Ubuntu media players

I brought in my mp3 player from home with about 140 random songs on it and a few video clips. After plugging in the USB, the player showed up on the desktop and I was able to transfer files to the laptop. Right-clicking on the mp3 player icon let me eject it from the laptop without having to use text commands at all. This is so frickin' easy!

Ubuntu comes with Rhythmbox, which is standard for all Gnome linux operating systems. It is modeled after iTunes and works pretty well. Here are the features I need in a media jukebox:
1. support for very large music libraries
2. support for mp3 and unprotected wma files
3. the ability to lookup and search for song or album information from a database
4. renaming files based on song or album information
5. real-time monitoring of my music directory for added or removed files
6. automatic shuffling to my mp3 player

Rhythmbox is great for 1, 2, and 5, but there's no way currently (that I can figure out) to lookup song information. You see, right now I have Windows Media Player setting all that information, and often it gets things slightly wrong, like putting composer info instead of artist info. So I want to correct those errors. I also want all my music organized into directories based on this info, and WMP works well for that. When I add a bunch of new music, I just save them to my "upload" directory, and WMP does all the work of renaming them and moving files to the proper directories. But unfortunately, Rhythmbox doesn't do that. But it does monitor file changes, including song and album information, which is great. It even knows when songs have been deleted, which a lot of media players don't do.

The Rhythmbox website recommends EasyTag for editing song information. It's pretty powerful, and can work on lots of songs at the same time, but it's not really that straightforward to use. It looks up song information from a database, and it can also rename files based on song and album information. The only problem is that it doesn't give any album details, so if there are a number of versions of the same album (like a US and a UK version) it can be difficult to distinguish the two. But I can use EasyTag to find song information and let Rhythmbox update its music library with the new information without skipping a beat.

I also tested out other media jukeboxes like Banshee, BMPx, and Exaile. I stayed away from XMMS and Audacious because I never liked the look and feel of Winamp. Banshee was nice, and even offered music recommendations, but it wasn't easy to browse my music library, it couldn't lookup song information, and it couldn't automatically update the music library for added or missing files. I deleted Exaile right away because it was too clumsy, and there was no easy way to browse songs by artist (you had to go down to the album level to see a list of songs). But Exaile might be good in the future because it has built-in wikipedia support. BMPx was interesting, because it was an entirely new interface from what I'm used to. It has a lot of options for internet radio and podcasts, but the best thing was the way it looks up song information. It pops up a new window and looks for album information from both Amazon.com and free database called MusicBrainz. For the results, it shows both the album cover and a song list, which helps figuring out which version of the album I'm looking for. In fact BMPx seems to do everything except that it's not good for browsing through a large media library. The base level of organization is by album rather than by artist, which makes the list much longer than it needs to be. I'll keep it around to see if it gets better in the future.