qmmp Is A Fast, WinAmp-Like Music Player For Linux

qmmp is a Linux music player which will remind you of Winamp. In fact, it looks a lot like it and it can even use Winamp skins (as well as Xmms skins) so if you're just switching to Linux and can't give up WinAmp (although I really liked Foobar2000 on Windows but anyway), you should try qmmp as an alternative to WinAmp.

It supports mpeg1 layer 1/2/3, ogg vorbis, native flac support, musepack and wavpack, modplug, wmpa, pcm wave, acc. audio cds, CUE sheet, WavPack embedded CUE and FLAC embedded CUE support. It can use ALSA, PulseAudio, Jack or OSS sound. Of course, those are just the essential features. qmmp comes with basically all the features you would want in a music player (and even more).

One downside would be that qmmp is a QT application, but since it supports Winamp skins I don't think QT is a big drawback.

Other qmmp features include:

• Last.fm/Libre.fm scrobbler
• Spectrum Analyzer
• projectM visualization
• sample rate conversion
• bs2b dsp effect
• streaming support (MP3, Vorbis via IceCast/ShoutCast)
• removable device detection (via HAL)
• MPRIS support
• global hotkey support
• video playback via Mplayer
• lyrics support (using lyricsplugin.com)

And many other features.

If you're scared that such a fully featured music player would use too much system resources, you'll be glad to know that in my tests, qmmp used only 11MB of RAM with a collection of ~1000 music files - all loaded in the playlist - which is very good considering that Goggles Music Manager used 14 MB of RAM and Rhythmbox - 17mb (like we were telling you about in our Listen Music Player review). For the test I used Ubuntu Karmic 32 bit.

Another great thing about qmmp is that it's very actively developed.

How to install qmmp in Ubuntu

qmmp is available in the Ubuntu repositories. However, the version in Karmic or Jaunty is very old. Luckily, there are 2 PPA repositories to install a newer qmmp version in Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic.

a) Latest SVN PPA

In this PPA there are experimental packages with the latest qmmp svn version. To add the PPA and install qmmp, paste this in a terminal:

-Karmic

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stiff.ru/qmmp-svn

-Jaunty:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stiff.ru/qmmp-svn/ubuntu jaunty main ' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2C2B0858

Then install qmmp using the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install qmmp

b) Stable PPA:

To add the stable Ubuntu Karmic and Jaunty PPA, paste this in a terminal:

-Karmic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stiff.ru/qmmp-releases

-Jaunty:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/stiff.ru/qmmp-releases/ubuntu jaunty main ' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2C2B0858

And then install qmmp:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install qmmp

Once installed, you will find qmmp under Applications > Sound & Video > Qmmp.


For more information on qmmp and other Linux distributions download, visit qmmp homepage and qmmp Google Code page.

[thanks to LinuxFresh for mentioning qmmp]