Decibels is designed to be a simple program that lets you play audio files. Decibels is explicitly designed for playing single files.
Installation
We evaluated Decibels using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as Ubuntu.
With Manjaro there’s a package in their Official Repositories, as well as a package in the Arch User Repository (AUR). The advantage of using the package in the Official Repositories is that you don’t need to build the software.
In Operation
Here’s an image of Decibels in action.
The interface is extremely simple. At the top left is a hamburger icon which lets you open an audio file, and show the keyboard shortcuts.
When playing an audio file, the program displays the waveform of the track. It’s not that high a frame rate. The waveform is primarily used to allow fine-adjustments in a track.
There are seek controls; a slider which lets you jump to any point in the audio track, as well as icons which let you skip 10 seconds backwards and forwards.
In the bottom left of the interface resides a slider which lets you change the playback speed. This makes the program useful for listening to things like podcasts. There’s also a volume slider.
Summary
Decibels is designed to be a very simple audio player for playing single files.
If you’re looking for a general purpose music player, you’ll need to look elsewhere. For a great GUI music player you won’t go wrong with Tauon or fooyin, although the latter’s development has slowed to a glacial pace in the past few months. Read our roundup of the best GUI music players.
Website: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/decibels
Support:
Developer: Angelo Verlain
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Decibels is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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