Migrating My Music Collection To Linux Part 2
[Moozik: The Clash - The Call Up]
As I mentioned earlier, my entire music collection resides on a 100GB ntfs disk. So, in order for this whole experiment to be even slightly successful, access to that disk is an absolute must. Luckily thanks to ntfs-3g, read-write access to ntfs partitions from Linux *just works* these days.
After determining that the disk in question was /dev/hdb1, I created a mount point of /media/storage, and added the following line to /etc/fstab so that the disk would automatically mount on boot:
/dev/hdb1 /media/storage ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0
Which all worked like a charm. So far so good. Now all I need is a media player and I'll be all set.
I initially set a lofty goal of finding a player that offered the following features: smart playlists, last.fm support, album cover support, iPod support, and iTunes library import capability. I'm a statistics junkie so being able to import playcounts and date-last-played was of vital importance to me ;-)
After taking a peek at Rhythmbox, Listen, Banshee, and the Linux version of Songbird I ended up choosing Banshee. Banshee satisfied all my initial requirements. And thanks to the rather spiffy banshee-itunes-import-plugin, importing those playcounts would hopefully be rather easy.
Next on the agenda, heavy Banshee usage. Would I miss iTunes?
I'm very interested to hear how you do with Banshee. I'm currently using Audacious (http://audacious-media-player.org/) but that's just because it's the most active current fork of the xmms/beep codebase which started out as a clone of WinAmp.
I'm pretty sure that the state of the music player art must have moved on since WinAmp, but I haven't had the time to investigate alternatives. I'll be watching closely for updates :-)
Thanks for pointing out Audacious, I missed that in my cursory glance at the current crop of Linux music players.