Summary
There’s a lot to like about Amethyst. The interface is pretty good once you increase the zoom setting although it’s missing a mini-player option. The player offers a good range of features, and sports visual frippery you often don’t see in music players. The software seems reasonably resilient with only a couple of crashes during my testing which I mostly couldn’t reproduce.
The absence of gapless playback is hugely disappointing though.
As you might expect from an Electron-based app, Amethyst is a huge system hog. It consumes bucket loads of RAM, but also eats an horrendous amount of CPU and GPU; the most I’ve ever seen from a music player.
Turning off the graphics frippery doesn’t reduce the guzzling of resources either.
Website: amethyst.pages.dev
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Georgios Tsotsos
License: MIT License
Amethyst is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Memory Usage
Page 4 – Summary
When a music player consumes as much memory as the OS it’s running on there’s something seriously wrong somewhere.
Yep, hugely bloated Electron. The project is really a proof-of-concept rather than anything serious in my eyes.
It really highlights that developers should choose appropriate tools for the job. And that isn’t Electron / TypeScript.
And when a music player uses so much CPU and GPU it staggers belief. I’ll test with a power meter, and will update the article.