Audio Player Review: Qmmp

Qmmp (Qt Multimedia Player) is a Qt-based audio player for Linux which resembles the appearance of XMMS (and Audacious for that matter), so users of these two players which want to have a player which integrates well in KDE will probably want to give it a try.

Qmmp 0.4.1 running in Kubuntu Maverick Meerkat Beta

The features of Qmmp include:
- support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV or WMA
- visualizations
- XMMS and Winamp 2.x skin support
- 10-band equalizer
- stream support
- lyrics support
- CUE support
- Last.fm song submission

Qmmp uses mplayer for audio output and presents an interface very similar to the one of XMMS or Winamp 2.x for Windows, supporting their skins too. The options Qmmp offers, and also the keyboard shortcuts are the same with the ones used by Winamp (e.g. J to open the Jump To Track window, C to Play/Pause the current song, V to stop playing and so on).

Jump to track using J

Qmmp has a 10-band equalizer, comes with an analyzer plugin, and allows you to configure several aspects, including change the font face and size for playlist and player windows, double the size of the player window, change transparency for the main window, playlist and equalizer window, edit track tags, show pop-up information.

Analyzer plugin

In addition to these, Qmmpcan fetch local album covers and bundles a decent number of plugins which can prove very useful. Some of them:

- Audio CD plugin
- Cover Manager plugin
- Global Hotkey plugin
- Lyrics plugin (the version included in the version which I tested - 0.4.1 - doesn't seem to work)
- Scrobbler plugin (supports Last.fm and Libre.fm)
- Status Icon plugin

Transparency and plugins

Final conclusion: if you like XMMS and use KDE, then Qmmp can be a perfect choice. On the other hand, for those used with collection-oriented players like Amarok will probably not like this player.