Rhythmbox is a very cool music player app for Linux, that comes default installed with Ubuntu Linux.
Unfortunately, it isnt particularly stable, especially when used with the crappy mp3 stuff you might have lying around. To the defense of the Ubuntu folks, mp3 support doesnt come out of the box with Ubuntu Linux, since it requires a license to be used, since it employs patented algorithms. I'm sure it has little problems with well formed
ogg vorbis files.
I often have a hard time explaining to others why proprietary formats are bad. People are often satisfied if something just "works" now, and dont really think about the crap they are going to have to deal with five to ten years down the road. But, when those five years come up, you are in a crapload of hurt if all the media you have accumulated wont play on your current operating system.
By using open formats like Ogg Vorbis you can feel confident that at any time in the future, a significantly motivated person or group can re-implement a player that will suit your application. With open formats, both the content producers and the consumers win. What tends to come in between the two groups are those who provide content production and consumption tools for commercial reasons. Lets take the horrific case of the Real player (Real is a company). Back in the older days, it was "the way" to play streaming content over the internet. I remember happily installing their free player on my windows 98 box years ago, and using it to watch a video stream of the alaskan dog sled race that was going on. Yea, it's like candy, we're having fun. But fast forward to several years later, when it became damn near impossible to locate the free player on their website. Microsoft had windows media player set up to play streaming media, but it very conspicuously avoided compatibility with the Real formats. So now we have two tool makers slugging it out.
When this sort of crap started happening, you had content producers like radio shows having to switch away from Real's format because it was 1) hard to get a hold of the free player, 2) real's program dumped a lot of spam like notifications across the screen, and 3) Everyone had windows media player out of the box. This pissed off the content producers, who were happy with Real's tools, and it pissed off the users, who had to muck about with either Real's player, or miss out on some of their favorite web video feeds if they had not yet switched over to Windows Media Player compatible formats.
There is tons of research out there on video streaming. Doesnt it make sense that we should just work on making common sets of easy to use tools without all this maneuvering crap. Microsoft made their player less of a hastle because they had to in order to dethrone the Real Player. But now that Real is pushed into the sidelines, why do they have to play fair anymore. Now we have all this drm locked up windows media content that you will definately not be able to use if you move to a free operating system like GNU/Linux, which by it's nature cannot include proprietary components like windows media video support.
Back to the title, Lou Bega must die. Why would I say this. I think his candy coated crap is a scourge on humanity. I like it for five minutes and then i hate it with a passion. Unfortunatly, some of my acquired music files have him in it. In rhythmbox, you can rate files as you play them and it keeps track of the ones you skip over, so you can have it automatically create playlists of good songs. But since rhythmbox is crashing on these older files, i have to use xmms, which has no such rating capabilities.
