Noatun Yes-a-Tune

by Eric Foster-Johnson

May 15, 2002 —

Noatun, part of the KDE desktop and recently highlighted as part of the
KDE 3.0 announcement
(http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-3.0.html), plays MP3 and Ogg
Vorbis music along with offering a whole lot more nifty features. For
years, I've been using the X MultiMedia System (XMMS)
(http://www.xmms.org/) and FreeAmp (http://www.FreeAmp.org/) players for
my MP3-encoded music. Noatun plays the same music formats and provides
the standard KDE media player.

Noatun also supports skins, or user-interface overlays. Skins allow you
to overlay a particular look, such as for a TV show or celebrity, over
the default interface. I especially like the ability to pick a skin that
shows up better under the lighting conditions where I work. Skins are
nothing new for XMMS or FreeAmp, as well.

Like XMMS, Noatun supports skins created for the Windows application
WinAmp. WinAmp is a major, if not the major, MP3 music player for
Windows systems. There are thousands of WinAmp skins available. XMMS and
Noatun both support WinAmp skins. Noatun's interface, in fact, looks
almost exactly like that of WinAmp. You can download KDE-related skins
and desktops from http://www.kde-look.org/, including Noatun skins.

In addition, playing DivX-encoded video files through the use of Mpeglib
(http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/) is one Noatun's best features. You can
find a number of interesting Linux multimedia links at
http://mpeglib.sourceforge.net/links.html, part of the Mpeglib site.

Noatun also uses aRts, the Analog Real-Time Synthesizer library that
forms the basis for the KDE multimedia efforts. See
http://multimedia.kde.org/ for details. Quite a few applications that
use aRts are listed at http://multimedia.kde.org/arts-resources.php.

I found Noatun to be a worthwhile addition to the other music players I
use, XMMS and FreeAmp.

ITworld