You know how it is in the Windows platform: the majority of its popular media players use confusing custom UIs & widgets and so they feel heavy. Enter MusikCube: a no-nonsense clean interface app that simply delivers the music without the extra cruft. The application supports CD ripping & tag editing but it could do with some clean up on its song contextual menu. It is released under the BSD license.
MusikCube: A No-Nonsense Music Player
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I like the interface. Simplified yet maybe a little heavier looking than foobar.
Yeah baby. I’m in Sydney :B
if your PC is too slow to run iTunes decently
iTunes is definately a great program, but I can’t stand QuickTime and iTunes requries that it is installed, so I wont be using it any time soon… MusikCube looks very nice and doesn’t require much to run it. I’m all for it.
It looks a bit like KDE’s AmaroK.
Nothin wrong with that, AmaroK is the best player I’ve ever tried.
After reading this short description, I was hoping for something “innovative.” But instead, it looks like another iTunes clone. Granted, an open source one, but I’m not seeing anything to get excited about. I’ve fallen in love with Muine, and it’s ability to make an interface that is intuitive, elegant, and innovative. It’s a shame there isn’t an equivalent on win32 (yet).
And it doesn’t have any confusing custom interface.
I use DFX for Winamp and WiMP. I also had Octave when I had my iBook.
This software seems to have almost all of the power and flexibility of Windows Media Player, while not being as resource intensive.
Truly, it is not exactly eye-candy, but it is not a pain to the eyes either. It’s tame and to the point. Screenshot here. [ http://musik.sourceforge.net/html/cube/screenshots.html ]
The main features missing for normal-to-advanced users are CD burning, and visualizations. Then, it will be pretty much up to par with WMP, iTunes and MusicMatch. Sans the music stores, of course, but then again, it could grow to work with Linspire’s MP3tunes, or with that other store that uses OGG, whose name escapes me now. (yeah, MP3tunes is easy to remember, just like the Lindows name was 😉
This project is interesting in the fact that it is one of the few and first that is written 1) under OSS politics [BSD license], 2) developed for Windows first, and 3) has *not* been started from the works of an existing commercial venture.
Many OSS zealots like to quickly forget or dismiss that most of the prominent and successfull OSS projects that are having traction on Windows (and off) started as proprietary projects, with heavy investments already been made.
For example, OpenOffice did not start as an Open Source Project. Sun paid millions of dollars to buy the StarOffice product, which was very advanced by then. Ditto Firefox, from Netscape. Ditto Eclipse.
Yet we demonize Netscape while we praise Firefox, we demonize Sun and praise OOo.
[For the flamers: I didn’t say *all* projects, but many of the prominent projects do conform to this situation]
Ok, excuse me for starting to go off-topic, it’s just that this political subject is currently in vogue, and you can actually breathe it in the air.
I guess I’m one of those on this side of the debate that thinks about computers as tools FIRST and FOREMOST, and as an object of politics second (or third, or…)
Well, back on track. Casey, kudos for this musikCube project. It’s an amazing feat you have accomplished this far, even at this young age. Nice website too. Very GNOMEy (eek!), like I like.
Ok, now I will leave tha path open for all the rest of people who want to say how superior iTunes is (20% of you), those who will attack *why* it’s not on Linux first (another 20%), then those who say they prefer Juk/Rhythmbox/XMMS because whatever (20%), and the other 80% who will attack me back on my OSS views.
😉
Should have been: “…really _like_ programs…”. sry.
Why don’t you just stick with the old Winamp 2.95? You can still download it places and it’s small, lightning fast, consumes little memory, is stable and does the job really well….
meh – sticking with foobar.
I don’t actually use an UI as such, it’s just hidden in the tray all day, and I navigate using keyboard. Have added an On Screen Display to tell mw which song is playing – works like a charm
What, in the world, could possess Eugenia to choose this unremarkable non-OS to post on OSNews. Hey, it’s your site.
Beat me to it!
For those who want a link http://www.foobar2000.org/
in other news bending the knee of a Ken doll is a weird feeling
… and MusikCube both have common roots, but the first one runs on Linux as well:
http://musik.berlios.de/
well, doesent’ convince me…
if you want a simple, nice and light and good player for win32 take a look at xmplay, which also supports winamp plugins…
i’ll stick with my fav one
this player don’t even run on win9x and i already have itunes in my xp machine which can do a lot more, thanx but no thanx, maybe next time when it’s really good.
i’d rather use winamp lite than foobar for my p200+ win95 machine coz it still fast and foobar won’t even run on this machine (maybe they should put win98 as the minimum requirement).
Hey this is great!
We’ve long been looking for a decent music player for TheOpenCD. foobar2000 is nice, but it’s not Free. If this thing is stable generally works well, it would fill a big hole in our line-up.
I also like the fact hat is has a CD-ripper, so we could replace the now-stagnated CDex.
I’m off to give it a good testing …
http://musik.berlios.de/
I use XMMS and XMMS-Curses in Linux. Doesn’t have all the features, but it works well enough. I’m sure I’ll switch away once I find something better (or code something better), but it works. I like having a curses-based interface – it works well for my windowmanager (I use Ion 2).
Perhaps GNOME has spoilt me, but is there a simple free music player for Windows like Muine? I just want something that plays music without the clutter and feature fuck that all the media players I have used on Windows have become.
http://muine.gooeylinux.org/
Gimme Billy.
http://www.sheepfriends.com/?page=billy
Now that’s what I call no-nonsense.
PapaPitufo wrote: This project is interesting in the fact that it is one of the few and first that is written 1) under OSS politics [BSD license], 2) developed for Windows first, and 3) has *not* been started from the works of an existing commercial venture.
You should take a look a the top downloads section of sourceforge.net — the interesting points you mentioned hold also true for projects auch as eMule, CDex, or VirtualDub.
All of them are rather famous on Windows for some time already, AFAIK.
Awesome! Thank you!
i can’t believe it’s not possible for OSS to be a little be innovative :-((.
Look at that, it’s just another poor copy of Itunes, there is really no other way to do a music player ?? i don’t think so.
Get REAL. iTunes copied a design that MANY other players before it already had. IMO it’s ugly and stupid design. If I wanted a window the size of a word processor open on my desktop just for media files, I’d… Well, it’s just simultaneously ostentacious and overly utilitarian.
Easy with the Shift-F7
look at these two programps freeam (aka zinf) was born 3 or 4 years before itunes and itunes stoled almost all the interface…….
pffffffff………;
“that MANY other players ” witch one ?, i don’t remember any.
doesn’t matter if the design of itunes is good or not, they copied it.
like kde copy windows (i hate windows), OOO copy word (i hate word) 🙁
i want something new please (fortunately Apple exist but is not OSS).
i’m really worry by the lack of innovations in OSS (too conservative), if there are no change, the software patents (but not only) will cruch it.
You DO realise Apple bought iTunes dont you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_iTunes
Everybody copies everybody…especially Apple and MS. But feel free to enlighten us by explaining how you would design an ‘innovative’ and ‘original’ word processor. We’re all ears…
If only Muine could work on Win32… MusikCube is okay, but I miss the songs/albums seperation and album covers.
Also, MusikCube isn’t *that* resource light.
(not that I agree with fredouil, just want to answer the question of sort from you)
I’d call lyx highly interesting word processor (if you can call it that way…)
I never knew that Apple bought iTunes! That’s freaking funny, with all the anti-OSS zealots on here moaning about how OSS always copies commercial software! Talking about knowing your history.
Commercial just buys software, OSS copies. Po-tato, Pa-tato…
i knew Apple bought it, doesn’t change anything ?
there are different ways to do the job, and yes we can be innovative, OOO just copy, ooo v2 is ridiculous, is it look exactly the same than WORD.
i want to be able to describe what i expect to have to the word processor ( concept like latex but without coding) and be free to move text in it without pain with indesign/Page, i want be able to make some graph in it (visio like) And more light, simple, adaptable.
i want a word processor that do what i want (and help me) without pain and without crush me under his complexity.
At this moment i use a lot TextShop and Omnigraph.
heeey
please have DAAP support in thoses players or i stick with itunes
Well a bit off topic but what do you happy chappies recomend as a video player ?
I thought the whole point of muine was that it was Mono and therefore crossplatform. If it isn’t, that looks to me to be a big problem with Mono. Does it depend on some native library that hasn’t been ported to win32, or what?
For everyone who doesn’t know, take a look in foobar WITH the latest collums ui version (download it, there’s links in foobar forum…). Looks better (IMHO) than musikCube and can be customized with albumart (also plugin), library and so on… in your way…
…if iTunes didn’t exist on windows. I don’t find iTunes either heavy or complex
On the subject of the OOo 2 interface and its similiraty with word (or MS Office in general) it was actually requested by users. Companies argued that the different interface required some training which required money. In this case people are not choosing innovation but considering a cost factor. Firefox did exactly the same, mirroring the basic functionnality and shortcuts of IE to help smooth the transition.
On the other hand, the muine player that’s been referenced a few times here is actually quite nice and indeed innovative. And open source too…
Sorry, no wavepack, np musepack and not even monkey’s audio… As long as those mayor codecs are not implemented, it’s a useless app.
I’d use fb2k instead…
I thought PCs were fast enough to run iTunes-even better than Macs in this regard. Obviously, this is not the case-since one has to constantly watch what resources each application takes. Since XP is supposed to have superior multitasking, even if iTunes was resource hungry, compared to other music programs, XP should be able to handle this even if one typed as fast as possible while using Word/Office. Do PC users always check how resource hungry programs are before using them. In that case, XP and MS Office would be used the least-since they hog the most resources of all!
Sorry, couldn’t help trolling 😉
Why I don’t use iTunes …
Right now, I’m running Winamp Lite 5 – it is consuming about 2.6MB of RAM. Can you do that with iTunes? Truthfully though, I’d like to find something that is lighter than that. When I am playing music or audiobooks, the ONLY thing I need is an audio player. I don’t need CD burning/ripping, the visualization crap, skinning, tag editing or file organization. All that stuff is great, but I don’t need it 98% of the time, so I’d rather either have it seperate or at least modular so I can load it only when I need it.
Basically, all I need is this:
1. Fast and light on system resources
2. Able to play all the major audio formats (esp mp3 and aac)
3. Consumes very little screen real-estate when in ‘compact mode’
4. Ability to use the arrow keys to fast forward/rewind and control the volume
5. Variable speed playback (eg – the pacemaker plugin in Winamp)
6. A ‘bookmark’ feature wouldn’t hurt either, so that if I’m listening to an audiobook (which I do often), I could bookmark my position and next time I start up that file again, I can continue right where I left off last time. (I’ve found a few plugins in Winamp that are designed to do this, but all the ones I’ve seen are more trouble to use than they’re worth.)
Thus far, Winamp is the closest thing I’ve found to my ideal player, though it still has too much crap, IMHO. I have not tried most of the players mentioned here as of yet, but I intend to. I absolutely DESPISE iTunes … hate it with a passion. It is the exact opposite of almost everything I’m looking for in an audio player.
I soo tired of these e.g. “it’s fast enough on my 3ghz machine”, “your PC/Mac may be not fast enough to run iTunes”, “Only takes 10% of CPU-Power”, etc. …
It’s just a lousy media player, the less it needs the better and the more processing power is left for the IMPORTANT tasks, for example your main app.
Do ppl. really work with their computers or do they just buy it to listen to mp3?
sorry, but i’m fed up again. no offense…
LyX is interesting, but the interface is clumsy to use . they need to have hot keys assigned to each mode and they need to make their preference settings less cumbersome. If they also took some of the most important settings features like Line spacing and other things like that and put them in the menu or a tool bar rather than in a preference window it would be much better in usability.
After all that is said and done, the only way to get any real performance out of their DVI files is to export to LaTex and use TeTex or some other TeX implementation to typeset the laTex file.
I tried using LyX for my documents and it just is not sufficient. I decided to just learn LaTex.
Likely most PCs run iTunes just fine – some people just do not appreciate the high memory usage and sluggish ‘owner drawn’ interface the program uses.
Basically if you use iTMS its great. Otherwise its memory hog.
I agree.
2. Able to play all the major audio formats (esp mp3 and aac)
Don’t forget ogg.
I also want dynamic playlists.
I also want dynamic playlists.
Yeah, I think I forgot to mention a good playlist editor, so throw that in too
A lot of people talking about iTunes being ‘fast enough’, I mean … I’ll use any program that is resource-intensive, so long as whatever is hogging resources is useful to me at the time I’m using it. For example, if I”m using an arcade emulator that needs 80% of the CPU power to play a certain game, then fine.
But in the case of iTunes, 90% of its functionality is of some use to me, but not when I’m simply playing music in the background while doing something else – it’s just too much.
I’m interested in making a car mp3 or ogg player. Does anyone here know what are the minimum specs for either an MP3 player or Ogg player on linux?
just curious.
This app is good!
This project is interesting in the fact that it is one of the few and first that is written 1) under OSS politics [BSD license], 2) developed for Windows first, and 3) has *not* been started from the works of an existing commercial venture.
WOW! I find it great that it’s written under a BSD license. This is a guy that knows what freedom is in it’s truest meaning of the word. I wish more projects was released under that license. I thank him for his kindness. I’ll give it a try.
Well, you can call it whatever you want. But for latex editing you’d better get using kile and/or vi and learn real latex. Then you’ll find out what you can really call lyx and what latex is really good for.
As for MusicCube and wxCube: I test them for quite a while and some versions, still don’t like them any better than my properly configured foobar2k which is just rockingly good and has what it takes (low resources, lush configurability, and very good sound quality).
On Windows, I usually use Media Player Classic.
Any hardware you could actually buy new today would work fine. The standard base for a car PC is one of VIA’s C3 chips, and any of those is powerful enough for any MP3 or Vorbis file you could throw at it.
I’ve tried MusikCube, it’s alright but needs a lot of work as of yet. I use Billy, it’s one of the few programs that keep me using Windows as opposed to Linux on my desktop (yes, it’s really that good). If there were a replacement for Billy, K-Meleon and a way to run Steam without glitches I would use nix completely. Oh well.
For all of you saying that OSS is not innovative, I beg to differ. It is just as innovative as commercial software, meaning that maybe 1 out of 100 programs try something new. If you want a music player that doesn’t clone iTunes, use GNOME’s Muine. It is not only innovative, in many ways the interface is _better_ than that of iTunes. For example, quickly building a list of tracks to play is much easier in Muine. Further, Muine simply looks more elegant.
As far as office software goes, yes, you won’t see innovation in OO.org. It is a huge project with the purpose of being a drop-in replacement for MS Office. No surprise that they copy the interface. Keep an eye on the Abiword guys if you want to see some interesting office software that won’t bloat your computer.
Oh, and Apple’s “Spotlight,” GNOME devs announcement Beagle several days ahead of it. And they had been toying with a similar idea called “Dashboard” for a long time before that. Also, I’m already using Beagle with great ease.
Pointing to one or two projects and claiming that OSS is not innovative is nothing but FUD.
Seeing as Winamp is going quickly out of business (seeing as the team who have been developing it over the years are now all but moved onto other things, and no one looks to be picking it up anytime soon, except maybe AOLs marketing department) a Win32 OSS alternative to iTunes is very much needed. Foobar is great but it looks like a pig and is horribly complex for new users. And iTunes is a resource hog.
Is there a search?
Nothing can touch mpd
. I’m insane, don’t worry about me!
WOW! I find it great that it’s written under a BSD license. This is a guy that knows what freedom is in it’s truest meaning of the word. I wish more projects was released under that license. I thank him for his kindness. I’ll give it a try.
Why? Do you plan on doing a closed-source derivative?
Nothing can touch mpd
. I’m insane, don’t worry about me!
Heh! I love mpd, but it just doesn’t handle all my mp3’s very well. I use CMUS, which is not quite as network-functional, but loads all of my mp3’s in seconds. MPD (or any client, I’ve tried glurp, mpc, gmpc) refuses to load all of them.
It’;s tough finding a player that has the functionality I want and can load two months worht of mp3’s.
The closest I’ve ever come to media player bliss is, frankly, SoundPlay on BeOS. Nothing is so simple yet so feature-filled and extensible. Not to mention that it’s not an ugly skinned app (by default, at least). I have been looking for something comparable to it under Windows and have not been successful.
More and more programs seem to be doing it, including Musik Cube. WHY do “they” need to disable NVidia card functions. It makes using this type of program, if you have NVidia cards a non-starter!
I’m using GMM myself (http://www.fifthplanet.net/gmm).
wow they copied itunes and took out the eye candy. impressive..
wow they copied itunes and took out the eye candy. impressive..
iTunes without the eye candy is a good thing, IMHO .. if it’s faster.
But I only like it for one reason I think, because of the free CDDB tagging stuff which makes it easy to keep your Tags in a good way.
Why people keep talking about organizing 2 months of music as a problem or of iTunes nice way of searching music must be because Winamp 5 hasn’t been tried. Winamp 5 is definitely The most flexible player on the market with most and the best add-ons with internet TV, a great interface for finding music which is also themable and it loads your music DB faster than any other software out there that I’ve tried and that’s quite a few….
BUT I must admit that this looks promising as I’d love to support a BSD licensed project, but first he must sort out FLAC support and learn something from Winamps ML
Nice.. trying it now.
Seems the sound quality is actually better than iTunes for some of my mp3s. Probably the codecs they’re using.
The interface is nice.. a little spartan, but nice.
I’d like to move the media player up to the top.
One feature I like about iTunes is how it manages your mp3 library’s filesystem. If this app does that, I could be making the switch.
please have DAAP support in thoses players or i stick with itunes
talk to the devs and support this feature request…
http://musik.sourceforge.net/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=118
Looks very promising, but if they’re going for the iTunes crowd (like me) they’ll need to support AAC. Good work so far though!
Umm what’s wrong with WinAMP 5.x? Small, compact. If you don’t want certain plugins get rid of them.
Thanks to whomever fist put up a link to Billy in this thread. I find it to be really close to what I’m looking for.
Now, if I could only find a CD Ripper that was so simple in both its UI and feature set.
When it comes down to practical terms, who cares it it’s “innovative” or not? I don’t miss the days when, in order to perform a simple task that virtualDub can do today, you would have had to rely on either mediocre shareware or expensive professional software.
NOFI, but if it doesn’t, its not worth using it over EAC which guarantees a perfect rip or no rip at all — with secure mode.
Try ffdshow for the codec support
screenshots:
http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/FFDShow-MPEG-Video-Decoder…
Use the daily builds, they’re usually better:
http://ffdshow.sourceforge.net/tikiwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Getting…
If you need a simple player try MPC:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82303&package…
Both are OSS
I’ve switched from WinAMP to musikCube as mC offers a cleaner interface that blends in better on my machine (I run everything maximized/full-screen and usually sort programs by virtual desktops). It’s also a little lighter on resources than WinAMP 5.x (classic skin, no extra plugins, visualizations disabled).
If it had AAC support and an iPod plugin, it would be near perfect.
Nice app, but I prefer wxMusik instead.
http://musik.berlios.de/
Almost as good as Amarok. Almost.
From the screenshot on the homepage, looks like the developers are Dream Theater fans, so at least we can say they have good taste in music
I’ll have to give this a try.
Looking at the screenshot, I was surprised to find it also resembles Rhythmbox. If it’s true that AmaroK also looks like it and they were all developed independly of each other, then there must be something to the interface.
I happen to like Rhythmbox’s interface so MusikCube might just be the app I would use had I a Windows box.
Foobar2000 with the Columns alternative UI is the most elegant player I’ve ever used. Powerful, highly customisable and lightning fast even on a 300Mhz Celeron. I’ve had a quick look at MusicCube, but I don’t see anything to make me switch from Foobar.
“Nice app, but I prefer wxMusik instead.
http://musik.berlios.de/
”
are MusikCube and wxMusik forks of the same project? They look pretty darn close and wxMusik seems to have started just a month or so after MusikCube. They both claim to have been originally called Musik. I bet there is an interesting story there.
Goggles Music Manager has become my favorite; no play lists to build, just point it to the directory and it builds a database of what’s there, sortable by various criteria.
It was an instant winner for me, and I’ve tried many…
MUHAHAHAHA
Foobar2000 is the ultimate player! Resistence is futile!
MUAHAHAHAH
I am trying it and loving it, especially the possibility to search for music in the library using SQL-like queries.
erk. nice player, and love the query capabilities. but it takes 80% more memory than foobar2k. i wish foobar2k have the user friendliness comparable to musikcube. its nice just to have an open source win32 player around tho. cheers.
From what I’ve been reading the author of wxMusik is also the author of MusikCube. Somewhere along the line he wanted to move in a different direction (MusikCube) and one of the other devs took over maintaining wxMusik. I don’t think they share much code, but it explains the similarity in interface.
Wow, thanks for pointing me to CMus, this really looks my ultimate mediaplayer, since it really works vi-style.
This is the bet program I have used and it seems to be updating fairly quickly. HOLY CRAP I just found out it has plugins!!! That means it could do so much more than the developer allows it to.