XMMS2 is a powerful and modular music player, the successor to the popular (but now old) XMMS, which was the de facto replacement for Winamp on GNU/Linux. It is still considered unstable, but who cares, beta is trendy these days isn’t it?

So what makes it stand out from all the other Free music players? Among other things:

• Modular client/server design, which means you can use whatever interface you like to command it, from command-line to advanced GUI, or even write your own!
• Media-library, so you can browse and find music using meta-data (collected from tags or custom) very quickly.
• Collections, which let you manage subsets of your medialib in a powerful and efficient manner, and allows advanced features such as party shuffle playlists and dynamic filters. This concept is based on thoughts gathered in my essay called Manifesto for a Better Music Player.
• Most audio formats are supported, i.e. MP3, Ogg Vorbis, Flac, AAC, etc; even Last.Fm streams and others.
• Many supported platforms, from GNU/Linux to *BSD, as well as MacOS X and windows (still experimental).
• Various bindings so that if you’re scared of C, you can write your client in Python, Ruby, C++, Java, etc.

In addition to being a regular contributor to the project, I took part to the Google Summer of Code 2006 for the XMMS2 organisation and completed the design and implementation of Collections, which is finally merged into the main tree and released to the world as part of the DrJekyll release.

I’m also taking part to the 2007 edition of Google Summer of Code, this time as a mentor (still for XMMS2) for the Service Clients project.

Finally, I’m also the author of two XMMS2 clients: nyello and iimms2.