Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.


Deadbeef, probably the lightest (GUI) music player for Linux is finally available for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

Most of you probably already know Deadbeef (we talked about Deadbeef a while back in our UNE optimization tips post), but for those who don't, here's a brief introduction: Deadbeef is not just another music player as it's a lot different then most Linux music players. The only music player that Deadbeef reminds me of is foobar2000 (Windows only).

There's nothing fancy about Deadbeef - it only comes with everything you need to enjoy your music: last.fm support, it can play any kind of music files  (including cuesheets, gapless) and has tabbed playlists support. There's a lot of stuff Deadbeef doesn't have but being so lightweight, it's definitely a music player to try out.

In my tests Deadbeef used around 10mb of RAM while Rhythmbox: ~62mb with my large music collection. Update: I removed my music from Rhythmbox just to see how much RAM it uses with only a few music files and it's somewhere around 27mb of RAM. For other music players, read the comments below!

Besides the memory usage, Deadbeef is also great for small screens (netbooks).

Install Deadbeef in Ubuntu (Karmic, Lucid and now Maverick) using the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexey-smirnov/deadbeef
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install deadbeef

Many thanks to Alexey Smirnov for updating the PPA with Maverick packages!