Music player for linux [closed]
One of the new music players that shows a lot of promise is Songbird. I think it can do most of your feature requests.
Ability to import/export ratings
Yes. Songbird's iTunes integration is top notch.
Automatically picks up new files/folders added to library
Yes. Although right now it can only monitor one folder at a time.
Has an active plug-ins ecosystem
Yes. Highly Active. Songbird plug-ins are just like Mozilla plug-ins.
Smart playlists
Yes.
Preferable:
Controllable through Gnome-Do
Although not a feature right now, there are plug-ins coming that will make this possible. At the moment there are Command-line plugins for songbird that allow you do control it via the shell. It wouldn't be hard to make a Gnome-Do plug-in that works much the same way as the banshee Do plug-in.
Ability to function as an MPD server (or stream music in any format) instead of piping music to speakers ?
I do believe there is a plug-in for songbird that does this.
I think amarok is on of the best players for linux and my personal favourite.
I'm afraid it does not fulfil your requirements very well.
Ability to import/export ratings
Partly, there are varius scripts to import from iTunes, haven't tried it however.
Automatically picks up new files/folders added to library
Nope, you'll have to rescan.
Has an active plugins ecosystem
Nope
Smart playlists
Yes
I'm new to Gnome-Do, don't know if it is possible to control amarok.
Besides that I have iTunes running in Wine. I don't use it very much, because I'm very satisfied with amarok, but technically it works.
Amarok version 1.4.10 works very well. (Forget 2.x, they screwed the pooch with that one.)
Ability to import/export ratings
It stores all its library information in a database (either SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL) so if you can grok the database structure, you can slice the information any way you want.
Automatically picks up new files/folders added to library
Yes.
Has an active plugins ecosystem
Appears to. Just tried the "Get new scripts" option and the latest updated script was 20th July. (I haven't needed many plugins for it.) Also, looks like plenty of scripts here
Smart playlists
Yes
Controllable through Gnome-Do
Well... not sure what you mean by controllable. I think you can launch just about anything via Do if I'm not mistaken. It is a KDE3 application though, and you can control it via dcop (I have a script that pauses Amarok automatically when the phone rings, for instance.)
Ability to function as an MPD server (or stream
music in any format) instead of piping music to speakers ?
Looks like there are a couple of possibilities - but I doubt you'll get good MPD compatibility unless the client was specifically written for MPD to begin with.