Listen Review

very good
key review info
application features
  • Playlist editor with support repeat, shuffle, sort
  • (5 more, see all...)

People use computers for a million things but most of them will do them while? listening to music. And in order to play your music, you need an audio player. But here comes the hard part: which audio player to use?! There are tons of music players available for Linux only, some are rather simple and focused on specific tasks while others will do all kinds of things. Here's one a little more complex, but with a straight-forward name: Listen. Listen music player is also a music manager and has been mainly developed for the Gnome desktop but this won't stand in your way if you want to use it in KDE or other environments. Besides playing and organizing music, Listen can also manage your iPod and podcast, generate playlists, automatically download album covers, burn audio CDs and more!

Listen is written in Python and GTK+ so in order to install it, your system has to meet a pretty long list of requirements: GTK+ version 2.8.x Python >= 2.4 pygtk >= 2.0 python-dbus python-gnome2 python-gnome2-extras python-gst >= 0.10.1 Mutagen (>= 1.8) python-musicbrainz2 & libpimptune (optional) libgpod >= 0.3.2 & python-gpod (optional)

Fortunately, Listen has grown to be a popular multimedia application and it can be found in repositories for most popular Linux distributions. This means that in order to install it (and its dependencies automatically), you'll only need to run a command in the terminal. I'm running Fedora Core so I had to type yum install listen. A few moments later, I found this great music player in the Kmenu, under Multimedia. Later on, I?ve tried to install it on a freshly installed Kubuntu system, which turned out to be a little bit difficult. For starters, the Listen package and its dependencies don't reside in the default repositories, so I had to manually update the sources list.

Unfortunately, if your system was installed a short while ago and you never played mp3 files on it, you'll notice that Listen isn't able to play this popular audio format. This is due to copyright laws that prevent shipping mp3 support with each Linux distribution. Several other formats aren't supported by default such as DVD playback or wi-fi cards out-of-the-box support. So, before enjoying Listen Music Player, you'll need to install several gstreamer plugins (gstreamer-plugins-ugly offers mp3 support) the same way you installed the player before it will be able to understand and play the mp3 (and other) file formats.

On its first run, it won't ask you anything regarding your media directory and so on, like other music organizers do. It just starts and in order to add media to it, you'll have to import a file or directory from the File menu. Its main interface is divided into three sections: the left section holds the player with its playlist and play buttons, the middle section contains tabs that allow you to choose a sub-section for the left section. The tabs are: Context, Current, Lyrics which will show the last played songs, the favorite songs sorted by the number of listening and the favorite albums, which sorts the loaded albums also by popularity. The Current tab shows the album which the currently playing song is part of and it also lists more songs by that artist. The Lyrics tab will show the lyrics for the current song, if available. The lyrics, as well as the information in the next tab, Wikipedia, are both fetched from the Internet. The Library tab will list all the available media and offer the ability to arrange them by genre, artist or album. Other tabs include a Last.FM tab, Podcasts and Radio.

For each media file listed under Library, there's a context menu available once you right click on a song. That menu allows you to play the file, enqueue, remove or move it to trash. It also allows you to fetch the lyrics for that song. Listen fetches the lyrics from an online lyrics database service but unfortunately, most of the time, it will provide the wrong lyrics. I'd rather get a message like ?couldn't find the lyrics for selected song? than to get the lyrics from a God-knows what song, which doesn't have the slightest relation with my current song. The cover fetching feature will, however, work rather well. I haven't seen it fetch a wrong cover, not even once. And even if, at some point, it will fetch the wrong cover, you can at any time pick a cover from the local drive. The Radio tab in version 0.4.3 will only list whatever Internet radio stations you manually add, while the 0.5.0 version will fetch all the available radio stations from Shoutcast and arrange them by genre.

To configure Listen, go to File menu and click Preferences. You'll notice the preferences dialog, which is also divided into five tabs. The first tab, General, allows you to change various basic settings, such as whether to: show splashscreen, start minimized, close to tray and a lot more. The Podcast tab allows you to choose a podcast directory and whether to refresh on startup. The Audioscrobber tab only consists a username and password filed for authentication to Last.FM, while the OSD tab allows you to choose if to enable notification and if yes, how and where to display it. The last tab, Web service, acts like a filter and allows you to add and remove words that will be skipped from the web service queries.

The Good

Listen is considered by many people (including me) better than Rhythmbox. Well, at least the 0.5.0 version of Listen is better. It offers more features and it's more straight-forward to use.

The Bad

First of all, because it's a Python application, it will most definitely have speed problems. Moreover, Python applications will always cause errors and warnings and will crash out of nowhere. On the other hand, there are some annoying functions inside it, such as the inability to drag the ODS to a right or right position on a desktop as it will only work up and down.

The Truth

Listen is a good music player and organizer. Well, at least it's better than many. It is, however, in its early developing stages but this won't stop anyone who wants to try a new player for Gnome. However, don't use it if you're not a Python fan.

Check out some screenshots below:

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user interface 4
features 3
ease of use 4
pricing / value 5


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good
 
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