Mark Haney mhaney@ercbroadband.org wrote:
I'm a little slow catching this thread, but I understand that XMMS development has stopped and there is currently no maintainer.
There is a maintainer, but there's indeed not much development except some minor bug fixes. XMMS works pretty well to play MP3 files. Small footprint, fast and stable.
Is there any reason you want or need xmms? Personally I found that audacious works just as well as xmms and has about the same footprint.
Audacious started as a promising alternative to XMMS, but especially with a large collection of MP3s you'll notice that it is slower than a moving glacier. And it is somewhat unstable and crashes on some MP3s or ID3 tags. However, Audacious supports a lot of formats and works much better with audio streams (eg, web radio) than XMMS. Personally, I use Audacious for audio streams, but XMMS for local audio files.
Nowadays, Audacious goes the same way as all other players. Most development goes into a cool-looking the user interface, but little into bug fixes and optimization (stability, speed, resources).
As long as Fedora still ships with GTK1 stuff, I stay with XMMS. ;-) Haven't yet decided what to do if XMMS won't compile or gets incompatible with newer kernels, audio subsystems or libraries.
Suggestions welcome! Andreas