Beep Media Player

Beep Media Player (BMP) is a fork of XMMS using the GTK2 toolkit to look a lot nicer. You will need the Universe and Multiverse repositories enabled to install BMP and plugins, see AddingRepositoriesHowto for more information.

Skins

BMP is compatible with Winamp 2.x (Classic) and XMMS skins. Ubuntu includes a few skins also, to install them:

sudo apt-get install bmp-skins

You can also download more skins from [http://www.winamp.com/skins/ the Winamp skins page] and place them in "~/rob/.bmp/Skins" to use with BMP.

Music Plugins

There are several plugins needed to play your MP3/MWA etc music files with BMP. Eventually BMP will be moving towards GStreamer but not in the near future, not before GStreamer 0.10/1.0. Hoary and Breezy will still use the normal plugin system for some time to come.

Mp3 Plugin

libmpg123.so is already included with BMP, so it should play .mp3 files out of the box.

Musepack Plugin

Simply do:

apt-get install bmp-musepack

WMA Plugin

There is no WMA plugin available in Ubuntu, but you can compile one yourself:

Install the development tools

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now we need the Beep Media Player development package

sudo apt-get install beep-media-player-dev

Download the WMA Plugin

wget http://download.berlios.de/bmp-plugins/bmp-wma-0.1.1.tar.gz

Extract the files

tar -xvzf bmp-wma-0.1.1.tar.gz

Enter the directory

cd bmp-wma-0.1.1

Configure and compile it

./configure
make

install it

sudo make install

or to install it via a deb file (CheckInstall)

sudo make checkinstall

attachment:IconsPage/IconWarning3.png You cannot play WMA files with DRM.

Misc Plugins

BMP Docklet

This plugin lets you control BMP via an icon in your task tray.

Firstly download the plugin:

wget http://mark.xnull.de/bmp-docklet/bmp-docklet-1.3.tar.bz2
tar -jxf bmp-docklet-1.3.tar.bz2

Install libxml-praser-perl

sudo apt-get install libxml-parser-perl

Enter the directory

cd bmp-docklet-1.3

Configure and compile it

./configure
make check
make 

install it

sudo make install

This plugin can now be enabled under BMP Preferences -> Plugins -> General -> Docklet Plugin

Libvisual Audio Visualisation Plugin

Due to broken OpenGL support and some outdated packages in Ubuntu Hoary, this will only give you the "infinite" plugin. It does include nice plugins like GForce, but they fail to install. If anyone wants to have a stab at fixing this be my guest!

This plugin lets you use many of those good old XMMS visualisation plugins and much more.

Firstly download the plugin:

wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libvisual/libvisual-0.2.0.tar.gz
tar -zxf libvisual-0.2.0.tar.gz

Enter the directory

cd libvisual-0.1.7

Configure and compile it

./configure
make 

install it

sudo make install

By itself the libvisual plugin doesn't do a lot, next we need to add BMP support:

wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libvisual/libvisual-bmp-0.2.0.tar.gz
tar -zxf libvisual-bmp-0.2.0.tar.gz

Enter the directory

cd libvisual-bmp-0.2.0

Configure and compile it

./configure
make 

install it

sudo make install

Next we can add some visual plugins:

wget http://optusnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/libvisual/libvisual-plugins-0.2.0.tar.gz

tar -zxf libvisual-plugins-0.2.0.tar.gz

Enter the directory

cd libvisual-plugins-0.2.0 

Configure and compile it

./configure
make 

install it

sudo make install

As mentioned, you only get one visualisation with this method, hopefully a fix will come soon and we will all able to enjoy all of the plugins available!