XMMS2 is the successor to the XMMS, a great all around media player for Linux. Unlike XMMS, XMMS2 incorporates a client server model, acting as a daemon for client applications to use as their back end. I however prefer just to control it directly from the command line and therefore i find it perfect. The less GUI apps I have open the better!

Here is how to get XMMS2 running on Ubuntu with a bunch of useful plug-ins.
Install the app…

 sudo apt-get install xmms2

Install the plug-ins…

sudo apt-get install xmms2-plugin-all

Launch the daemon…

xmms2-launcher

From this point the xmms2 deamon is now running and you can control it via the xmms2 command. I prefer to store all my media on a separate ubuntu server here at my home. On that server I run another great application called gnump3d, which allows me to stream all my music over my LAN keeping my desktop clean and tidy. The playlists that get provided from gnump3d come in the form of .m3u files. To get this to play with xmms2 you need the xmms-plugin-m3u plugin which comes with the xmms2-plugin-all we installed above. In order to load an m3u play-list we use the addpls command as shown below.

xmms2 addpls recurse.m3u

now that the playlist is loaded we need to play it

xmms2 play

And if the song happens to not be so great we can skip it with…

xmms2 next

And so on..

There are many other useful commands…to see a quick list just type

xmms2

without any other commands.

Enjoy!