Last Updated on September 1, 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 there are only so many opportunities to attend music performances live in my neck of the woods. For the rest of the time, I’m listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC.
I’ve reviewed a smorgasbord of open source music players. But there’s still quite a few I’ve yet to put through their paces. For this review, I’m looking at Deepin Music. The software bills itself as a “beautiful and simple music player that plays local audio. It supports viewing lyrics during playback, playing lossless audio, and playlist customization”.
While the music player is designed for the Deepin Desktop Environment, it’s not tied to that environment. If you’re curious about Deepin Desktop Environment, it was featured in the survey of Best Linux Desktop Environments: Strong and Stable.
Installation
On my Arch system, there’s a convenient package available, but this package doesn’t provide album covers or lyrics.
As I wanted to enable album covers and lyrics, I compiled the software. It’s a little more involved. Besides cloning the project’s repository, we need to add one of the source files, before compiling.
$ cd deepin-music/
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ qmake ../
Next, edit the file src/plugin/plugin.pro. Change the line
#SUBDIRS += netease-meta-search
to
SUBDIRS += netease-meta-search
We can then compile the source code.
The compilation didn’t initially succeed as my system was missing lrelease, the Qt Linguist Release tool for the Qt GUI toolkit. This was rectified with:
With a successfully completed make, the binary is stored in src/dist/bin.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Memory Usage
Page 5 – Summary