can use the command line interface.
Regarding the cloud, I know the discussion here was about using streaming services, not necessarily cloud storage providers. As far as I know, most of them don’t provide audio players in their interface. Even if they do, they won’t give you options like playlists and such. However, VLC may be able to play from them. I know there’s cloud provider integration in the iOS version, for exampel.
I do have the command line version but no GUI. That’s the main reason I’m asking the question because I had it when I was using 20.04 and then I upgraded to 24.04 (using the command line 20.04->22.04->24.04) and I no longer have XMMS2 with the gui.
I find it nice to be able to organize different things to different apps. XMMS to play music, Audacious to play my pinknoise when going to sleep, and VLC for movies and videos.
I did have to install Audactious again too which was strange since I had it in 20.04.
I did have to uninstall “Lubuntu Desktop” when going from 22.04 → 24.04 so maybe that’s when they uninstalled. I did of course have to reinstall it to get a desktop again once 24.04 was installed.
And so yeah I don’t necessarily need it but it is nice to have everything set up and ready to go depending on what I want to fire up. And a big reason for the question is curiosity.
Thank you so much for your time and help!
I didn’t realize XMMS has a client-server model. That’s the problem. Most of the graphical clients have disappeared, last appearing in 22.04. The only one that seems to still be around besides the CLI interface is wmxmms2 and that’s just a dock app so I’m not sure how useful it will be.
As for why you had to uninstall and/or reinstall apps, I have no idea. There’s no reason why you should have to.