Awesome Music Player That Rocks: Jajuk

Jajuk is a free, cross-platform music player available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X, written in Java. I never used Jajuk before, so I tested it for the first time today, an I'm really impressed. Let me explain.


Jajuk 1.9 RC2 running in Kubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat


Introduction
The version I'm going to talk about is 1.9 RC2, which is the version currently included in Ubuntu 10.10 Beta. Jajuk is written in Java and it uses the mplayer engine for playing audio files, and comes with a full set of features, most of them reviewed here.

First, the interface...
I must say, the interface of Jajuk is really cool and will probably fit any person who likes to have the widgets and layouts organized in a different way from the default. Why is that? Well, first of all Jajuk offers tabs (which actually look like some kind of sub-windows) for each different item, like: different tab for playlist, cover, lyrics etc. These sub-windows can be moved around, minimized/restored, and even organized in tabs. This is very powerful and very useful in my opinion. Take a look at these screenshots, which show Jajuk's GUI organized in various modes:


Every possible widget in Jajuk has a pop-up tooltip, so it will be easy to figure out what everything does. Also, the icons are very appealing, making Jajuk a pleasant experience to use.

Full-featured
Let me quickly list some of the features which are present in almost any decent audio player for Linux out there, and also in Jajuk:

- Jajuk offers a playlist which can be sorted depending on many factors, like artist, title, duration, genre etc
- lyrics fetching from the Internet
- cover fetching (including detecting covers from the local directory where the current playing file is located); covers can be displayed in many sizes
- Wikipedia information about the currently playing artist, album and song
- Last.fm song submission
- file browser
- Audio CD player
- collection statistics
- web radios
- ratings


Cover (album) manager


Jajuk doesn't include a graphical way to configure an equalizer, but according to the info that I could find on the official website here, you can pass arguments to mplayer to configure an equalizer. To do that, go to the Config tab on the left tab, click the Advanced tab, and fill in the Mplayer arguments field, for example:

-af equalizer=0:0:0:0:0:-1:-1:-1:-1:-1

The Wikipedia information allows you to change the locale, and can show artist, album, or song information, however it has one frustrating downside: it's very, very slow when scrolling up and down the page. Other than that, it rocks!

One more nice feature is the Stats tab: it uses a visual approach to show how the collection size changed from one month to another, total numbers of tracks played each month, percentage of genres or disk space occupied by the music collection.

The official website offers RPM and DEB installers, as well as Java multiplatform installers for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. To install it in Ubuntu, just type in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install jajuk

Or use the Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center. Also, Jajuk can be tried live on the official website.

Configuration
The Preferences tab is pretty rich and offers the user the possibility to change the way it behaves, providing ways to:

- set the application language (included are English, French, Galician, German, Greek, Korean, Russian and Spanish)
- change the cross fade duration, limit for best of playlist
- set the system tray settings
- change the font size of the UI (this is a great feature in my opinion)
- what to do (play) at the start-up of the application
- change the collection encoding, configuration path
- change/add names for what covers you want Jajuk to detect in local folders
- set your Last.fm submission information
- change the history duration for ratings

Later edit: Adding new music files to the collection may be a little confusing at the beginning. To do this, go to the Configuration->Device Wizard menu entry and select the music collection folder in the pop-up window that appears. This will append the selected folder to the music collection, and you can find your music folders by clicking on the Files tab to the left of the main window.

Conclusion
One word: amazing! Jajuk truly rocks. I can't remember exactly when was the last time I tested an application for the last time and got so positively impressed. It has a powerful interface, it's full-featured, it's well organized and stable, it's intuitive and configurable. If you haven't tried it yet, it's definitely the time to do so, because I think it can really make a lot of converts among the Linux users who use another audio players.

Pluses
- one of the biggest pluses: configurable interface
- lots of features
- lots of configuration options

Minuses
- as every Java-based application, the GUI is pretty slow
- lack of a graphical equalizer

More screenshots



The stats tab offers various information about the collection in a visual way



File browser and the Preferences tab



Wikipedia information

Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/gui
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Pros and Cons for Using CLI

In this article I will debate on several major advantages and disadvantages for using the command-line in Linux. When I think it's 'better' to use CLI, when not, and how can this can impact the work speed.

The pros

It's faster: It's well-known that in most cases the use of command-line is faster and makes easier working with large numbers of files
Easily automate tasks through scripts: Scripts and functions can prove very handy for certain tasks which need to be performed on a regular basis
Aliases: A strong point of the shell is the ability to create aliases, which usually replace a longer command (or small group of commands) with an easy to type one
More powerful: In most cases CLI is more powerful. Just an example, when it comes to manipulating a big number of files CLI is the way to go, since it can perform custom operations using several commands which usually fit on a single line very fast
Faster for getting help: It's faster to get help by copying and pasting a command (given that you know what it does) than through screenshots; bandwidth is one factor, another one is different desktop environments (e.g. use Synaptic/KPackage, go there, under that button, press that etc, instead of just apt-get install something)
Less memory: Using CLI won't load additional GUI libraries (given they aren't already loaded)
Less bandwidth: Although today bandwidth is not a major factor any more, using CLI for navigating on the Internet saves bandwidth and is faster
Basic CLI knowledge can make wonders: CLI can be successfully used on a very old computer, and you can browse the web, listen to music, use IRC and IM, read mail etc without any problems. A minimum CLI knowledge will also help troubleshooting a computer for which X won't start etc
GUI frontends can be incomplete: With CLI, you have complete power over the parameters to pass to a command-line tool. Sometimes GUI frontends lack those

The cons

Making mistakes: Running commands and scripts in a wrong manner (especially if one doesn't know what the specific command does) can lead to unwanted removal of files, a broken system and so on
Lack of GUI: Although you can browse the web, see images and even videos (using ASCII), it's obviously using CLI for that isn't the optimum way. Of course, this also depends on one's needs, but browsing the web for example with a text-based browser is usually slower and lacks images, videos etc.
GUI is definitely more intuitive: And also, more easy to remember things. Since the brain memorizes images too, GUI will be easier to use for the average user
GUI looks good: I guess it's always nicer to look at KDE4 effects or Compiz than at a screen full of text

Now I won't be hypocritical: I think over 95% of the Linux users have a GUI, and although one can use a computer only with CLI, it makes no sense to use only CLI if you also need to do tasks which require a GUI.Source URL: https://ashesgarrett.blogspot.com/search/label/gui
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