Whoa, Whumpscutt followed by Vivaldi is jarring...

March 6, 2012 5:20 AM

Linux app filter; I need a program for playing mp3s that lets me create playlists. Difficulty - I want to do things like create a playlist of all genres and no genres minus classical music.

I'm using Banshee, but can't figure out how to create a playlist of everything minus classical (classical doesn't work on shuffle, everything else does). I've also tried Rhythmbox. I don't need podcasts, videos, stores, etc., but it doesn't bother me if features I don't need are there if they are unobtrusive. Like the Banshee interface better than Rhythmbox, but functionality is more important than interface. Can do command line comfortably, but I'm not up to creating a massive shell script to do what I want.

Bonus if it is possible to save default ways of playing, for example, play classical in order, shuffle the Industrial playlist. It'd be nice to have a comments or notes field, but it isn't necessary.

posted by QIbHom to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Have you looked at Songbird, which is an open source Itunes clone, which works though is not supported under Linux? That should at the very least do what you want it too, though might not be easy to get to work under which every distribution you're using.

(Worked for me under Ubuntu when I tried it.)
posted by MartinWisse at 6:02 AM on March 6, 2012

Clementine allows you to create Smart Playlists that can filter genre, title, etc.
posted by Memo at 7:47 AM on March 6, 2012

I haven't used it in the last year but I would suggest amarok and dynamic play lists .
posted by bdc34 at 8:07 AM on March 6, 2012

Clementine looked good, but keeps crashing when I scan my library. amarok no longer has dynamic play lists (which looked perfect) at the current version.

Great ideas. May just have to start installing everything.
posted by QIbHom at 9:41 AM on March 6, 2012

What's wrong with Banshee's smart playlists? At least in version 2.2.1, I can make a smart playlist with the criterion "Genre is not 'Classical'".

It doesn't look like arbitrary boolean combinations are supported directly (eg: "all songs whose name contains 'foo' but not 'foobar"), but you can emulate it by creating sub-playlists. Not sure if you need that feature, anyhow.
posted by vasi at 2:36 PM on March 6, 2012

Doh, vasi, you are absolutely right. I missed that feature somehow. Thank you.

Booleans would be awesome, but I don't expect the world to speak librarian.
posted by QIbHom at 8:42 PM on March 7, 2012