Thursday, 16 September 2010

Pretty Damn Good Audio Player: Guayadeque

Yesterday I put up an article about peculiar application names in Linux, and Guayadeque was on that list. But how about seeing what this application has to offer as a music player, besides a pretty funny spelling.

Guayadeque 0.2.7 in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta

Guayadeque is built using the wxWidgets toolkit, a popular C++ library designed for writing graphical applications, and is included in the Ubuntu Maverick repositories. Let me list some of the major features Guayadeque offers:

- 10-band equalizer, including presets
- sortable playlists with column attributes which can be added or removed
- music library, which show artists, albums with covers and labels
- static and dynamic playlists
- support for online radios
- Last.fm integration and song submission
- lyrics support
- podcast support
- album browser with covers and various album information
- file browser
- crossfade effect
- fullscreen mode

Last.fm integration

Guayadeque comes with an interface mainly divided in two parts: the left one contains the now playing widget, and the right side, taking most of the space, which is divided in tabs, each tab containing one of the following items: library, radio, Last.fm, lyrics, playlists, podcasts, browser, files. This tab approach makes the interface look pretty clean and uncluttered.

Album browser

Guayadeque also allows you to change the size of its interface widgets and then save the layout as a local file, so you can create several such files and load them depending on your current preference.

Scanning the music collection took around three minutes and a half for a collection of 6000+ FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files on my Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz, using Guayadeque 0.2.7 in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta. Not very slow, nor fast, just around the middle.

Lyrics tab

Although there is a huge number of audio players for Linux to choose from, only a few of them are full-featured, embedding all their features in a fashion that will please the audiophile who wants to have access to all the information regarding his music collection, and also pleasing the user who only wants to get music out of his PC as fast as possible and without any hassle. Guayadeque may be just the right player for this, being a very nice surprise, even though not many people heard about it.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I tried Guayadeque once but never could get the thing to run, so I gave up on it.

Anonymous said...

I regard Guayadeque to be the best music player/manager in Linux, full stop.

Blue Rain said...

This player is really very good. Well rounded features, almost everything that most people want. I gave up using Amarok 2, which is like a bulky unpredictable elephant compared to this player, after using Guayadeque.

Anonymous said...

Lo llevo usando meses. Es el mejor. Su nombre creo que viene de un barranco de Gran Canaria y puede que su creador sea de la isla.

Anonymous said...

Guayadeque is THE most amazingly well thought out music player. Some features are astounding in their power and simplicity: just the smart playlist feature where you pick a single song from your library and it will then find complementary songs. Put on one song and forget. Wow.

Anonymous said...

one year ago I changend from windows and mediamonkey to linux (ubuntu + gnome). no audio player is close to mediamonkey, and I tried a lot of.

but for me guayadeque is the best of all linux players. I use v 0.3.5 and there is a command creator.I use tese commands to launch external programs.

so many missing funtions of mediamonkey or of your own choice are now available. for example launching 'easymp3gain' to change volume of all marked files, or launching a sound converter, mp3split, cover editor etc.

the only misgiving I have: I read there is only one software developer for guayadeque.

segln, germany