I am new to Fedora 3, and I was surprised to see that there was no mp3
player built in.
What is the best mp3 management/player being used in Linux? I have 40GB to manage.
That's a lot of mp3's - I'm sure the RIAA loves your business ;)
I've never tried to manage a collection that big, but I think the *best* mp3 player for Fedora is probably xmms simply because it has such a small screen footprint. As other people have pointed out, you can get xmms-mp3 package from rpm.livna.org - and it works well. They also have an xmms-faad plugin for aac files.
That being said - I'm a big fan of the GStreamer backend, I think it is the right multimedia framework for desktop linux to use. With GStreamer there are a couple of options - Rhythmbox ships with Fedora, but it has an absolutely huge footprint on your screen, and I've had it take large amounts of time scanning flac directories on startup (that may be better now, been a long time since I used rhythmbox to play flac files). Rhythmbox also won't play aac files. Not for me anyway.
The GStreamer player I like best is called gamp.
It works very well for me, though it could use some polish. It also will play aac files with the (just released) 0.8.6 version of the gstreamer aac plugins.
GStreamer backend needs mp3 support just as xmms does, you can get the plugin from livna.org - or I also package the plugin in my yum repository (along with other gstreamer plugins and apps - I'm in love with GStreamer, did I mention I think it's the media backend of the future? ;) - http://mpeters.us/linux/fc3_gstreamer.php
You still have to use livna though to use my repository for libmad and lame.
-=-
Anyway - the short of it, mp3 works very well in FC3 with just a little bit of work (adding some repos and installing packages)
For the best user experience, xmms is still king.
For a neat visualizers with xmms - try the xmms-libvisual plugin (available in my yum repo) - some really nice effects.
To taste the future, I suggest a GStreamer backens solution like gamp.
Nice thing about GStreamer (why I love it so much) - add a plugin, and and all GStreamer apps can theoretically use it without needing a recompile. That is theoretical, sometimes the apps themselves (like rhythmbox and aac) have issues, but it generally works.
