It really whips the Llama's A$$

As I have already mentioned before, I have now abandoned my windows (XP as well as Vista) installations, and have taken a liking towards Linux (Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon distribution) The one and probably the only problem I have faced with Ubuntu so far is choosing the right music player. After over a month of using, Ubuntu, I was satisfied with the default media player I had been using, Rhythmbox. It was then I realized how used to winamp I had actually become. Although I usually enqueue all my music in my playlist I do sometimes like to make my own playlist too sometimes, a big hassle with Rhythmbox. In the past month I did try to look for an alternative for Rhythmbox, but none were of my liking. So yesterday morning, I started a hunt for the best media player for Ubuntu for AMD64, I specified AMD64 because finding stuff for this version is tougher than it is for the Generic 32bit (i386) one. The first place that I went to look for a player was the add or remove application utility, for obvious reasons, ease of installation n guaranteed compatibility. But lo and behold, the player which apparently looked and worked like winamp, called XMMS player had problems showing text on the buttons. Uninstall time. Next up came Amarok which was pretty much like Rhythmbox. I am not saying that any of these players are bad, just that I was more used to Winamp. So anyway I decided I needed winamp, or nothing else would suffice. Google, Google, n there it was (tears of joy in my eyes) WINAMP FOR LINUX, but wait a minute, what is that, Winamp 3 alpha for linux, last updated 6 years 6 months ago. Damn it! I'll try it out anyway, winamp 3 wasn't that bad, so what if it's an alpha version. Click, download, ok, Woohhaaa!!! WTH? Its a what? A .RPM file. Now what? Google, Google, use alien to convert to a debian package. Oh i know what that is, that is one package you can double-click to install... Sigh of relief. Terminal, sudo blah blah blah, ERROR ERROR... Now what did I do wrong? An hour later it finally struck me. Oh Crap! 6 years 6 months ago there probably wasn't any AMD64, (Checked it out on Wikipedia and I was right. The first AMD64-based processor, the Opteron, was released in April 2003.) that means that this version was meant to be run with the AMD64 version, would have i been better off had I installed the generic i386 version? Naah, 3yrs after I buy a 64bit PC I am using a 64bit OS with it, I shouldn't be having second thoughts about it. But I think I read somewhere there are support libraries you could install to get the generic versions of the softwares to run. Argh! that's why I didn't switch to linux earlier. All about coming out of your comfort zone. Now what? Lets try out wine. Wine is this really cool application that builds this layer which provides support for software meant for windows. Behold, apparently you aren't safe from dll hell even while using Linux. There are a couple of other such softwares I had heard of too, but since Google makes use of wine in it's Picasa for linux, I figured it would be good enough. Went to wine's official site and discovered that a newer version of the package was available there, than that was there in the repository. Installed wine, followed by winamp. Started winamp, and it works, but wait, where have all the title-bars (the bars with the close minimize and maximize options) disappeared? There aren't any borders for the windows either, to distinguish between two windows. CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE (restarts X) Uninstall. Next came winamp lite 5.53, but it had the same problems. I looked for an older version of winamp n found a 2.9 something Installed it n it worked :)the title bar look a little odd n there was a border there for the winamp window, but it was working. I wasn't satisfied. Uninstall, reinstall new version, uninstall compiz (desktop manager) and now the new version works. Now I am satisfied, enqueued all my songs, pressed J (for jump to file) n the damn thing crashed. Uninstall, Reinstall old version, enqueue songs, J... It crashed again. For the first time I was wondering why I had installed linux. Now to reinstall compiz, but it simply wouldn't reinstall. I remembered I had purged a few folders manually, why do I do such things? Google, Goolge, try this command, Sudo apt blah blah blah and it worked. Now my system is back to normal again. Now I'll stick to the repositories. It was then that I found Beep Media Player(BMP). It looked and felt a bit like winamp, even though it lacked the media list. A little research showed that it was in fact based on the XMMS player. J and the search menu popped up. Great. The features it lacked included the lack of support for WMA format. I did find loads of plugins for it, including those for playing WMA, but they are all in the .TBZ format, and using the TAR utility to extract the package gives a failure. I have kept the files aside for when i learn how to install em. Then came Beep Media Player Experimental(BMPx), a successor to BMP. It had those iTunes type looks I really hated, but the one thing it had was a really cool Internet Radio. It supported all the formats I required too. But it wasn't much of an improvement over Rhythmbox. The hunt continued and then next came Audacious, a fork of BMP. Tried it out n it is just what I wanted. J n the jump to window opened up B and the next song started playing. This is it, I have finally found the ideal player. Audacious Rocks \oo/