Minirok: A Lightweight, File System Basic Music Player for Linux

Many of us have already gone to great pains to organize our music libraries well at the file-system level: We have top-level folders for our artists, and maybe subfolders for albums, with all of our files neatly named, as well. If you're one of these people, you'll love Minirok, a stripped down, back-to-basics music player.

As the name suggests, Minirok is highly minimal version of one of the essential Linux apps: the amazingly functional Amarok. Unlike Amarok, though, you won't find any kind of tagging capability, Wikipedia lookup, cover art, music store integration, or powerful playlist management.

What you will find is a simple, two pane interface that's really quite intuitive. If you've ever used Foobar2000 on the Windows platform, you should be fairly comfortable with the interface, but even if you haven't chances are you'll find Minirok a snap to use. On the left, you'll find a tree view for your music folders, from which you drag tracks to the main playlist window on the right. From there, you can queue tracks, select a final track to play, crop a list of songs, or remove tracks from the list.

Directly below the playlist pane you'll find the standard plackback controls, along with a "clear playlist" button, and options to either repeat or turn on random play. Above the two panes are search boxes for quickly finding the music you're looking for. Minirok offers a tray icon for easy access and Last.fm reporting via a secondary download, and that's that.

I know this all sounds almost too simple, but in its simplicity, Minirok borders on brilliance. It does what it does darn well, making it perfect to use on a low-resource system, or in a situation where you just need rock-solid reliability. Searches are fast and real-time. I searched my over 2500 tracks for several songs and results literally appeared as I typed. NICE!

This app is also great for, say, an Asus Eee PC, Acer Apire One, or any other Linux-based netbook. It's small in size, takes up only minimal resources, and as we've already stated, performs like champ.

Minirok has pretty much everything you need and almost nothing you don't to productively play the music you've already organized!