In search of a good audio player for Ubuntu 9.10

If this should be marked Community Wiki, please let me know.

I'm switching from XP to Ubuntu, and I have been very disappointed with the selection of media players available. I'm primarily interested in an audio player, but integrated video and library management is OK, too. My criteria:

• Must be able to play audio CDs (I'm shocked how many apps this does away with, right away)
• Must be able to play MP3 & WAV; OGG, SHN, FLAC are all bonuses
• Repeat and Shuffle modes are a must
• FreeDB / GraceNote through a proxy is a must (if it can read a PAC file, that would be awesome)
• It needs to be really small, e.g. skinnable or an applet
• Ability to execute a playlist is a plus
• Gapless MP3 playback a plus

I'm running Gnome, but I'm not totally adverse to a KDE app. Command-line only is also a viable option.

Some that I've tried:

• RhythmBox - probably the best of the lot that I've tried; I don't like its mini mode (doesn't show the song being played) and I can't figure out how to get it to hit FreeDB/GraceNote through a proxy
• Songbird - can't play CDs, playlist management is atrocious
• Banshee
• Jajuk

Maybe a couple of more.

Thanks!

UPDATE

I tried out VLC, Amarok and Songbord (again). VLC I eventually got to work (I had some kind of bad configuration). It seemed way more involved than I was looking for out of a music player, and in general more geared to video than audio. I couldn't fathom its library management, which I think it has; maybe it doesn't, and that's why I couldn't figure it out.

Amaork looked very promising but the library management was not to my liking, and the way it handled a playlist with both MP3 and WAV is inexplicable at best. I did like some aspects of the UI, but not enough to keep it.

Songbird is very finicky, but I like the library management. Sort of. It kept telling me my Watch folder was invalid, even thought it clearly was accessible. Playlist management is bizarre, and the message that it was deleting source files whenever I deleted a playlist had me too worried to keep using it. Had it been able to play CDs, maybe I would have persevered.

Audacious, while a bit odd at times, does seem to do what I want. If it had a library manager, I wouldn't have bothered trying any of the others.

Thanks for the help, everyone!

I use an "heir" of XMMS: Audacious

• mpd, a music player daemon, with its many clients:
  • gmpc
  • Ario
  • Sonata
  • ncmpcpp
  • many more
• Exaile
• Quod Libet
• moc
• Decibel
• Songbird
• Listen

A few thoughts. If you (mostly) like RhythmBox, you might want to know there is a command-line tool (RhythmBox-client) you can use to access that info using another tool that could give you the info you want. A popular system monitor program is conky. I use it to display my music state like so:

You produce it with:

${if_running rhythmbox}
${alignr} ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format %aa}
${alignc} ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format "%te of %td"}
${execbar rhythmbox-percent}
${alignr} ${color f1aa0e}${scroll 50 ${color lightgrey}${exec rhythmbox-client --no-start --print-playing-format "%tt  -  %at"}  }
${endif}

I tend to use rhythmbox because I'm lazy and I use hardly any features that most music players have. I had to get the status to conky the hard way, but conky knows how to talk to BMPx, moc, mpd, and xmms2. Every single one of these is very lightweight - so lightweight that concepts like skinnable cease to even apply - moc is a terminal app & mpd is a daemon only.

I really liked Amarok before they went to their 2.0 design. I might go back, but I don't know. Exaile is a GTK+ based player inspired by Amarok that has kept to the 1.4 UI. My favorite feature is the wikipedia integration. I was one of may favorite things about Amarok, probably the main thing I miss. It's considered lightweight, but I wouldn't call it that lightweight.