Hello good people of Linux world. 
I am looking for a decent Media player capable of playing all the usual music and video formats and that can also reliably convert my CD collection to MP3. The old windows version (which I had to download a patch for) would convert and search the web to get album details allowing it to name all the tracks automatically for me.
Any help much appreciated.
Oh, and I’m running Ubuntu 11 if it matters.
Cheers.
Which Windows media player ?
Personally I use VLC as the media player (plays pretty much any audio/video format)… and Asunder to rip Audio CD’s to mp3, it also has CDDB lookup and allows you to manually set which CDDB server to use (for getting Album/Track info).
Though VLC also rips, converts, and supports CDDB… so it could be used as an “all-in-one” solution if you want.
IMHO, VLC is without a doubt the premiere media player on ANY platform.
Both are available in the Ubuntu package managers, but you will also need to install lame if you want Asunder to encode to mp3
sudo apt-get install vlc asunder lame
And I will back this quote up even further by saying VLC is the best media player I’ve ever used. I’ve never had to install any codecs, plug-ins or anything. Supports so many formats it’s amazing. I even watch DivX movies on it because it’s that good. It so easy to use as well.
Thankyou very much for your recommendations, I shall give it a whirl.
Right, VLC now installed. Haven’t the foggiest as to how to use it though!
I have try’d to set it as the default media player through system preferences preferred applications menu but the only options are but Totem Movie Player or Custom. Setting to custom results in Totem being chosen regardless.
As for how to use it, I can’t find a ‘Help’ option so I shall try googling for a manual.
Cheers,
Smiler.
Just like Windows… the first time you want to open say an mp3 in VLC… right-click the mp3 file, and select Open With>Other Application … now select VLC Media player from the list (or enter vlc as a custom command) … and make sure there is a tick in Remember this application for “” files and click Open.
From now on VLC will automagicallly be associated with the mp3 file type.
Obviously you can do thes for ANY media file type.
Another way to edit file type associations (in Ubuntu)…
Install Ubuntu Tweak:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tualatrix/ppa
then
sudo apt-get update
then
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-tweak
Then follow this tutorial to use Ubuntu Tweak to change file associations:
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2010/05/how-to-manage-file-association-in-ubuntu-with-ubuntu-tweak/