Music Player Amarok 2.5 Released 152
jrepin writes with this quote from an article at The H:
"The Amarok development team has released version 2.5 of its open source music player and organizer, code-named 'Earth Moving.' Among the changes highlighted by the developers are re-written support for USB mass storage devices, GPodder.net podcast synchronization and an integrated Amazon MP3 store. The GPodder.net support includes the ability to browse directly from Amarok through the list of recommended podcasts on GPodder.net. Users of playlists on Amarok will find the new playlist functionality in 2.5 such as the ability to use formatted strings in Playlist layout items as prefixes and suffixes, dragging and dropping tracks in an empty area in the list of playlists to create a new playlist, and, in that same empty area, the addition of a new 'create new playlist' action."
Amarok 1.4.6 For life (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amarok 1.4.6 For life (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah but... now you can buy things on the internets. This will put Linux on the desktop for sure...
Re:Amarok 1.4.6 For life (Score:4, Insightful)
you know, that feature in itunes is probably the thing I hate least about itunes. Having my music player figure out what I like to listen to, and then offering it to me right now for $0.99 is something I rather like.
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Now with more cloudy cloud clouds!
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Re:Amarok 1.4.6 For life (Score:5, Informative)
In case you didn't follow the rest of the thread, I wanted to let you know that you should try Clementine. It's basically Amarok 1.4 ported to Qt, although they're still catching up on some less essential features.
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"Essential features" like podcast support. That is a killer for me.
I'm surprised that there isn't a good OSS music player around that includes podcast management at least as good as Amarok 1.4.10 does (Maybe there is but last time I looked I also needed libgpod support so maybe some great programs did fall through).
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Yeah, I should have changed the wording there to be slightly less flattering, considering that last time I needed to put music on an iPod ("I'm telling you, it's not mine! Those things aren't my bag, baby!"), I ended up using RhythmBox. Clementine's support for it was pretty broken.
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+1 This. I am still looking for a Podcast client which is anywhere near what Amarok provided back them. Does anyone know the progress of Clementine in adding podcast support?
I honestly haven't looked at Amarok since 2.2 and was squarely in the Pana camp until Clementine became usable (around release 0.6). Amarok was far too heavy on the resources to be usable and frankly got in the way of listening to music. I guess it's gotten 'better' but frankly I kind of wonder why some KDE-based distros haven't ditche
Re:Amarok 1.4.6 For life (Score:5, Informative)
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Im in love. Amarok 1.4 for a while was the main reason I used Linux. Its been years since Ive used it and ive always been unhappy with songbird and itunes. My music is wonderful again, thanks for the suggestion.
I dont suppose anyone has a suggestion for merging my partially duplicated libraries (songbird and itunes)?
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clem is cute, although there are some rough edges. like not changing track information in collection & playlist if you edit it =)
it's also missing some features compared to amarok 1.4 (filter wizard comes to mind), but at least it's improving.
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I've happily moved to Clementine, which "is inspired by Amarok 1.4". Wikipedia says it's a port of Amarok 1.4 to the Qt 4 framework and GStreamer framework. To me, it seems like the way Amarok *should* have gone.
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1.4.10. with a couple of tiny patches. but yeah, amarok 1.4 was/is THE music player.
currently i'm using clementine as my primary player as it's sort-of-amarok-1.4, but amarok 1.4 is still... better :)
i guess that tells something about the quality of 1.4. and yes, i tried amarok 2 - i used it for several months, but gave up in the end.
i need a t-shirt with "amarok 1.4" ;)
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Try this one you might be surprise.
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I stuck with it, but recently (and for the second time) an update completely blew away my database. Last time this happened I figured out a way to recover it, but now that amarok uses mysqle I don't know how to recover from the loss and so far no one has been able to provide me with a method that actually works. Goodbye, amarok; life is too short to deal with stuff like this.
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Why do people on slashdot think everyone wants to hear about what they think about the article and related subjects?
FTFY
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Why do people who use an old version of an application think everybody wants to hear about how they use and old version?
Because if they try the new version and find it to be rubbish, they may be very pleased to hear an older version might suit them much better.
If it ain't broken, don't fix it (Score:2)
This is something that happens way too often. KDE4, Amarok 2, Python 3, there are too many systems that were good and became fucked up in a new version.
It would be better if they tried to follow the example of people like Donald Ervin Knuth, who made TeX converge asymptotically to version pi. Or Nicklaus Wirth who created an entirely new language, Modula, when he wished to extend Pascal.
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KDE 4 at this point is better than 3. It just took time.
As for Knuth, in practice that is not what happened.
TeX got replaced with AMSTeX and LaTeX then AMSLaTeX, adding huge numbers of macros. This moved on towards LaTeX 2e adding even more.
The engine itself got replaced with the PDFTeX engine which is now standard. That caused Metafont to mostly be dropped which was key to the whole system, as well as DVI.
The entire character system got chucked with the Omaga and now XeTeX / XeLaTeX.
So how exactly in a
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KDE 4 at this point is better than 3. It just took time.
Not for me. In KDE3 when I browsed a directory containing pictures in konqueror I could click on an image file to see it and there was a set of buttons to jump to the previous and next pictures in that directory. In KDE4 when I do that I must go back to see the directory because there are no next/previous buttons.
Also the taskbar shows the buttons for open windows in reverse order. In KDE3 when I opened a new window the corresponding button appeared to the right of the older running tasks. In KDE4 it appea
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I'd say that's a rather specific complaint about a massive overhaul of an entire GUI. That might be configurable, it might not but that amounts to disliking a new model of a car because they changed the shape of the ashtray. The ashtray might be a real problem but ...
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New versions have the audacity to not have an empty changelog.
No. Audacity is a different sound program used for recording and mixing.
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I'm not sure which version I'm running (the drive in that PC died, I need to replace and reinstall), but the one that comes with kubuntu 11 is FAR better than the one that came with kubuntu 9. Until now I preferred XMMS, but IMO Amarok has it beat.
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I decided to give Amarok a try on Kubuntu 11.10 and it worked well enough, but I couldn't get it to play back tracks gaplessly which is a no-go for me... am I missing something?
All my music is in FLAC.
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Hmmm, I haven't ried any FLAC files on it (and won't be able to until I replace the hard drive), but that may be the probem. Oggs, WAVs, and MP3s play gaplessly for me. I surmise that the gap may be caused by decoding the entire file before playing it, or at least decoding the first part ("Buffering"). Maybe they'll fix it in the next release. Meanwhile, it doesn't sound like it suits your purposes.
When I replace the drive I'll try some of the music I have in FLAC format (mostly still stored on backup CDs),
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No, then people will think it's a camera-related application.
You're right though: "Clementine" is a little out there. Some other play on the name "amarok" would be nice.
Sticking with Clementine (Score:5, Informative)
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Then I started using VLC and everything Just Played(TM). Ever since then, I haven't had a reason to use anything else.
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From the comments in TFA:
"So is it now possible to seek in flac-files?"
"This depends on the phonon backend you use, it works with the vlc backend."
Of course, unlike the old 1.x Amarok backends, changing the Phonon backend is a system-wide setting with the potential to break other stuff (not to mention cause licensing headaches - VLC is under the GPL v2 and some Phonon-using apps may be under GPL incompatible licenses).
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Yes, I'm also a happy Clementine user. Hopefully some day the Amarok developers will realize they screwed up, and go back. I guess we can say the same of KDE and gnome devs...
Re:Sticking with Clementine (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a good thing the people who makes automobiles and passenger airplanes don't think the way you do.
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KDE is thriving at this point. They took a huge hit from the KDE 3 -> KDE 4 transition but now they get to enjoy the fruit of the upgrade.
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Unfortunately, that transition was totally mismanaged, and they lost a lot of users and goodwill. I still see people complaining bitterly about it, who obviously haven't gone back to see how KDE 4.7 is not like 4.0 any more. Now we see Gnome shedding users because of their change in direction, but I don't think many people are actually switching over to KDE, because they associate it with Gnome ("not listening to the users") due to the way they mismanaged the 4.0 transition.
They would have done much bette
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I don't think there is any doubt they mismanaged the transition. I think that a lot of the Gnome users will end up moving to KDE. Lets not forget that Gnome 2 is still available, in other 2 years.... And people who have been with Gnome for years are experienced enough to enjoy the features of KDE. Don't forget that Ubuntu is currently forking Gnome in a way that most likely will not work for them. I can see Ubuntu being forced to switch over.
It wouldn't shock me at all to see KDE move back into first
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I hope you're right. It'd suck to see it become a minor player and Gnome and Unity to be the dominant DEs used by all the main distros.
They should make a KDE theme that makes it look much like Gnome2; this could bring in a lot of converts.
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They have one oxygen-gtk makes KDE look a lot like gnome 2, including the apps.
Anyway I wouldn't worry: openSuse is a big player. Mandriva, Linpus, Kanotix aren't small. And there are plenty of other distributions like Mint which have KDE versions. Frankly I think Ubuntu is about to hit a brick wall with their approach to Gnome which leaves Kubuntu as a possible alternative.
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True but that was mainly over the whole problem of having to maintain an integrated software stack which goes against Slackware's philosophy. Patrick even pointed people to GNOME Slackbuild (GSB), GWARE, Dropline.... to get the integrated stack with a slackware feel.
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Amarok 2.4 is great. They made mistakes with 2.0 realease, it was not a complete software. The three pane layout and the toolbar at the top are really easy to use. I should say that it displaying covers in music browsers is a great idea. However an stylish cover theme and projectM visualizations arn the features I want to see in future releases.
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I've switched to Exaile. Does what I want it to, much like Amarok used to. I will have a look at Clementine.
Dynamic playlists? (Score:3)
Have they put dynamic playlists back yet?
I still hold onto the hope that perhaps one day, Amarok 2.x might have the feature set that Amarok 1.4 had.
And chew up the same amount of memory or less.
But maybe crash less often.
Re:Dynamic playlists? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't know when it was added to 2.x, but I'ts been working well since at least 2.3, when I started using it.
Also I don't understand what people are complaining about; in my opinion the 2.x versions work much better than the 1.4 ones ever did (including having enough functionality).
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Amarok has had Dynamic Playlists back for quite some time now. It's quite robust and sophisticated. Give it a look-see. :-)
WINAMP! (Score:1)
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This. There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player. I'll keep using 2.9.5 as long as it still runs.
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I agree, simple is better.
Why should a music player take full screen, or waste precious screen real estate replicating what the built in file manager already provides? All of them seem to be in an arms race with itunes to have te most complex and least well behaved interface. I just want to listen, I don't ned to know every fact about the music, the album cover, or even who played drums. Its music people. Not a spreadsheet or a rocket launch. Just listen. Stop making it complex. Just listen.
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Aqualung for Gtk and moc are my favorites.
What the built-in file manager does not provide (Score:2)
replicating what the built in file manager already provides?
Does the built-in file manager already provide support for playlists, other than as a folder of shortcuts? Does it provide for sorting by featured artist, BPM, or other metadata?
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It's music. Just listen to it.
Sort by metadata!? That's like sorting your corn flakes by shape!
When I'm not in the mood for "this my shit" (Score:2)
It's music. Just listen to it.
It's possible to be in the mood for one kind of music and not another. For example, I find walking or running for exercise more enjoyable if the tempo matches my stride rate. Or perhaps I have children under 18 in the house and don't want shuffle to land on a swear-heavy track like "Starfuckers Inc." by Nine Inch Nails (well over a dozen fucks) or "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani (38 shits) or "Filthy Words" by George Carlin (shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits). Or perhaps I'm gettin
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Exactly.
It's easy enough to look additional details up when you want to. A good music player plays the music in the background, and provides very basic information if you want it. It's hard to say what exactly is wrong with the current Amarok package in the Kubuntu repository, but it can't even do that. The entire UI is taken-up with its failure to retrieve the Wikipedia article on the song or album, the lyrics, and album covers (which I didn't want anyway), but an even more fundamental failure to correct
Re:WINAMP! (Score:5, Informative)
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From what I recall, Winamp 2.x has multiple serious security vulnerabilities (remote code execution through music files, mostly). The only version that's still maintained is the much more bloated Winamp 5.
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I'm not worried about remote code execution through mp3s since the vast majority of the music I've got is stuff I've ripped from my cd collection. Everything else came from a source I trust (Amazon's store).
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There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player
Too bad Winamp no longer is. Plus, unless I'm mistaken, there's no Linux version (but that's OK, XMMS is a better Winamp than Winamp).
And I kind of like the extra bells and whistled in Aramok. I especially like how it finds lyrics for the song that's playing, even if the lyrics are often ((gracenote_takedown)). I'm especially impressed when I sample a cassette or LP, convert the sample to .ogg, and it STILL can find the lyrics. Impress
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Yeah, that would be why I specified a version of Winamp. XMMS was decent the last time I could be bothered to use linux on the desktop. Now the desktop is either windows (games) or osx (most everything else) depending on what i'm working on, and the linux machines are remote command line shells.
I don't care about finding lyrics, or album artwork, or "visualizations" or anything else. I just want a music player to play music.
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There's still a hell of a lot to be said for a simple, minimal mp3 player
Too bad Winamp no longer is. Plus, unless I'm mistaken, there's no Linux version (but that's OK, XMMS is a better Winamp than Winamp).
XMMS has been inactive since 2007. Use Audacious if you want an actively maintained Winamp clone on Linux. :)
just to be a wearisome twit... (Score:4, Interesting)
in the amarok 2.5 source tree?
Re:just to be a wearisome twit... (Score:5, Informative)
4661
[ink@mtz amarok-2.5.0]$
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Playlist Editing (Score:4, Insightful)
I found the description a bit confusing but it *sounds* like they have improved the playlist creation and editing - that was what pushed me away fro Amarok 2.x, creating and editing a playlist was incredibly awkward involving multiple swicthes between various panes. Not to mention very buggy. The bugs were mostly fixed, but the actual process remained a usability nightmare.
Will check it again once it reaches the kubuntu repos.
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Well bugger. Saving playlists to disk is my primary usage pattern, so I can share them between different PCs and Installs. This is why I'm switching to services like Google Music or AMPache.
Thanks for checking it
I still use old XMMS that is like Winamp. (Score:2)
Am I the only one who is still using old school players? :/
Re:I still use old XMMS that is like Winamp. (Score:4, Interesting)
compiles easily. and it's only heard not seen. it does exactly what a music player ought to do and no more.
blessings upon the maintainers.
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But I want the GUI player, not command line. Hence, why I still prefer the original XMMS.
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Ugh, so I have to run a front end over a daemon? Why can't we just have a simple GUI audio player like original XMMS? :(
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Audacious
http://audacious-media-player.org/ [audacious-...player.org]
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Perfect!!! Too bad old XMMS doesn't get updates. :(
Streamripper + audacious (Score:2)
I use streamtuner + streamripper + audacious . Mostly listen to streams from http://somafm.com/ [somafm.com] , because I otherwise don't like music enough to bother creating my own playlist / collection. Streamripper saves the stream to a big directory, so I can time-shift it into the car / subway later, while proxying the stream to audacious.
Every once in a while I'll drop them a donation, and buy a few tracks that I really like on Amazon. Which is much more than the music industry would get from me if I didn't lis
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As a broader hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn polemic: folks that fancy themselves as techies (most slashdot commentors?) would do themselves a favor in education not to become so rigid
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XMMS2 is not an old school player. With command line and network modes, it shouldn't really even be called the "X" multimedia player anymore. They're trying to compete in the same space MPD is, which is a good thing, but significantly different from XMMS1.
If you want XMMS1 these days, you'll have to find a distro that carries GTK1.2. This is harder than it seems, AFAIK you can't apt-get XMMS on Debian anymore. The easiest alternative is Audacious, which is a nice XMMS clone based on GTK2.
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Dragging and dropping folders is just archaic, I prefer to use players with a library feature. I have a music collection of over 16k tracks (99% purchased, mostly ripped from my own CD's) and accessing my music via a library is a necessity. On Windows I use a recent Winamp or foobar2000. On Linux... well, I haven't really found a player that works for me yet. The one included in recent ubuntu releases (I can't recall which one it is) is supposed to support a library-like function, but I have never been able
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Why aren't folders by artist and album good enough? Add symlinks and you can search by genre.
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The answer to this is not to cram a database into a music player. The job of a music player is to play music. The job of selecting files belongs to the file system. What we really need is a database file system.
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But I find I'm not listening to music I've "forgotten about" any more as it's not as visible as with a constantly displayed library.
I found the same thing... while I like to actively choose my music, I tend to get stuck with certain listening patterns.
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Earth Moving (Score:5, Insightful)
That was a terrible album.
Amarok 1.x was a much better interface than 2.x (Score:2)
but was buggy as hell and crashed all the time. 2.x is much more stable but it counter-intuitive to use and downright cryptic when it comes to simple functions. Random? How do I set random play? dig, dig, dig, help, OH? Ok. Random.
Still using XMMS (Score:2)
And that's not XMMS 2 nor Audacious just to be clear.
I can't stand anything more complex.
Am I old fashioned?
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Don't you have to keep a bunch of GTK1 dependencies around to run it?
Audacious (Score:2)
It plays music. It stays out of the way.
Local Metadata King (Score:2)
The big deal breaker with Amarok 2 for me is local metadata handling. I have tagged all of my files with (correct) artwork and (correct) lyrics. With a couple of extensions, Amarok 1.4 would use the local metadata and only use an online source for that information if the file didn't have it in the tags. The last few times I tried Amarok 2, it still insisted on searching online for things I specifically put in the tag.
The sin isn't unique to Amarok. I've only found Songbird/Nightgale (with some extension
But can it play CDs? (Score:3)
I might give it a try, I liked 1.4...the 2.* versions have sucked powerfully. A music player that can't play CDs? Seriously?
I really hate to criticize things people are making for the common good, but Amarok is pretty bad. It's super-bloated, but with basic functionality lacking or broken. It seems that as versions advance, more and more is broken. The interface becomes more and more cluttered and less and less usable, and the display elements that they ostensibly changed the whole thing over so they'd work in KDE 4 have been perpetually screwed-up too. The most used part of a media player, the controls, almost seem like an afterthought.
Sometimes, the time comes in a product's development cycle where maybe the folks working on it should just realize it took a very wrong turn and scrap it.
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moc with filesystem-based metadata using symlinks.
Music Player Daemon (Score:2)
Have you tried mpd? I use a GUI client (ario) and an Android client (mpdroid), and sometimes the basic terminal client (mpc), mpc; flatmates/visitors have used Windows/OSX/iPhone clients too. There's a curses client, but I've not used it: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients [wikia.com]
They don't have as many features as Amarok (which I use at work), but I wanted something that runs on the desktop, which I can control from my phone or laptop. (The desktop is plugged into the amplifier.)
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Here are a few good command-line tools for managing and playing your music:
dnuos [bitheap.org], a list-generating script which you could use to create something like your catalog.txt file. It's pretty nice, and it can do things like read the metadata of the files if you want, as well as the file names.
morituri [apestaart.org], a command line CD ripper with error correction support and metadata fetching
beets [radbox.org], a command line music manager which includes an MPD server and so can be interacted with using any number o