Ok, I have a range of various hardware players that run Rockbox that can play all the music I have in my stored collection. But when I’m in front of my Linux box I prefer using the computer to play the music, not only because then I can select from all my music (that don’t fit on most of my players) and I have quick and easy access to changing the volume or skipping to the next song etc.

Here’s the thing: I use xmms for this (and I want to mention explictly that I don’t mean xmms2). I know this will make most of you reading this go what? and then suggest a billion other players. I know xmms is pretty much abandoned developer-wise and it doesn’t do gapless playback and has all sort of other drawbacks (including the silly winamp-mimicing GUI). I’ve seen that it’s even been discussed to get dumped from the debian packages (although people similar-minded to me spoke up and prevented this).

I want a simple player with a GUI that can play songs from a mere directory. I want to point out a root dir and it could play all songs in there recursively. I’ve tried several different players over time, but I always go back to this simple xmms one simply for the reason that all the new and fancy players seem to be so focused on getting the music into a database and then arranging and viewing it all based on their tags and what not. I really really don’t want no database or anything, I just want my player to play everything in the dir I ask it to. And I want it to be available in a debian package preferably.

Any recommendations?