In Operation
Dopamine starts with a useful wizard which lets you choose your language, pick a light or dark theme, add your music folders, and set your online preferences (download missing album covers and choose whether to enable Discord Rich Presence). I wish more apps make it this easy to set basic settings.
I added a small music collection published under Creative Commons licenses which I use for memory comparison purposes. Here’s an image of Dopamine in action.
Dopamine achieves its objective of making organizing and listening to music straightforward. You can sort by artist, genre, album, and song. The playlist support is very well implemented. Other things like track ratings and an audio visualizer (with its configurable FPS) aren’t really useful to me. Fortunately, both of these can be disabled.
What else does Dopamine offer?
- Discord Rich Presence.
- Download artist information from Last.fm.
- Last.fm scrobbling.
- Check for updates.
As Dopamine relies on Electron, I wasn’t expecting it to be lightweight in memory usage. Remember that Electron is a huge memory bloat. It uses a ton of memory because it’s running a full browser inside a browser/desktop, Chromium, and all of it’s own code. With a small music collection loaded, the ps_mem utility reports that memory usage is around 300MB. That’s pretty respectable for an Electron-based app.
Summary
I always prefer substance over style. Dopamine is a very stylish music player which is easy to set up and use. Very stylish indeed. But the software definitely doesn’t warrant my recommendation.
I’m of the firm belief a music player must have gapless playback. Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. It’s essential if you listen to classical music, electronic music, concept albums, and progressive rock. There are a few Linux music players that don’t offer gapless playback.
Sadly Dopamine falls into the minority camp, bereft of gapless playback. That’s a showstopper in my book. It’s a shame as in other respects, Dopamine is one of the better Electron-based music players. If you can live without gapless playback, Dopamine may meet your needs.
Adding songs is a rather sluggish affair which is annoying if you want to add a large music collection.
Website: digimezzo.github.io
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Digimezzo
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Dopamine is written in TypeScript. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Thanks for the review Luke.
What music players do you think are best? I like both TUI and GUI apps.
You’re welcome.
For GUI, I use Tauon Music Box. It’s the best playlist-orientated GUI music player even with its non-standard interface.
For TUI, I switch between tap and musikcube.
All three of these apps are extraordinarily awesome.
I’ve never heard of tap.
Here’s my review of tap
tap is a terminal-based music player that lets you jump to any album with fuzzy-finder shortcuts. It’s got one of the lightest memory footprints of any audio player. It’s written in Rust.
Rust seems so popular these days for open source software.
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