Last Updated on September 3, 2020
I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to music. My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being in the audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. These days, I’m listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format.
Linux is endowed with a plethora of open source music players. And I’ve reviewed the vast majority. But I seem to keep finding interesting music players. Byte is the latest I’ve stumbled across.
Byte is a GTK-based music player. It was created with the desire to make a good music player for elementary OS. It focuses on two aspects: features and design. Byte isn’t tied to elementary OS; it runs on other Linux distributions. It’s in a fairly early stage of development, with its initial release only back in August 2019.
Installation
Byte is available from Flathub. There’s also a package in the Arch User Repository. But, at the time of testing, it wasn’t the current version, and inhibited some nasty issues such as regular crashing when importing a music library. I therefore tried a different approach, cloning the project’s GitHub repository and building the source code using Meson and Ninja with the following commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/alainm23/byte.git
$ cd byte
$ meson build --prefix=/usr
$ cd build
$ ninja
$ sudo ninja install
The program is run by executing com.github.alain23.byte (which is stored in /usr/bin).
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Internet Radio
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary