Kiwi

Features

• Fast and Lightweight
• Simple, Intuitive Interface
• Plays both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis

You shouldn't need a 2GHz machine to listen to music. Kiwi is fast. In fact, the Kiwi development standards state that all Kiwi releases (for the foreseeable future) must run comfortably on a 400mhz machine with 64MB of RAM. (Those also happen to be the specs of the principal developer's laptop, Gir. Pure coincidence.) Kiwi handles a 7GB library of music admirably on such a machine -- and, because of Kiwi's simple, clean architecture, expanding this to 10 or 20GB shouldn't tax the system. (Though our testing machine's hard drive is too small to tell for sure.)

Kiwi does away with interface clutter. No toolbars littered with tiny icons. No menubars with hidden features two or three levels deep. Instead, drag-and-drop works like you'd expect, and right-click menus are available almost everywhere. The controls you need most are right at your fingertips, and the rest are a single click away.

Also, don't worry about saving your settings or playlists -- Kiwi remembers. Each time you start Kiwi, everything from your playlists and column sizes to your volume setting are right where you left them.

In reality, you may never need to actually look at Kiwi. Kiwi global keyboard shortcuts, allowing you to bind any key(s) on your keyboard to almost any Kiwi function. The keyboard shortcuts work even if the Kiwi window isn't visible -- even if it's collapsed into a tiny green fruit in your system tray! (Have a newfangled keyboard sporting 'music control' buttons? Now you can finally put them to use!) In addition, when the song changes, Kiwi can display the title, artist, and album in a tiny popup in the corner of your screen that will come and go without interrupting your work. Of course, all these features integrate tightly into KDE, and respond to your global system preferences.

Tired of proprietary file formats? Kiwi plays both industry-standard MP3 files and music encoded using the new Ogg Vorbis standard. Vorbis files sound better than MP3 at lower bitrates, and are free of software patents or licensing restrictions. Why pay for a high-end MP3Pro encoder when you can just use Ogg Vorbis?

Options are always good; that's why support for many more music formats is planned.

The Details

• Designed for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Support for any format available in aRts can be added in just a few lines of code. (Yes, Phish-heads, FLAC and SHN too.)
• Sports its own, completely independent volume control. Now you can turn down your music without muting your instant messenger. (Ask yourself why your other music player can't do this.)
• No internal limitation on number of songs, number of playlists, or number of users (this means you! go download!).
• No banners! No nagging! No spyware! (And it's open source, so the particularly paranoid can verify this.)
• Kiwi promises not to tell the RIAA.
• Developed by anal-retentive poor people to be fast and responsive, even on old hardware soldered together from eBay parts.