You might be wondering whether Linux really needs another music player. If it’s just a fork of an existing project, we’d agree that this wouldn’t be an enticing prospect. After all, in this field audiophiles are granted a huge array of fine music players. We covered our favorites in this roundup.
Amberol offers a different tack to some music players. It’s definitely not innovative in any shape or form. It doesn’t offer any functionality that a whole raft of open source players already offer. Instead it seeks to be a small and simple music player built using modern technologies.
When we read of modern technologies we instantly think of Electron. Heavily bloated apps often follow. But Amberol is not Electron-based. Instead, Amberol relies on the GTK4 widget toolkit and the Rust programming language. It seeks inspiration from Muine, a GNOME-based music player that saw its last release back in 2009.
Installation
You probably won’t find a convenient package for your distro although there is a package available in the wonderful Arch User Repository (which is for Arch and Arch-based distros only). The developer recommends installing the music player using flatpak.
Flatpak is an open source containerized package format similar to Snap. While Snap relies on a central repository for software, Flatpak can be installed from different sources.
On a vanilla installation of Ubuntu, you’ll need to install flatpak:
$ sudo apt install flatpak
If you’ve not used Flatpak before, you’ll also need to run the command:
$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
We installed Amerbol with the command:
$ flatpak install flathub io.bassi.Amberol
As the software is published under an open source license you have full access to the source code. If you’ve got the time, you may wish to compile the source code.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
No, you *can’t* drag folders in.